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Conversations on a Bench

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Anna Scott-Brown hears stories from the people who stop to sit beside her on benches.

Anna Scott-Brown hears stories from the people who stop to sit beside her on benches around the country.

Conversations on a Bench: Falmouth

Falmouth

BBC Radio 4 - Conversations on a Bench, Falmouth

A poem by Penelope Shuttle picks up on conversations recorded on a bench in Falmouth.

Falmouth’s Conversations on a Bench creates a counter-intuitive picture of Cornwall through conversations of love, death and poverty, complemented by a poem by Penelope Shuttle.

Anna Scott-Brown hears more stories from the people who stop to sit beside her on benches around the country. 
 
In this edition, she sits on a bench in Falmouth, Cornwall.  Throughout the programme a specially commissioned work by the poet Penelope Shuttle draws on the voices of those passing by – and sometimes pausing on – the bench in Queen Mary Gardens on the seafront. 

It is a counter-intuitive approach to the county that gets away from its picture-postcard image, reflecting the poverty and hardship experienced by many in a post-industrial county. 

There are stories of love and death, poignantly brought together as Penelope remembers her late husband Peter on whose bench the conversations are taking place. 

From the automata maker and his little cat that tells us ‘suddenly it is now’, to the exercise teacher from Washington DC, the swimming instructor who remembers losing her wellies in the park as a child, and the sustainable tourism gold award winner who is now sceptical about how much good tourism does for the country.

How long does it take to become Cornish? It seems the answer is three generations, while the county itself seems to draw out a special affection from old timers whose families go back generations and from newer arrivals. 

Hidden lives are revealed and common threads recur as Anna’s gentle but insistent, and sometimes extremely direct, questions elicit poignant and profound responses from those sitting on the bench.


An Overtone production for BBC Radio 4

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