In Suburbia

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Ian Hislop asks why suburban estates have had such a pull on the creative mind.

Ian Hislop, a citizen of Middle England, asks why these apparently dreary estates have had such a pull on the creative mind.

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In Suburbia: Better out than in

Better out than in

BBC Radio 4 - In Suburbia, Better out than in

Ian Hislop explores the culture that emerges from, and describes, Suburbia.

Ian Hislop visits the land between city and country where the majority of the population now live, and challenges the established myth that Suburbia is a cultural desert.

In spite of the fact that so many of us live, and choose to live, in Suburbia, it's still described as, at best a cultural backwater, and at worst a cultural desert.  Indeed the cultural output of suburbia is often songs and novels and films that describe a striving to escape from this land between the city and the country, or in cultural terms between rural Idyll and Bohemia.  Ian Hislop has long been fascinated by this cultural snobbery, and in three programmes he talks to leading cultural figures who either come from or celebrate Suburbia and Suburban life.

Hanif Kureishi, author of 'The Buddha of Suburbia' is a not so proud son of Bromley, Comedian Lee Mack is star and writer of the suburban comedy 'Not Going Out' which is now the longest running sitcom on British Television and still uses the familiar tropes of suburban aspiration, gentle class conflict and stability to garner laughs, and JC Carroll of The Members, is the composer whose Punk anthem 'The Sound of the Suburbs' made the tedium of car washing and noisy neighbours a badge of honour'.  All of them discuss their mixed feelings about suburbia, if and how it's changing, and why it remains a place where so many people aspire to live.  

He also visits the suburbs themselves and chats to  The 'Suburban artist' of Woodford, and he looks back at the way the suburbs have developed from their Medieval reputation as the place to dump everything you don't want in the city, to the industrial revolution when the Romantic suburb emerged allowing a new middle class to find a place between the castles and mansions of the aristocracy and the slums of the workers.  

In the first programme he concentrates on that historical development and how it was reflected from Chaucer and Shakespeare to The Diary of a Nobody and the quintessential figure of suburbia, Mr Pooter, as well as the whimsical reflections of Betjeman and the withering verse of Stevie Smith.

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