Big 'In Our Time' news

Hello as you know, there's only one radio show—In Our Time, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, beloved by The Stopgap and our commenters alike (see: Anon21 making the same point) for the way he starts every episode with the word "hello" and then runs on into whatever's next with no regard for breathing as if you had read this sentence out loud.

Each time Bragg launches himself into whatever aspect of existence has been assigned to him that day with the same attitude. This creates a different atmospheric effect depending on what the subject is—a kind of rigorous, Oulipian approach to a highly segmented concept of knowledge.

eg:

Hello John Donne is best known now as one of England's finest poets of love and in his own time as an astonishing preacher with an exceptional mind and remarkable life.

world's fastest chiasmus

Hello in 1911 the Dutch physicist Haika Kameling-Honors made a remarkable discovery that nobody predicted and that none can since fully explain it's called superconductivity.

pacy!

Hello in 9 AD Germanic tribes destroyed three Roman legions in the battle of the Teutoberg forest—about 20,000 Roman soldiers were massacred.

wow

Hello I'm joined today by two neurologists, Patrick Wall and Semir Zeki, to look at pain and subjective experience, what can our experience of pain tell us about ourselves and about human consciousness, is each individual human experience unique or are there experiences we say could apply across all of human consciousness?

ow

Hello the nature of good and evil is a subject which has continued to tease and trouble the greatest minds in the 20th century whether in medicine, philosophy, politics, or the arts, in the century that has seen one of the greatest atrocities known to mankind, the holocaust and with continual wars in the former Yugoslavia, the question of what is good and evil is as resonant as ever.

Yugoslavia?

This week, In Our Time released its 1000th episode. A thousand! It's a radio show, not a podcast, strictly, and the scale of the operation makes more sense when you apply BBC proportions to it. But I'm still impressed. Melvyn Bragg did some press around it and the Guardian ran the interview under the headline, "I'd been fired once. It didn't hurt."

What subject did they (I don't want to know or specify the "they," honestly) choose to celebrate a millennium of this particular format of combative explanation? Something way better than I would have chosen.

Hello it's an image that once you've seen it stays with you for the rest of your life, this is Death playing chess with the Crusader on the rocky Swedish shore, and it's the opening of Ingmar Bergman's film, 'The Seventh Seal,' which from its release in 1957 brought Bergman fame around the world.

He's absolutely right. The Seventh Seal is so good. And what a way to conceptualize the semi-fake but very generative concept of the "era"!

Just thought you should know. Enjoy the weekend x