Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-11-19T16:10:26.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: It was 30 years ago today...
items: The Beatles Anthology exclusive behind the scenes with Jools Holland as remastered series with new episode arrives
items: Bossing it in the UK
items: 10 podcasts in a pear tree
items: 'No one knew what was coming next'
items: Band Aid at 40: Bob Geldof recalls the iconic charity single's chaotic creation
items: How the last ever song by The Beatles came together
items: Melvyn Bragg looks back on 20 years of In Our Time on Radio 4

It was 30 years ago today...
type: item
creator: David Hepworth
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Three decades after the Fab Four’s history was chronicled in Anthology, there’s now an extra chapter. Theirs is a long and winding road – but an endlessly compelling one
encoded: Add The Beatles Anthology to your watchlist Because nothing with the Beatles is ever entirely over, 30 years after the three remaining members, Paul, George and Ringo, brought forth their long-threatened Beatles Anthology – an eight-part series of TV documentaries, accompanied by three double CDs of previously unreleased versions of some of their best-known tunes plus, if you were a completist, an enormous book – they are releasing a remastered version. It comes with an additional part nine, made up of footage shot in and around the launch of that Anthology project and featuring the Fab Three, known at the time as “the Threetles”. While it doesn’t offer much in the way of revelation, this film of their reunion provides even more of the one thing Beatles watchers most crave, which is to watch them in the room with each other, just behaving. This will never not be fascinating. Here are three middle-aged men, all at the time over 50, Englishly keen to demonstrate their ordinariness, drinking tea from workmen’s mugs and playing with any toy at hand, while also strongly hinting that decades before, they were bonded for all time by an experience the rest of us cannot possibly understand. “I was 17 in Hamburg,” says George. “By the time I was 23 we had done Sgt Pepper.” Take that, pop stars of today. Like most gentlemen of their generation, born during the Second World War when lips were stiff, they are not natural practitioners of the newly voguish male hug, but they do it. You didn’t catch them collapsing into each other’s arms at the end of marathon performances the way bands do today. This was partly because they were rarely on for more than half an hour, and partly because Brian Epstein had instructed them in the importance of announcing the show’s end by forming up and executing a smart bow from the waist. A montage shows them performing this same signature move at the end of shows in front of everyone from stiff royals to demented teens. As a three-piece they can ne…

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The Beatles Anthology exclusive behind the scenes with Jools Holland as remastered series with new episode arrives
type: item
date: 2025-11-18T00:01:08.000Z
creator: David Hepworth
subject: audio
subject: Magazine
description: Three decades after the Fab Four’s history was chronicled in Anthology, there’s now an extra chapter. Theirs is a long and winding road – but an endlessly compelling one.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Because nothing with the Beatles is ever entirely over, 30 years after the three remaining members, Paul, George and Ringo, brought forth their long-threatened Beatles Anthology – an eightpart series of TV documentaries, accompanied by three double CDs of previously unreleased versions of some of their best-known tunes plus, if you were a completist, an enormous book – they are releasing a remastered version. It comes with an additional part nine, made up of footage shot in and around the launch of that Anthology project and featuring the Fab Three, known at the time as “the Threetles”. While it doesn’t offer much in the way of revelation, this film of their reunion provides even more of the one thing Beatles watchers most crave, which is to watch them in the room with each other, just behaving. This will never not be fascinating. Here are three middle-aged men, all at the time over 50, Englishly keen to demonstrate their ordinariness, drinking tea from workmen’s mugs and playing with any toy at hand, while also strongly hinting that decades before, they were bonded for all time by an experience the rest of us cannot possibly understand. “I was 17 in Hamburg,” says George. “By the time I was 23 we had done Sgt Pepper.” Take that, pop stars of today. Like most gentlemen of their generation, born during the Second World War when lips were stiff, they are not natural practitioners of the newly voguish male hug, but they do it. You didn’t catch them collapsing into each other’s arms at the end of marathon performances the way bands do today. “This was partly because they were rarely on for more than half an hour, and partly because Brian Epstein had instructed them in the importance of announcing the show’s end by forming up and executing a smart bow from the waist. A montage shows them performing this same signature move at the end of shows in front of everyone from stiff royals to demented teens. As a three-piece th…

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Bossing it in the UK
type: item
creator: David Hepworth
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Bruce Springsteen has become something of a national treasure in Britain — but it wasn’t always the case, says David Hepworth
encoded: Add When Bruce Springsteen Came to Britain to your watchlist I first met Bruce Springsteen one September night in 1984, in a backstage room in Philadelphia. He was delivered to a 20-minute meeting with me and a camera crew from the BBC music show The Old Grey Whistle Test with all the caution of a spy swap in East Berlin. He and his people were determined that this had to be a low-key reintroduction to the UK. At the time he viewed England as the land of missed opportunity. He had visited London in 1975 and had been so bruised by the way he had been over-sold with the line “at last London is ready for Bruce Springsteen” that he could barely bring himself to think about a return. The Whistle Test documentary, Born in the USA, which came out of our chat that night aired on 22 December 1984 and by February the following year the album of the same name was number one in the UK, from which you may deduce that the re-introduction worked. While it might be an exaggeration to say that I made Bruce Springsteen a star, I don’t think it would be too much to claim that I played a significant role in making him a star in the UK. His management certainly thought so. Impetuosity may be the mark of other rock stars, but Bruce Springsteen is essentially a cautious man. He even wrote a song with that title. His UK tour in 1985 was the first time he played outdoors. It had to be if it was to accommodate a dramatically expanded following in which his original zealots were soon outnumbered by the people who had been attracted by the video in which he danced with Courteney Cox. Brits punched the air, sang of baseball and the county line; in a few particularly distressing cases they even wore bandanas. When I interviewed him again in New York in 1986 he was in no doubt that he now had what you might call a special relationship with his British audience. He had found that British fans, with their long record of having put in the hard yards with the music papers, were more likely to appreci…

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10 podcasts in a pear tree
type: item
creator: David Hepworth
subject: App
subject: App features
description: David Hepworth mourns the record token in his festive column, before sharing RT's pick of the pods — including the outstanding documentary on America's political divide.
encoded: Of all the features of Christmas Past, from merry gentlemen to chestnuts roasting on an open fire, from Bing Crosby in the AM to the Queen in the PM, there is none whose passing I mourn half as much as that of the humble record token. Regardless of the merits of the illustration on the outside or the value of the stamp affixed to the inside, did ever a small card purchased in your local high street bring so much pleasure into the average home? The prospect of spending it the minute the shops re-opened carried me through many a desolate Boxing Day. The record token was the teenager’s delight and the trusted fall-back position for every aunt. It guaranteed that at least once a year more or less everybody went to a record shop, many of which opened early to catch “the token trade”. Give the gift of music, as the marketing campaign used to say, and people did. Those days are no more. With most music consumed via a stream, how can you? The physical act is gone. You can’t see yourself decanting a new album into your nephew’s smartphone, can you? That’s a chilly prospect. It’s to be hoped the book trade doesn’t shoot itself in the same foot as the record business did. A hardback book is still a valued and soulful thing to hand someone at this time of year. No matter how hot the market for audiobooks gets, it will curl up and die without the reminder of the tomes to which they owe their life. I’ve nothing against audiobooks. I’m currently enjoying A Voyage around The Queen by Craig Brown, thoughtfully produced using the voices of both Harriet Walter and the author. How much better it would be if the purchase of the book included access to the audio and the Kindle version as well. That way, I would have had more opportunities to get through the book, I would have finished it more quickly and would already be on to a second book – and waiting to unwrap more from under the tree. Merry Christmas! SOCIETY We Live Here Now — RT Podcast of the Year View oEmbed on the source websit…

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'No one knew what was coming next'
type: item
creator: David Hepworth
subject: App
subject: App features
description: In 1984, Sir Bob Geldof was roused to action by a news report on the Ethiopian famine. Forty years later, he’s still amazed Band Aid came together…
encoded: Add The Making of Do They Know It's Christmas? to your watchlist At the time of the first Band Aid recording in 1984, I was one of the presenters of BBC rock show Whistle Test. When the producer told me to be at a Notting Hill recording studio on Sunday morning because “apparently Bob Geldof’s making some kind of charity record”, it was said with a look we now call “side-eye”. The stock of the Boomtown Rats singer was not high. Forty years later, Geldof admits his second career might never have started had the first not foundered so badly. Their 1984 album had not troubled the chart. At the close of a gloomy October day spent trying unsuccessfully to interest anyone in their new single and, “thinking the best part of my life might be over”, he slunk home early to his girlfriend Paula Yates and their young child. “That’s how I saw Michael Buerk’s report about the Ethiopian famine on the Six o’Clock News,” he explains. “Le Bon and Boy George and Bono and the rest of them would have been out being rock stars. I wasn’t. I was on my sofa.” Galvanised by what he saw, he conceived the idea of a fund-raising single, plundering the family’s phone book for top pop names to sing on it. “Although they had pushed our lot aside, I knew all these people through Paula and The Tube [the Channel 4 music show she presented]. I’ve got Polaroids of people like Simon Le Bon at my place, asleep on the sitting room floor because they were just exhausted.” The song Do They Know It’s Christmas? was arrived at by putting together a pre-existing Midge Ure composition with a fragment of a song Geldof had failed to interest the Rats in. “Midge sent me the tune and I said, ‘Dude, that’s f***ing Z Cars.’ He said, ‘Better than anything you can write.’ Midge will grudgingly admit there may also be an element of The Dam Busters there.” It proved serviceable. A new BBC documentary of how it came to be recorded, put together from footage shot on the day that has lain in a vault ever since, begins with …

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Band Aid at 40: Bob Geldof recalls the iconic charity single's chaotic creation
type: item
date: 2024-11-19T00:01:54.000Z
creator: David Hepworth
subject: Documentaries
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: No one knew what was coming next.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. At the time of the first Band Aid recording in 1984, I was one of the presenters of BBC rock show Whistle Test. When the producer told me to be at a Notting Hill recording studio on Sunday morning because "apparently Bob Geldof's making some kind of charity record", it was said with a look we now call "side-eye". The stock of the Boomtown Rats singer was not high. Forty years later, Geldof admits his second career might never have started had the first not foundered so badly. Their 1984 album had not troubled the chart. At the close of a gloomy October day spent trying unsuccessfully to interest anyone in their new single and, "thinking the best part of my life might be over", he slunk home early to his girlfriend Paula Yates and their young child. "That's how I saw Michael Buerk's report about the Ethiopian famine on the six o'clock news," he explains. "Le Bon and Boy George and Bono and the rest of them would have been out being rock stars. I wasn't. I was on my sofa." Galvanised by what he saw, he conceived the idea of a fund-raising single, plundering the family's phone book for top pop names to sing on it. "Although they had pushed our lot aside, I knew all these people through Paula and The Tube [the Channel 4 music show she presented]. I’ve got Polaroids of people like Simon Le Bon at my place, asleep on the sitting room floor because they were just exhausted." The song Do They Know It's Christmas? was arrived at by putting together a pre-existing Midge Ure composition with a fragment of a song Geldof had failed to interest the Rats in. "Midge sent me the tune and I said, 'Dude, that's f**king Z Cars.' He said, 'Better than anything you can write.' Midge will grudgingly admit there may also be an element of The Dam Busters there." It proved serviceable. A new BBC documentary of how it came to be recorded, put together from footage shot on the day that has lain in a vault ever since, begins with Geldof and U…

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How the last ever song by The Beatles came together
type: item
date: 2023-11-03T14:01:48.000Z
creator: David Hepworth
subject: audio
description: The Fab Four split in 1970, but now something remarkable is happening – the release of a new Beatles song.
encoded: This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. In the winter of 1964, Derek Taylor, first and greatest of the spin doctors of pop, was engaged to write the sleeve notes of the Beatles' fourth album, Beatles for Sale. In this, he offered a prediction. He said it was inevitable that generations not yet born when he was typing would, at some point in the future, wish to understand the fuss about the Beatles. Faced with this question, he advised against trying to explain about the hair or the screams. Instead, he said we should simply play them the records and "the kids of AD 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of wellbeing and warmth as we do today". Now, the kids of AD 2000 have kids of their own, but Derek Taylor's words hold true, even if they only tell half the story. What Taylor couldn't have been expected to foresee is just how much people far in the future would still yearn for that "sense of wellbeing and warmth". Like a benign inherited condition, Beatlemania has been passed down the decades since, assisted by judicious nudges from marketing, facilitated by advances in technology and informed by a weather eye on the changes in public taste. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2023/11/GettyImages-1281862281-e68eacd.jpg" width="2353" height="1569" alt="Derek Taylor, the Beatles' Publicist for the US, is seen in 1968 recording his weekly radio show at KRLA in Pasadena, CA. His wit, charm, style and intense focus are in plain view. He is wearing his signature silk scarf, a Mickey Mouse watch, and an embroidered Nehru jacket. Two employees of KRLA are also seen here, along with two disc jockeys, the latter one pictured is "Reb 'The Rebel' Foster. (Photos by Sulfiati Magnuson/Getty Images.)" title="Derek Taylor, the Beatles' Publicist for the US, is seen in 1968 recording his weekly radio show at KRLA in Pasadena, CA. His wit, charm, style and intense focus are in plain view. He is wearing his signatur…

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Melvyn Bragg looks back on 20 years of In Our Time on Radio 4
type: item
date: 2018-10-11T07:00:28.000Z
creator: David Hepworth
subject: News
subject: Radio
subject: audio
subject: BBC Radio 4
description: The veteran broadcaster explains how he keeps the academics 'on their toes' on subjects ranging from the Abbasid Caliphs to the Zulu Nation
encoded: Barbara Graziosi is a rising star of academia. She has just been appointed Professor of Classics at Princeton University in the United States. On the day she was supposed to start teaching she excused herself on the grounds that she had been invited to make her first appearance on Radio 4’s In Our Time. Getting the call from In Our Time isn’t quite like being picked to play for your country, but you don’t turn it down. Her bosses understood. Don’t worry about the students, they said. They, too, will understand. Sara Cox had the best response to Zoe Ball being named the new BBC Radio 2 breakfast show presenter Chris Evans called his mum for advice on how to respond to BBC pay backlash RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox They’ll understand, because some of them will hear the In Our Time podcast, or as host Melvyn Bragg is given to calling it in fogeyish moments, “the iPod”. It’s the podcast of In Our Time that’s turned what was always a respected part of the Radio 4 offering into one of its stars. This weekly discussion about the history of ideas is now listened to by an average of two million on the radio and it’s reckoned to reach a further million as a podcast. Many of the podcast listeners are younger than the average Radio 4 listener, and many are overseas. View oEmbed on the source website It’s done this without resorting to any of the tricks programmes traditionally employ to get into the good graces of younger audiences. If anything, In Our Time goes the other way. Indeed, when one of Barbara Graziosi’s fellow panellists, who are gathered to talk about The Iliad, compares the politics of ancient Greece with Theresa May’s government, Bragg says, “That won’t do,” with that touch of asperity that 20 years as the host entitles him to. “‘Never knowingly relevant’ is one of our mottoes!” The guests’ involvement with the programme begins with the usual phone call from producer Victoria Brignell, who grills them eac…

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