The Exploding Library

Original version

BBC Radio 4 FM

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

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Comedy

A trio of comedians explode and unravel their most cherished cult books.

A trio of comedians explode and unravel their most cherished cult books, paying homage to the tone and style of the original text, but blurring the lines between fact and fiction.

In this series, a trio of comedians explode and unravel their most cherished cult books, paying homage to the tone and style of the original text - and blurring and warping the lines between fact and fiction.

As our hosts shine the spotlight on strange, funny and sometimes disturbing novels, listeners are invited to inhabit their eccentric worlds - gaining a deeper understanding of their workings and the unique literary minds that created them.

BBC Radio 4 LW

The Exploding Library: Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut

Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut

BBC Radio 4 - The Exploding Library, Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut

Comedian Daliso Chaponda unravels the myriad personas of Vonnegut's Mother Night.

Comedian Daliso Chaponda unravels the myriad personas of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night. If we're always playing a version of ourselves, how do we know who we truly are?

In this new literature series, a trio of comedians explode and unravel their most cherished cult books, paying homage to the tone and style of the original text - and blurring and warping the lines between fact and fiction.

“We are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

So reads the warning at the beginning of the novel Mother Night, in an author’s introduction written by Kurt Vonnegut himself. Yet in this world of unreliable narrators, editor’s “corrections” and weirdly omniscient first-person testimony, nothing is really what it seems.

Purportedly the “confessions of Howard J. Campbell Jr”, an American expat-turned Nazi propagandist-turned Allied spy (allegedly), Vonnegut’s warped collection of bizarre characters and slippery narratives invite us to cast aside our black and white notions of morals and guilt and survey the gazillions of greys in between.

Comedian Daliso Chaponda considers the strange world of people playing versions of themselves in public - comedians, spies, politicians and, to an extent, all of us. How do you deal with people perceiving you differently to your "real" self? And, for that matter, how do you know who you "really" are? 

Presenter: Daliso Chaponda
Producer: Steven Rajam
An Overcoat Media production for 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.

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The Exploding Library

Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut

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