Original version

BBC Radio 4 LW

Book of the Week

Audiobooks

Factual

Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

BBC Radio 4 FM

Book of the Week: Picnic Comma Lightning

Stephen Mangan

Laurence Scott

Elizabeth Burke

Alexandra Quinn

Book of the Week: Picnic Comma Lightning: Episode 5: Final Fantasies

Picnic Comma Lightning

Episode 5

Episode 5: Final Fantasies

Final Fantasies

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Picnic Comma Lightning, Final Fantasies

Stephen Mangan reads the final episode of Laurence Scott's philosophical memoir.

Stephen Mangan reads the final episode of Laurence Scott's philosophical memoir. Today - obsessive personal accounting.

An innovative examination of the nature of reality in the 21st century by award-winning author Laurence Scott - part personal memoir, part philosophical exploration. Read by Stephen Mangan.

In today's final episode, he explores the vogue for obsessive personal accounting - taking in fit-bits, Scrooge, posts about death on the internet, and the author's sense of his own parents' presence after their death, a benign haunting. 

Laurence Scott says, "Any fluctuating, quantifiable thing - daily footsteps, calories burnt, number of re-tweets, YouTube views, Airbnb reviews, crypto-currency values - invites an obsessive and solipsistic sort of accountancy. We 're regularly provided with new ways to think about our lives numerically, giving us a model for our realities that favours concretion over abstraction, quantity over quality. We can now track so many aspects of life that they stream like stock prices along the bottom of our minds. As a consequence, we 're spending more and more time locked in the existential counting house, poring over ledgers that could only possibly be of interest to ourselves..."

Laurence Scott is a writer, broadcaster, academic and a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Arcadia in London. He is author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize, and was named the Sunday Times Thought Book of the Year. In 2011 he was named one of ten New Generation Thinkers by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC. 

Read by Stephen Mangan
Adapted by Elizabeth Burke
Produced by Alexandra Quinn
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4.

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

A meditation on modern life, inspired by the death of author Laurence Scott's parents.

By Laurence Scott. Philosophical meditation on 21st-century reality, inspired by the death of the author's parents. Read by Stephen Mangan.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Book of the Week

Picnic Comma Lightning

Episode 5: Final Fantasies

Contributors

Genres

Formats

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 4 LW

About BBC Radio 4