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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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Front Row: BBC Centenary, The Art of Radio, Joy Whitby, Climate Fiction

BBC Centenary, The Art of Radio, Joy Whitby, Climate Fiction

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, BBC Centenary, The Art of Radio, Joy Whitby, Climate Fiction

Celebrating the centenary of BBC Radio, Play School creator Joy Whitby, Climate Fiction

Author Tom McCarthy and sound designer Benbrick consider radio as art, and pioneering producer Joy Whitby discusses creating iconic BBC programmes like Play School and Jackanory.

With Samira Ahmed.

To mark the centenary of the first BBC radio broadcast, Samira Ahmed discusses the art of radio and radio’s influence on art with the novelist and radio enthusiast Tom McCarthy and with Benbrick, sound designer and co-producer of the Peabody award-winning Have You Heard George’s Podcast?  

From early on the BBC made programmes especially for children. Samira Ahmed speaks to Joy Whitby, a pioneer of children’s programmes – she started Play School and Jackanory – and hears how her approach to these owed much to her early days creating sound effects as a radio studio manager.  

How should writers respond to the climate crisis? As the COP 27 climate conference continues in Egypt, Samira is joined live from Cairo by the novelist Ahdaf Soueif and in the studio by the playwright Greg Mosse, whose debut novel The Coming Darkness has been described as climate fiction. 

Producer: Ian Youngs

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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