Gillian Reynolds in the Telegraph

The Telegraph’s superb radio critic Gillian Reynolds echoes some of the concerns about Neil MacGregor’s current Radio 4 series that I express in the February issue of History Today. The radio series that’s really – and should be – a television series. What’s that saying about great minds?

A History of the World in 100 Objects (Radio 4, Mondays to Fridays) hits its third week (of an initial six, with more to come). There’s something wrong with this series, too. It’s overly busy, almost as much as Chris Evans’s breakfast show. Chris, however, has two and a half hours to fill daily. Neil MacGregor gets under 15 minutes to talk about each representative object – a tool, a carving, a pestle, a bowl – and fit it into his wider story of global evolution.

Yet, for instance, if food is the day’s focus we must hear Madhur Jaffrey and Bob Geldof on the subject too, not to mention fitting everything into an aural frame of music, title, opening montage, scripted description and bits of distracting location sound. It’s too much. MacGregor is a born communicator, a brilliant talker. Why not just allow him to do it? Here is radio made for television audiences. Listeners may occasionally like to talk back. When the story is this good we actually prefer to concentrate.

Starkey on Today

David Starkey is becoming something of a regular on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. On the edition edited by the thriller writer and all round good egg P.D. James he talked eloquently (and courteously, tamed by the grand dame) on English national identity, musing on whether the English now inhabited a ‘post-nation’. Today he mused on the Staffordshire Hoard and the continuing camoaign to raise funds for a permanent home for the collection in the West Midlands. He thought it important that it should remain in the old kingdom of Mercia, as it was a symbol of the origins of ‘Angle-land’, and threw light on issues of Englishness that needed to be considered and embraced. The English, after all, have as much right as anyone else to muse on the nature of their identity, reluctant though they seem to be to celebrate it too loudly. The significance of the Hoard is hard to overestimate.

Listen to the Starkey segment of the programme by clicking here.

In Our Time's Free Archive

In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s radio 4 programme, is one the jewels of BBC broadcasting. Each Thursday the ageless Lord Bragg sits down with three distinguished panelists to discuss subjects ranging from the Anabaptists to Newton, Babylon to Dante. Today it was announced that the full 11-year archive of programmes is to be archived online, free to listeners. It’s a valuable, compelling and entertaining resource for anyone interested in history in all its remarkable diversity.

Blair Worden discusses the Civil War on BBC Radio 3

As a addendum to yesterday's post, here is a link to a historical discussion from BBC's Night Waves programme. The historians Justin Champion and Blair Worden, whose new book I previewed yesterday, discuss with the host Rana Mitter the long-term significance and legacy of the English Civil War.

The discussion is introduced with this blurb:

The figures of Cromwell, the executed King Charles I, roundheads and cavaliers, have come to represent the English Civil War in the public imagination.

But what was it really fought for, and what, in the long term, did it achieve?

Click here to launch the programme in BBC's iPlayer

Skip to around 11 minutes 40 seconds to reach the discussion and miss the first item in the programme.