Start the Week

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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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Start the Week: Lenny Henry

Lenny Henry

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Lenny Henry

Lenny Henry, Tessa McWatt, Matthew Syed and Keon West with Kirsty Wark

Lenny Henry, Tessa McWatt, Matthew Syed and Keon West discuss belonging and diversity with Kirsty Wark.

Lenny Henry was 16 when he first appeared on television making people laugh in the 1970s. He tells Kirsty Wark about coming of age in the spotlight at a time of casual chauvinism and blatant racism, all while under his Jamaican mother’s strict instruction to integrate. 

The novelist Tessa McWatt knows only too well the complexity of fitting in. Born in Guyana, raised in Canada and working in Britain, McWatt explores themes of the outsider in society and conflicting ideas of belonging.  

The writer and former sportsman Matthew Syed encourages breaking free of the echo chambers that surround us, to develop an ‘outsider mindset’. Cognitive diversity, he argues in his latest book, is the answer to many of the world’s most challenging problems.

And the social psychologist Keon West explains the research being done to reduce bias between different groups of people. He argues that mandatory unconscious bias training is not only pointless - but possibly detrimental.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Picture credit: © ITV / Rex / Shutterstock

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