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BBC Radio 4 Extra

Your digital radio entertainment station showcasing the best in comedy and drama

Your digital radio entertainment station showcasing the best in comedy and drama. With recent favourites from BBC Radio 4.

Book of the Week

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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

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

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Jill Waters

Matthew Baylis

Book of the Week: Man Belong Mrs Queen: Episode 2

Man Belong Mrs Queen

Episode 2

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Man Belong Mrs Queen, Episode 2

Matthew Baylis's investigation into the island cult of Vanuatu that worships Prince Philip

On the island of Tanna, Chief Jack is making vague promises but giving very little away. Read by Philip Franks.

As a bookish child with a posh accent, growing up on Merseyside in the 1980s, Matthew Baylis identified with the much-mocked Prince Philip as a fellow outsider. He even had a poster of him on his bedroom wall.
 
Years later, as an anthropology student , Baylis learned of the existence of a Philip cult on the South Sea island of Tanna. Why was it there? Nobody had a convincing answer. Nobody even seemed to want to find one.
 
His curiosity fatally piqued, he travelled over 10,000 miles to find a society both remote and slap-bang in the shipping-lanes of history. It's a place where US airmen, Lithuanian libertarians, and Graeco-Danish Princes have had as much impact as the missionaries and the slave-traders. On the rumbling slopes of this remarkable volcanic island, banjaxed by frequent doses of the local narcotic, suffering from a relentless diet of yams and regularly accused of being a divine emissary of the Duke, Baylis attempted to get to the bottom of this bizarre cult. In doing so he draws some ironic lessons about our own island 'myths' and comes to respect the pragmatic realpolitik of his South Seas hosts.
 
Episode 2: On the island of Tanna, Chief Jack makes vague promises but gives little away.
 
Abridged and produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company Production for BBC Radio 4

Book of the Week: Man Belong Mrs Queen

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.

Matthew Baylis explores the cult whose members revere Prince Philip as an island god

Matthew Baylis travels to the South Seas to explore the cult whose members revere Prince Philip as an island god

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