BBC Radio 4 Extra

A Spring Clean Symphony

Factual: Homes & Gardens

BBC Radio 4 Extra - A Spring Clean Symphony

We bring to light the musicality, rituals and personal stories of the spring clean.

Love it or hate it? Nina Perry brings to light the musicality, rituals and personal stories of the spring clean. From 2013.

Someone, somewhere, is scrubbing, wiping, brushing or zapping.

Love it or hate it, cleaning is part of our everyday lives and, in Spring in particular, there's a surge in cleaning activities as we throw open the windows and purge our lives of the accumulated winter grime. 

In this composed feature, Nina Perry brings to light the rituals and personal stories of the spring clean and interweaves them with specially composed music.

How has cleaning changed over the generations? Is our attitude to cleaning nature or nurture? To what extent are our cleaning habits indicative of an inward state? And is cleaning about goodness, purity and perfection - or about living a healthy, germ free existence?

Nina rolls up her sleeves and spring cleans with her 96-year-old grandmother, Gwen. She speaks to Angela Levin about the significance of spring cleaning within the Jewish faith. And she asks Professor Sally Bloomfield and Dr Robert Aunger, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, what is "clean"?

Producer: Nina Perry

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in 2013.

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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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