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 Radio 4 Autumn season
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Autumn highlights and the new Spring schedule on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 4
Seasons on Radio 4
Trafalgar
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Monday 10 October
Boney's Revenge 1/1
8.00 to 8.30pm
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There is a spectre haunting this year's British celebrations of Trafalgar. Napoleon Bonaparte, defeated then and even more decisively at Waterloo in 1815, remains a figure of huge global fascination.
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The man the British demonised as Old Boney is as talked about as ever, appears on all kinds of commercial merchandise, and has a large international fan club.
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The programme revels in the ironies and often bizarre touches this cult has produced.
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Chris Bowlby begins a journey around some of the cult's scared places by recalling the extraordinary scenes in Plymouth in 1815 when Napoleon, who'd surrendered to a British warship after defeat at Waterloo, held court on Plymouth Sound as adoring British crowds rushed to catch sight of him.
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The anxious British authorities hurried him into exile. But this only added to this mythical appeal.
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He goes on to explore in Dover how earthy British propaganda, setting puny Boney against robust John Bull, French cuisine against hearty plum pudding, had failed to cut Napoleon down to size.
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All this is accompanied by the songs that keep the mythology as alluring as ever, and the comments of international Boney watchers as diverse as the Australian couple bickering over his romantic appeal, the Japanese who buy him dressed in a kimono, the British who look forlornly for Wellington or Nelson souvenirs amidst the piles of Bonapartist merchandise, and the French woman living in Plymouth who just can't help admiring a bad man.
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Presenter and producer: Chris Bowlby
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Friday 14 October
Trafalgar Trail 1/1
11.00 to 11.30am
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London's Trafalgar Square is not the only Trafalgar Square. It is just one of many in the United Kingdom and beyond its shores, erected to honour our greatest seaman.
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In fact, Londoners were late off the mark. London's Nelson's Column dates from 1843, nearly 40 years after the Battle of Trafalgar and Nelson's death.
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Some local communities were much quicker in their commemorations.
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In this bi-centennial year, Nick Utechin goes on a Trafalgar Trail searching out the stories behind other squares (where is the Trafalgar Square that is not a square?) and other columns, trying to find which of the many columns can claim seniority despite its obscurity (could the first Nelson's column now stand forlorn and neglected somewhere off the A1 in Northumberland?).
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He talks to local people from Great Yarmouth to Gosport, from the London Borough of Merton to the Caribbean, about the pride they take in their particular associations with Nelson - and finds that in Dublin the only part remaining of the naval hero is his head, thanks to some IRA activity in the Sixties.
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Presenter: Nick Utechin
Producer: Merilyn Harris, Testbed
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Monday 17 October
Woman's Hour Drama - Betsy And Napoleon 1/5
10.45 to 11.00am
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Betsy Balcombe was 13 when Napoleon Bonaparte came to live in her garden. The two forge an extraordinary relationship in the first weeks of Napoleon's incarceration on St Helena.
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Drawn from the contemporary diaries of Betsy Balcombe, and her memoirs in later life, this is a story of a meeting between innocence and a great burden of experience, the Fool and the King, of a child who lives for the moment with a man who is wrapped in the greatness of his past.
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Betsy's father was purveyor of goods for the East India Company on the island of St Helena. The Balcombe family invited Napoleon to live in the Pavilion in their garden (a former ballroom which now functioned as a guest room) for the first weeks of his life on St Helena, while his house was being refurbished at Longwood, in the most bleak and remote part of the island.
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Betsy Balcombe spoke French and she was not afraid of His Imperial Majesty.
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Napoleon's entourage of Counts and Generals would not speak to him unless spoken to; their access to him was rigidly bound by rules, and they did not like this English girl who took liberties with the Emperor.
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It is beautifully written, moving and funny; with fine performances by Alex Jennings as Napoleon, Michelle Tate as Betsy, Ian McNeice as Mr Balcombe and Rupert Wickham as Count de Las Cases.
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The drama is based on a story that writer Julia Blackburn discovered when she was researching her book The Emperor's Last Island.
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Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery
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Monday 17 October
Afternoon Play - Clinging To Lord Nelson 1/1
2.15 to 3.00pm
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Thanks to global warming, a freak tidal wave has engulfed London.
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Jim and his teenage daughter Alice are stuck on the plinth of Nelson's Column overlooking Trafalgar Square, having made their way to rescue an escapologist. Ìý
They are worried that, in the middle of his most recent feat of illusionist endurance, he will be abandoned up there.
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Despite the extremity of their circumstances, Jim loses no opportunity to improve Alice's mind by setting her mental arithmetic tests to do with volume of rainwater and cubic feet of Trafalgar Square - after all, Cambridge will be short of students when they get down from here and will welcome her enquiring intelligence. Alice is impatient with him.
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Meanwhile, the American illusionist, Lazarus, has been befriended in his cage by Pericles, a sentient pigeon.
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Pericles can't help but be a bit smug that humans are at last feeling the result of their predatory greed and are about to be wiped out, just as the pigeons have been threatened in the past.
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Producer: Gilly Adams
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Monday 17 October
Nelson, The Latest 1/2
8.00-8.30pm
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In two programmes recorded in Spain, London, Portsmouth and Norfolk, Colin White – one of the greatest Nelson historians alive - presents the latest news on Nelson.
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How much do we know, what has changed over the succeeding generations since his death, what has happened to the iconography, his saintliness, the uses to which his heroism has been put – in short, what is the latest on Nelson?
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Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, has written a new poem especially for this two-part series.
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Colin tells the story of the launching of the Nelson legend and what has happened to it ever since.
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With expert contributions from the Second Sea Lord (who currently uses Nelson's rooms on Victory to work from), Roger Knight (naval historian), Adam Nicolson (writer), Agustin Guimera (Spanish naval expert) and Ron Fiske (scholar of Norfolk).
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Colin has found about 1,200 unpublished letters written by Nelson in various archives, both in Britain and overseas.
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These include the sketch which indicates his battle plans for Trafalgar, which he himself called 'The Nelson Touch'.
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The way in which the plan was discovered is in itself a fascinating story and it leads on to a discussion, with other naval historians, of the tactics that Nelson used.
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Presenter: Colin White
Producer: Tim Dee
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Friday 21 October
Afternoon Play - Trafalgar 1/1
2.15 to 3.00pm
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Trafalgar is a gripping docu-drama based on eyewitness accounts of the action from a range of perspectives.
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On 21 October 1805, England engaged in a massive sea battle against Napoleon's navy. It was the definitive naval battle of the Napoleonic Wars and it established Britannia's position as ruler of the seas for the following century and a half.
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It is a genuine turning-point in our island history - for if Britain had lost, it would have been impossible to prevent Napoleon's full-scale invasion of the British Isles.
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This drama will tell the story of Trafalgar from the point of view of the men who took part.
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The battle is one of the best documented in our history and the drama will draw on primary research from documents in the Public Record Office, the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Naval Historical Museum to establish an eyewitness account of the battle from the points of view of the officers and men of the British fleet.
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It will recreate the events of that day as they seemed to various participants:
Lieutenant William Cumby, whose 14-page letter to his son describing his part in the battle now lies in the library of the National Maritime Museum; Signals Lieutenant John Pasco of the Victory; and Captain Henry Blackwood, whose dogged persistence as Nelson's watchdog kept the Combined Fleet from running safely home to the Mediterranean and who recorded the emotions of the chase, the battle and the aftermath in letters home to his wife, for example at breakfast time on the morning of the battle.
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The writer is Lisa Osborne, who co-wrote Dunkirk, a Bafta-winning docu-drama for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ TWO that told the story of the retreat to the beaches and evacuation from Dunkirk of the British Expeditionary Force in May/June 1940. The three-part serial told a dramatic story with real characters. Nothing was fictionalised. Everything was drawn from primary research with living survivors and from documentary eyewitness accounts.
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Producer: Karen Rose, Sweet Talk
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John Lennon
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John Lennon died on 8 December 1980. In this short series of programmes, Radio 4 remembers the man and his music.
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³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 2 will also be marking the anniversary.
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Saturday 3 November
Archive Hour - The Wenner Tapes
8.00 to 9.00pm
Ìý The most famous interview Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner ever did was an extensive interrogation, on tape, of John Lennon shortly after the Beatles had broken up.
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Lennon and Ono had already given Rolling Stone a blessing of sorts by posing nude for its first anniversary issue in late 1968.
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In late 1970, an edited version of Wenner's interview appeared in print, and the subsequent two issues in which it was printed both sold out overnight.
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The Lennon interview remains one of the most important ever done with a popular musician. Lennon himself regarded it as definitive.
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It documented the Beatles' career and split with painstakingly emotional, at times excruciating detail, and served as a major (and controversial) point of exorcism for Lennon in his coming to terms with the Sixties, the Beatles and particularly his ruptured relationship with Paul McCartney.
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It was the last interview in which he ever spoke with such candor.
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The audio archive for this programme is centred on Wenner's own tapes, which have never before been broadcast in the UK.
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Producer: Simon Hollis, Brook Lapping
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Monday 5 December
Songs In The Key Of Lennon 1/5
3.45 to 4.00pm
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Radio 4 presents five 15-minute snapshots of Lennon's life, as illuminated by five songs he wrote about key relationships.
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Each day across the week, the spotlight falls on one song and the relationship it described.
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Each programme looks at what the relationship meant to him, how it affected his work and what this song says about the man.
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The programme also considers the stage in his development as a musician and songwriter in which each song was written.
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Unlike McCartney, Lennon wrote very personal songs in which he laid himself bare; he used his life to fuel his work.
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He was never afraid to reveal his weaknesses as a father, husband, friend and human being.
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"These stories about boring people doing boring things – being postmen and secretaries and writing home. I'm not interested in third party songs. I like to write about me, 'cos I know me."
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Producer: Nick Baker, Testbed
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Thursday 8 December
Afternoon Play - Unimaginable 1/1
2.15 to 3.00pm
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The death of John Lennon shocked the world. When he was shot outside his New York apartment the world's press wanted interviews with anyone who had known him.
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At the time, Ray Connolly had ironically just arranged to visit Lennon and conduct the first interview by a British journalist with him for something like ten years.
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Connolly was a friend of Lennon's and this is why Lennon had agreed to be interviewed.
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The play focusses on Connolly's reaction to Lennon's death and the conflict in his own mind between the public image and the private lifestyle.
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The director Martin Jenkins has his own connection to John Lennon and the Beatles, as he booked them to play at Liverpool University when they were known as the Silver Beatles.
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Producer: Martin Jenkins, Pier Productions
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