With Great Pleasure at Christmas

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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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With Great Pleasure

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Series bringing fresh insight into lives through literature, with guest presenters

Series bringing fresh insight into lives through literature, in which guest presenters pick readings from their favourite pieces of poetry and prose

BBC Radio 4 LW

With Great Pleasure: With Great Pleasure at Christmas

BBC Radio 4 - With Great Pleasure, With Great Pleasure at Christmas

Michael Rosen's favourite poems and stories. Readers Henry Goodman and Yasemin Özdemir.

Michael Rosen chooses festive poems and stories, read by Henry Goodman and Yasemin Özdemir. With live music from traditional folk band Shovel Dance Collective.

Michael Rosen chooses poems and stories that have meant the most to him in his life, with  guest readers Henry Goodman and Yasemin Özdemir and a special appearance by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, all recorded in the BBC Radio Theatre.  

Michael chooses extracts from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Simon Armitage. With poems by Warsan Shire, Raymond Carver and James Berry.  Many of Michael’s choices touch on ideas of home and heritage, or they remind him of stories handed down by family members, like ‘When Schlemiel came to Warsaw” by Isaac Bashevis Singer.  
 
Amazing live music from Shovel Dance Collective, a nine piece traditional folk band, who explore folk songs from a perspective that ‘isn’t imperial, white and male’.  They include a new setting for ‘Full Fathom Five’ from Shakespeare’s Tempest.  

Prepare for some unusual instruments and sounds and great stories by a master storyteller.  Intensely festive with a tinge of melancholy, hilarious, sublime.  The perfect way to start the festive season.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery

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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With Great Pleasure

With Great Pleasure at Christmas

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