Arts & Ideas

The Oscar winning Midnight Cowboy was followed up by this drama about an artist who has relationships with a female job consultant and a male doctor. Director John Schlesinger, writer Penelope Gilliatt, actors Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch were all nominated for Academy Awards but it performed poorly at the box office. Was the film - released on July 1st 1971, ahead of its times? Matthew Sweet re-watches it with guests including Glenda Jackson, playwright Mark Ravenhill, film historian Melanie Williams and BFI archivist Simon McCallum. They discuss the different elements of the film, including the score, which features the trio Soave sia il vento from Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, the very precise decor and evocation of late '60s London and filming inside a Jewish synagogue.Producer: Fiona McLeanSunday Bloody Sunday is available on Blu-rayYou can find Matthew Sweet discussing other classics of British Cinema in the Free Thinking archives including British New Wave Films of the 60s - Joely Richardson and Melanie Williams evaluate the impact and legacy of Woodfall Films, the company behind Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ysnl2 An extended interview with Mike Leigh, recorded as he released his historical drama Peterloo, but also looks back at his film from 1984 Four Days in July https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000tqw Early Cinema looks back at a pioneer of British film Robert Paul and at the work of Alice Guy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dy2b Philip Dodd explores the novel and film of David Storey's This Sporting Life with social historian Juliet Gardiner, journalist Rod Liddle, writer Anthony Clavane and the author's daughter Kate Storey https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09j0rt6 Samira Ahmed convenes a discussion about British Social Realism in Film https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pz16k

HIV's origins and colonial history have inspired the collection of poems by Kayo Chingonyi, which has been nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021. Paisley Rekdal is currently the Poet Laureate of Utah. Her latest collection of poems was inspired by Ovid. She's been thinking about where stories come from and what we mean by appropriation. Dr Nasser Hussain is interested in ‘lost’ fragments of language and in what we notice and what we ignore. New Generation Thinker Florence Hazrat studies punctuation. They join host Sandeep Parmar for a conversation about experimentation ahead of the Ledbury Poetry Festival.Sandeep Parmar is a poet and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. She has been running the Ledbury Poetry Critics scheme alongside Sarah Howe. This project encourages diversity in poetry reviewing culture, aimed at new critical voices. Ledbury Poetry Festival runs from 2 - 11 July 2021.Kayo Chingonyi's book is called A Blood Condition. You can find the full list of poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize at https://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/Paisley Rekdal's collection of poems, Nightingale, re-writes many of the myths in Ovid's The Metamorphoses. She has published an Essay Appropriate: A Provocation https://www.paisleyrekdal.com/Dr Nasser Hussain teaches poetry at Leeds Beckett University. He published ‘SKY WRI TEI NGS’, a book of conceptual writing that composes poetry from IATA airport codes, and is working on an autobiographical poetic project Playing with Playing with Fire and The Life of Form.Dr Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield studying rhetoric, punctuation and Shakespeare's use of music. She is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select academics to turn their research into radio.This episode was made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI. You can find a playlist exploring New Research on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90You can find more discussions in playlists on the Free Thinking programme website, featuring Prose and Poetry, and Ten Years of the New Generation Thinker Scheme.Producer: Emma Wallace

Cities produce more than half the world’s carbon emissions and are home to more than half the world’s population. So what role might cities play in tackling the climate emergency and how can their inhabitants be inspired to help design their own solutions? Des Fitzgerald asks Nicole Metje and Andy Gouldson how engineering, finance and local projects might combine to make city living greener and more sustainable. Professor Nicole Metje is Head of Enterprise, Engagement and Impact and Head of the Power and Infrastructure Research Group in the School of Engineering at the University of Birmingham. She is also Deputy Director for Sensors of the UKCRIC National Buried Infrastructure Facility at Birmingham.Professor Andy Gouldson is one of the directors of the Centre for Climate Change, Economics and Policy at the University of Leeds and founder of the Place-based Climate Action Network. Professor Des Fitzgerald is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Exeter.You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: https://www.ukri.org/our-work/responding-to-climate-change/ or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast.Producer: Marcus Smith

Bait depicted Cornish second-home owners in a tense relationship with local fishermen. The 2019 film's director Mark Jenkin is one of Laurence Scott's guests along with author Wyl Menmuir, and Joan Passey, from the University of Bristol, where she is researching ideas about the sea as a monstrous space. Their conversation ranges from The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker via Wyl's novel The Many, centred on a derelict home in a coastal village and ideas about outsiders, to Celtic Cornish Breton connections.In our archives and available to download, you can find a Free Thinking discussion about ideas of Revenge and Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel - about a young man brought up in Cornwall and the widow of his cousin who comes to the county. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08slx9wOur Green Thinking playlist includes programmes exploring oceans, rising UK sea levels and the insights gained from new research. The Green Thinking podcast is 26 episodes 26 minutes long for COP 26 hearing from a range of academics looking at challenges facing the planet.Producer: Luke Mulhall

What role do museums and heritage organisations have to play in the climate emergency? How do we stop cultural and historical landmarks from falling into the sea, or is it time to learn to say goodbye? Rodney Harrison and Caitlin DeSilvey share their expertise, from lost lighthouses to net-zero carbon museums, and their work on a shared project, Heritage Futures www.heritage-futures.org. Rodney Harrison is Professor of Heritage Studies at University College London and AHRC Heritage Priority Area Leadership Fellow (2017-2021). He co-leads the project ‘Reimagining Museums for Climate Action’ – which includes an exhibition opening on 25 June at the Glasgow Science Centre for COP26 which aims to inspire radical change in museums to address the climate crisis. This project included an international design competition where people were invited to submit concepts around how museums might adapt to and address the challenges of climate change. You can read more about the exhibition and see the design proposals here: https://museumsforclimateaction.orgAnd, you find out more about AHRC’s Heritage Priority Area here: https://heritage-research.orgCaitlin DeSilvey is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter and together with Rodney Harrison, was on the research team for the AHRC-funded project, Heritage Futures. She is currently leading the AHRC-funded follow on project, Landscape Futures and the Challenge of Change: Towards Integrated Cultural/Natural Heritage Decision Making. You can read more about the project here: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/esi/research/projects/landscape-futures/ She also supervises an AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral partnership with Historic England on coastal archaeology and climate change, which you can learn about here: www.tinyurl.com/tventure Dr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Durham.You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: https://www.ukri.org/our-work/responding-to-climate-change/ or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast.Producer: Sofie Vilcins

From the Great Exhibition of 1851 to Shanghai 2010, Owen Hatherley, Emily MacGregor and Paul Greenhalgh explore visions of the future offered by world's fairs and expos with Matthew Sweet. Emily MacGregor describes the row which blew up over music commissioned by William Grant Still for the 1939/40 New York World's Fair. Paul Greenhalgh tells us about world's fairs from London and Paris to Shanghai. Owen Hatherley describes visiting an expo in Kazakhstan.Owen Hatherley's new book is called Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism. He has made a film about the modernism represented in the buildings which house the London Czech and Slovak embassies as part of the London Festival of Architecture https://www.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/Paul Greenhalgh is the author of Fair World: A History of World's Fairs and Expositions from London to Shanghai 1851-2010. His latest book is Ceramic, Art & Civilisation. He is Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich and a Professor of Art History.Dr Emily MacGregor is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Music Department at King's College, London and is currently working on a project exploring The Symphony in 1933. You can hear more about the composer William Grant Still if you look up Composer of the WeekProducer: Torquil MacLeodYou can find other programmes hearing from architects and exploring architecture on BBC Radio 3 this week including Words and Music and a Music Matters report on Bold Tendencies, who host concerts in a former car park in Peckham.

Poets Yvonne Reddick and John Wedgewood Clarke are using poetry and creative writing to explore our, and their, relationships with the environment. John is focusing on a small polluted river in Cornwall, while Yvonne explores her family relationships. And they aren’t the first poets to do so - she also shares her research into how previous poets, including Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, were concerned about the climate emergency.Dr Yvonne Reddick is Research Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire and an AHRC Leadership Fellow specialising in poetry of the Anthropocene. You can read here poetry here: https://yvonnereddick.org/poems/ She researches writers’ engagement with environmental issues, and edits Magma poetry magazine https://magmapoetry.com/Dr John Wedgewood Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter and an AHRC Leadership Fellow. His current project, Red River: Listening to a Polluted River (AHRC-funded), uses poetry and writing to explore our relationship with the environment and pollution: https://redriverpoetry.com/ The project involves a number of local walks in Cornwall which you can join here: https://redriverpoetry.com/eventsDr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Durham. We hear Maya Chowdhry’s poem ‘It’s Official: Drought Spell Doom For Mango Trees’. You can find this poem, and others, in Magma magazine.You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: https://www.ukri.org/our-work/responding-to-climate-change/ or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast.Producer: Sofie Vilcins

Peace, prosperity and formica - that's one way of describing the vision on show at the Festival of Britain in 1951. But domesticity had a radical side and in this Free Thinking conversation, Shahidha Bari talks to researchers Sophie Scott-Brown and Rachele Dini and looks at the domestic appliances selected for display in the newly re-opened Museum of the Home, talking to Director Sonia Solicari about how ideas about home, homelessness and home-making have shaped what is on show.Museum of the Home, previously the Geffrye Museum re-opened on June 12th 2021 https://www.museumofthehome.org.uk/Producer: Luke MulhallPart of BBC Radio 3's programming tying into the London Festival of Architecture. Madeleine Bunting recorded a series of Essays considering different ideas about home, homesickness, homelessness and Homelands which is being broadcast this week on BBC Radio 3 and available on BBC Sounds.You might be interested in a Free Thinking discussion called Fiction in 1946 recorded at London's Southbank Centre with Lara Feigel, Kevin Jackson and Benjamin Markovits https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wrq03Enid Marx, Edward Bawden and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are discussed in this episode called Designing the Future https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b2mgpl

Stew, the name for brothels in London. A townhouse set to become luxury flats in the centre of Soho is the focus of the new novel Hot Stew from Fiona Mozley, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her debut book Elmet. SI Martin founded the 500 Years of Black London walks nearly 20 years ago. In his novel Incomparable World he depicts a bustling eighteenth century London which offers a refuge for the many black Americans who fought for liberty on the side of the British. Plus pianist and composer Belle Chen on her six original new pieces exploring London - each composition with its genesis in a field recording in the city from both before and during the pandemic. They join architects Eric Parry and Alison Brooks, and presenter Laurence Scott, for a conversation about the development of London, as part of the London Festival of Architecture. Alison Brooks is one of the judges for this year's Davidson Prize Exhibition: a digital showcase of architects’ solutions to ways of living in a post-pandemic world. Eric Parry has been thinking about the changing city skyline.Fiona Mozley's novel called Hot Stew is out now, as is Incomparable World by SI Martin - part of the Black Britain: Writing Back series of books chosen by Bernadine Evaristo for republishing.You can find out more about the music of Belle Chen here - https://www.bellechen.com/The London Festival of Architecture runs throughout June with events online and around the city https://www.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/ https://www.alisonbrooksarchitects.com/ https://www.ericparryarchitects.co.uk/On BBC Radio 3 Essential Classics is broadcasting five classic choices of music composed for particular buildings. Words and Music inspired by architecture features readings by Marilyn Nnadebe and Henry Goodman, from writers including Caleb Femi, Marwa al-Sabouni, Susanna Clark, Thomas Hardy, Andrew Marvell, Adrienne Rich, and music from Hildegard of Bingen to Iain Chambers. Music Matters explored buildings, acoustics, and music, looking at Bold Tendencies and the former car park they use as a venue in Peckham, in London.Producer: Emma Wallace

From Greek tragedy to Covid conspiracies via LGBTQI activism in Uganda, artist Leilah Babirye, classicist Natalie Haynes and BBC correspondent Marianna Spring join Matthew Sweet to explore the many roles of masks.Leilah Babirye's first solo exhibition in Europe - Ebika Bya ba Kuchu mu Buganda (Kuchu Clans of Buganda) II - is at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London until 31st July. Pandora's Jar: Women in Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes is now out in paperback. You can hear Natalie sharing her musical choices with Michael Berkeley on Private Passions on BBC Radio 3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnv3 And Natalie discusses the legacy of the Trojan War in this episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bg2kProducer: Torquil MacLeod