Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2022-06-20T16:35:25.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The real-life Black Mirror predictions made in futurologist Yuval Noah Harari's new book
items: Book of the Week: A Line Becomes a Wall tells the story behind Donald Trump's border rhetoric
items: The story of Hitler’s rise to power is told in a gripping new detective drama
items: The best of British: Radio 2's Ken Bruce reveals why he still loves working for the BBC
items: John Gordon Sinclair: I want people to get “a big old slap in the face” when they read my books
items: How did this happen?
items: Long Way Round's Charley Boorman: Even if I lost my leg, I would never give up motorcycling
items: Andrew Marr on life after his stroke: “I don’t do tears. I come from Dundee”
items: Safari so good: You don't have to worry about spotting the wildlife in Botswana
items: How different was BBC1's The Night Manager to its original book?

The real-life Black Mirror predictions made in futurologist Yuval Noah Harari's new book
type: item
date: 2018-08-06T05:00:37.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: News
subject: Sci-fi
subject: TV
description: Will algorithms actually select your dream partner? Could robots do most of our jobs by 2050? Discover the technological revolution the best-selling author forecasts in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
encoded: Yuval Noah Harari is a phenomenon. An Israeli professor of history, he became a huge bestseller when his book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind sold more than eight million copies worldwide. Translated into English from the Hebrew in 2014, when he was 38, it was robustly argued, mind-expanding, often overwhelming in its scope. His 2016 follow-up, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, examined the way developments in biotech and infotech, among other factors, might affect the future for humans. It had the same boggling sweep and intellectual audacity: I’m still trying to work out how his passage about lawns as status symbols related to a vision of ageless billionaire cyborgs. New BBC book to celebrate the women of Doctor Who RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox Putting down Homo Deus, I thought Harari might be the new Stephen Hawking: a man trying to address highly complex matters for a popular audience, whose books might be bought but not read. Or, if read, not fully understood. View oEmbed on the source website Now here’s his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which retools some of Harari’s earlier research and thinking in a more comprehensible form and applies it to our world today. It’s arranged in five sections – The Technological Challenge; The Political Challenge; Despair and Hope; Truth; Resilience – broken down into issues including immigration, religion, terrorism and post-truth. One of the central tenets of Harari’s work is that Homo sapiens won the evolutionary race over Neanderthals and other hominid species because of our ability to create and share useful fictions (religion, money, credit), which enabled us to organise into societies. But now it seems that belief in the dominant global narrative, of liberalism, has broken down. Harari sees the resurgence of nationalist myths embodied by Donald Trump and Brexit as regrettable but largely irrelevant, because the coming technological change…

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Book of the Week: A Line Becomes a Wall tells the story behind Donald Trump's border rhetoric
type: item
date: 2018-02-26T15:07:00.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: audio
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: Radio
subject: TV
description: Francisco Cantu, whose work will feature in Radio 4's Book of the Week, tells why those desperate enough will always find ways around it
encoded: With borders and immigration the hot-button issues of the day, Francisco Cantú’s sparsely poetic nonfiction debut is timely. The 32-year-old Mexican-American – “I can easily pass for white, but I have a Hispanic name that tells people something else is going on” – spent four years as an agent of the US Border Patrol. He chased Mexicans who risked their lives to cross, repatriated the ones he caught, and stumbled across bodies of those who didn’t make it. These were not the “rapists” of Donald Trump’s fevered imaginings, but people fleeing poverty and the psychotic, institutionalised violence of Mexican narcotic cartels. Cantú saw the Patrol as a stepping-stone to diplomatic service or a job as an immigration lawyer, and as a Spanish speaker and trained paramedic, he thought he’d be able “to become a force for good in the agency”. But the parade of casual brutality, misery and desperation took its toll: he suffered horrific nightmares and ground the enamel off his molars. After quitting in 2012 he took a job in a coffee shop, embarked on a period of self-examination and research, and almost by accident found himself involved in the tragic case of a Mexican work friend, Jose, who faced deportation after 30 years. All of which ultimately fed into his book. The Line Becomes a River, Radio 4’s Book of the Week, is brilliantly evocative of the starkly beautiful reaches of the desert and of the human stories behind the statistics. Cantú brings to life the immigrants he briefly meets, and does not demonise his former friends and colleagues on the Border Patrol, even as he records them shredding clothes and urinating on foodstuffs cached by desperate individuals in the desert. Alongside the personal dimension, Cantú intelligently explores the history and causes of Mexican immigration to America, and the US response. “Our government policy, ‘prevention through deterrence’, means cities are well enforced, so crossers are pushed to more remote desert areas,” Cantú says. “Hundre…

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The story of Hitler’s rise to power is told in a gripping new detective drama
type: item
date: 2017-11-05T08:00:45.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Volker Kutscher, the writer behind Sky Atlantic drama Babylon Berlin, reveals the thinking behind his Nazi Germany novels
encoded: “Unlike Quentin Tarantino, who blew up Hitler in his film Inglourious Basterds, I know what happened in history and I can’t change it,” says author Volker Kutscher. The 54-year-old German is six books into a series of nine that superimposes noirish, Berlin-set police-thriller plots onto real events, each charting a single year in Germany’s slide into Nazism and towards war between 1929 and 1938. Two of the novels have been translated into English and the first, Babylon Berlin, has been made into two eight-part series, the first of which begins on Sky Atlantic this week. Co-written and directed by Tom Tykwer (who made the films Run Lola Run, Cloud Atlas and the TV series Sense8), it had a reported budget of £35 million, making it one of the most expensive original language TV series ever made. The German title of Babylon Berlin was Der Nasse Fisch, which translates as “The Wet Fish”, German police slang for a cold case. Kutscher’s protagonist, detective Gereon Rath, is played by leading German actor Volker Bruch, while Rath’s on-off love interest and would-be fellow investigator Charlotte “Charly” Ritter is played by Liv Lisa Fries. Kutscher approved of the casting and says he was “very impressed” when he visited the set last year – four complete streets of inter-war Berlin have been re-created in Studio Babelsberg, just outside the city. But, he says, “I don’t want to make the mistake of paying too much attention to the series. They do their project, and I hope it is successful, but I have to concentrate on my novels, which is my project. I am now in 1935 and they are in 1929.” He hopes, though, that further adaptations of his novels will be forthcoming: “It makes no sense to stop in 1929. They have to at least get to 1933.” That was the year that Adolf Hitler’s rise was cemented by federal elections, and when many, including Germany’s Jewish community, still believed that his totalitarian instincts could be tamed. Kutscher thinks a fictional examination of the way …

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The best of British: Radio 2's Ken Bruce reveals why he still loves working for the BBC
type: item
date: 2017-10-31T13:24:03.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: News
subject: Radio
subject: audio
description: Bruce is one of the most popular presenters on BBC radio – how does he do it?
encoded: So, I say to Ken Bruce, what’s the secret? The 66-year-old broadcaster has parlayed warm, witty affability into a 40-year career, nearly 32 of those as host of Radio 2’s 9.30am weekday slot, where he gets a “fairly consistent” audience of 8.3 million and a 21.7 per cent share of all listeners. He is the station’s longest serving male broadcaster, and last year signed a new contract that will take him up to 2019 (he earns between £250,000 and £300,00, according to a report in July). “There’s no secret,” he says in that treacle-and-malt Glaswegian purr. “I just come on and am roughly myself – or a slightly better version – and hope that’s what people like. I don’t do laugh-out-loud stuff: wry smiles are what I like to get. A lot of it is luck: being in the right place, doing a good job, in the right slot. Mornings suit me, I’m sharper. And in terms of survival it’s probably that there is always a bigger problem than me to deal with.” This downplays his rapport with the Radio 2 audience, which rivals that of Terry Wogan. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” says Bruce. “The Radio 2 audience is a very giving group. It really is a dialogue. People have a feeling of ownership about the station.” On his first day at Radio 2, sitting in for Ray Moore in 1982, he was handed a box of records to play and a pile of cards from Moore’s listeners, welcoming him to the show. But you mess with this audience’s expectations at your peril. When Davina McCall stood in for Bruce in 2007, there were 150 complaints. Maybe Davina lacked his common touch. “You have to remember the broad sweep of the audience,” says Bruce. “Would something that works for someone my age work for someone of 15 who is listening in the car with their mum, or someone who is 35? Broadly speaking, I do normal life: things going wrong with your washing machine, children not cleaning their bedrooms. I don’t go to showbiz parties, but I wouldn’t talk about it if I did. If you talk about digging the garden – not everyone’s…

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John Gordon Sinclair: I want people to get “a big old slap in the face” when they read my books
type: item
date: 2017-07-29T07:00:00.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: Books
subject: Going Out
subject: News
description: The Gregory's Girl star and thriller writer shocked reviewers when he wrote Seventy Times Seven, and now he’s tackling difficult content once again with the third book in the series
encoded: Gregory’s Girl is the elephant in the room when I talk to John Gordon Sinclair about his latest thriller, Walk in Silence, published this month by Faber. The former apprentice electrician from Glasgow shot into the limelight at 18 in Bill Forsyth’s charming 1981 romcom, kicking off an ostensibly accidental acting career that embraces film, TV and musicals like She Loves Me and The Producers. But he is ambivalent about acting and the mostly benign parts he’s (type)cast in. When the first of his two daughters was born, Sinclair wanted to stay at home, so he renounced acting for a while and reinvented himself as the tougher-sounding, goatee-wearing ‘JG’ Sinclair, writer of pacy and startlingly brutal thrillers. “I definitely took the gloves off with the first book [in 2012],” says Sinclair, now 55. “I thought, I know what people are expecting, and I want them to get a big old slap in the face.” That book, Seventy Times Seven, about mistaken identity and sectarian politics in Northern Ireland and Tuscaloosa in the 90s, garnered strong and sometimes horrified reviews. Gregory's Girl This month sees the publication of the third in the series, Walk in Silence, which is set in present-day Glasgow, New York and Albania. Its heroine is Keira Lynch. A child in the first book, she is now a drily witty, knife-throwing human rights lawyer with three bullet holes in her chest. And the subject is the sex trafficking of women and children. “Because of what’s happening in Syria and Afghanistan now and what happened in the Balkans in the 90s, there are all these displaced families and children, and in the criminal underworld they are treated like any other commodity,” he says. “They are trafficked around the world, and when there is a glut, they are cheaper. It’s just shocking.” The Albanian criminals who have homed in on this trade, and the police who supposedly hunt them, are both products of the battlefield. “When the civil war in former Yugoslavia started in the 90s, rather than r…

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How did this happen?
type: item
date: 2017-05-16T16:15:00.000Z
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: As the BBC broadcasts a powerful new drama about the Rochdale child sex ring, Andrew Norfolk – the reporter who uncovered the original scandal in Rotherham – reveals the lessons he learnt investigating the men who preyed on teenage girls
encoded: When I first meet Andrew Norfolk outside a Leeds coffee shop he seems an unassuming figure – bespectacled, grey-stubbled, dragging on a cigarette – but he can rightly claim to have changed British society. In January 2011 the investigative reporter, now 52, published an article in The Times exposing the sexual abuse of mostly white girls, typically aged around 12 or 13, by gangs of middle-aged men, mostly of Pakistani origin, in Rotherham. The girls were initially befriended, given free food and alcohol, then repeatedly raped, beaten and coerced into having sex with countless men for money. “I came up from London as The Times’s north-east correspondent in 2003 and over the years became increasingly concerned by what seemed to me to be a pattern of offending that wasn’t being recognised,” says Norfolk. “And every time there was a prosecution of two or three men, for what seemed like very similar offending, it was always treated as a one-off.” His ongoing campaign in The Times uncovered similar cases across the north, the Midlands and eventually as far south as Oxford. It also revealed what seemed to be an almost perfect storm of catastrophic inertia by local councils, police forces and social services, who had failed to act against known gangs for fear of being thought racist, or because they thought the girls – many of whom were from chaotic households or in children’s homes – consented to their abuse. Eventually, Norfolk’s work led to a complete rethink of the way such crimes, and particularly their victims, were treated. Andrew Norfolk One of the first cases to be reopened after his 2011 story involved a gang operating in Rochdale, which the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to proceed against in 2009, ostensibly because of doubts that the young female victim would be believed by a jury. This case is the subject of a three-part BBC1 drama, Three Girls, written by Nicole Taylor (The C Word) and directed by Philippa Lowthorpe (Call the Midwife). It was creat…

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Long Way Round's Charley Boorman: Even if I lost my leg, I would never give up motorcycling
type: item
date: 2017-05-08T09:40:00.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: Books
subject: Documentaries
subject: Going Out
subject: News
subject: TV
description: An accident in Portugal left Charley Boorman fearing his leg would have to be amputated – but now he’s ready to ride again
encoded: I’m amazed when Charley Boorman walks to the door of his west London home. A year ago, the 50-year-old – who started out as a child actor in his father John’s films and gained a second bite at stardom on television as Ewan McGregor’s motorcycling partner in the Long Way adventure travel series – suffered a horrific bike crash. A Mercedes clipped the Triumph he was riding in Portugal. Boorman hit a wall and then bounced along the pavement three times. When he came to rest, as he casually puts it, “my leg was all flippy-floppy, bending in the wrong places and in the wrong direction”. He had shattered his left tibia and fibula and broken his right ankle and wrist. He underwent gruesome treatment in Portugal and then in London, and doctors feared he might lose the leg. View oEmbed on the source website He did lose a lot of work: a planned TV show about a bike trip through the perilous Darien Gap in Central America that had taken a year to plan, and commercial tours with bike fans in Australia and Africa, a lucrative offshoot of his celebrity. Sponsors, including Triumph, kept him afloat, but as well as pain and frustration, he faced crashing boredom. So, being a glass-half-full kind of person, he used the enforced year of recuperation to write a book. Long Way Back is an account of Boorman’s recovery, and also the story of his life, touching on his dyslexia (he takes great pride in having a literary agent), the death of his older sister Telsche from ovarian cancer at the age of 38 in 1997, and his own loss of a testicle to cancer in 2010. It’s also a handy guide to the world of motorcycling, where everyone knows everyone, and they all obsess about cylinders and paint jobs and regard broken bones as part of the ride. The book abounds with bikes trashed and accidents endured, including the time Boorman rode 400km in the Dakar Rally with broken hands. Boorman at last year's Chelsea Flower Show Ewan McGregor rode home with an undiagnosed broken leg after a crash in London, …

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Andrew Marr on life after his stroke: “I don’t do tears. I come from Dundee”
type: item
date: 2017-02-14T08:00:00.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: Current Affairs
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The veteran BBC journalist has made a documentary about his recovery - Andrew Marr: My Brain and Me
encoded: The extent of Andrew Marr’s physical impairment comes as a shock. His limp is pronounced and he “can’t really walk” without the brace attached to his paralysed left ankle. His left arm is flaccid, the fingers barely able to grip. In a new, authored documentary – which shows Marr seeking new treatments after his physical recovery reached a plateau – we see him lurching through hospital wards, dropping things, calling for the camera to be shut off when he can’t accomplish physiotherapy exercises. This is the real-life Marr, the one I meet in the flat he rents to paint pictures in near his north London home, far removed from the poised and posed figure he cuts in his eponymous Sunday politics show, where the only sign of the stroke is the way he sometimes cradles his left arm. “One of the things I said early on was that I didn’t want to become a poster boy for stroke recovery,” says Marr, 57. “I don’t really like talking about these things, or certainly being filmed. I didn’t enjoy watching the film. But when you are in public life, and something bad but very common happens to you – 1.4 million people are surviving strokes at the moment – then you have a kind of obligation to share your experience, particularly if it’s positive, and is going to encourage other people.” With Dr Ed Tobinick in Florida In this context, “positive” is a relative term, but Marr is a glass-half-full person, who wryly responds to director Liz Allen’s attempts to stir him to high emotion with the words: “I don’t do tears. I come from Dundee.” The stroke was almost certainly brought on by overdoing things. Marr’s wife, the political columnist Jackie Ashley, with whom he has three grown-up children, says in the film that four years ago her husband was “a workaholic, but immensely fit”. In the two years up to January 2013 he wrote a book and travelled the world for a documentary, while also hosting The Andrew Marr Show, and Radio 4’s Start the Week. He’d given up running due to ageing knees but wa…

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Safari so good: You don't have to worry about spotting the wildlife in Botswana
type: item
date: 2016-11-25T08:00:00.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: News
subject: Travel
description: As Botswana celebrates 50 years of independence, Nick Curtis travels to Africa's most luxurious game park
encoded: The 50th anniversary of Botswana’s independence is marked by a new film, A United Kingdom. David Oyelowu stars as Sir Seretse Khama, the Oxford-educated king of the Bamangwato tribe who became the country’s first president, and Rosamund Pike plays Ruth Williams, the white Englishwoman he married against the wishes of both his people and the colonial authorities. This remarkable couple laid the foundations for modern Botswana: a largely peaceful, prosperous democracy (though Seretse’s party and descendants still run the place, and there is a major HIV problem) blessed with diamond reserves and the sort of dramatic landscapes and wildlife that facilitate high-cost, low-volume tourism. The film, directed by Amma Assante, opens with Pike’s Ruth flying into Botswana over the country’s unique Okavango Delta, a beautiful flowering web of waterways. Having visited it in the year I too turned 50, I can tell you the Delta is just as striking at ground level. Rosamund Pike and David Oyelowu in A United Kingdom We were staying in two successive resorts run by Sanctuary Retreats: Stanley’s Camp on the Delta, named for the American journalist Henry Stanley who tracked down British explorer David Livingstone, and Chobe Chilwero Lodge, named for the nearby Chobe river, which becomes the Zambezi when it flows through neighbouring Zambia. “Camp” and “Lodge” are too-modest terms, really, for sumptuous complexes amid pristine national parks where almost everything – food, safari drives, “sundowner” drinks in the bush – is laid on, and where the authenticity of the African experience is tempered with levels of service to suit the pickiest American or European. In Stanley’s, we were at least in a tent, albeit one with foundations, plumbing and an adjacent bar/restaurant with a pool. On our first day our guide, Adam, whisked us off on a bush drive, where we were quickly blown away by the wildlife. Herds of incurious impala! The rump of a retreating hippo! Zebra, giraffe and warthog! Monke…

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How different was BBC1's The Night Manager to its original book?
type: item
date: 2016-09-15T11:00:00.000Z
creator: Nick Curtis
subject: Books
subject: Drama
subject: Going Out
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Fact or fiction? Here’s the truth behind John Le Carré’s spymaster stories, taken from his new memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life
encoded: Who would have thought that the BBC’s dramatisation of The Night Manager, the very model of a modern spy story, should have had its genesis almost 70 years ago? In 1947, a 16-year-old schoolboy is sent to Paris by his father to collect a debt from the Panamanian ambassador, Count Mario da Bernaschina. The debt is disputed, the boy is distracted by the count’s exotic female companion, and both his father and the count turn out to be con-men. The boy is David Cornwell, who would later become a spy and later still, under his pen-name John Le Carré, light upon Panama as the ideal playground for The Night Manager’s arms dealer, Richard Roper – and indeed, for the ambiguous protagonist of The Tailor of Panama. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ZcaKdvML8 Le Carré’s new book, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, is a series of sketches and a companion – or counter – to Adam Sisman’s recent biography. Here, the author reveals the people and places that inspired many of his best-known fictions, and his encounters with potent figures from the world of Cold War espionage and the field of entertainment: I’ll leave you to guess which are the more duplicitous. The title refers to the tubes under the lawn of the Monte Carlo Sporting Club, through which birds were flushed to be shot. The image stands as a metaphor not just for the agents that security services send into hostile territories, but for the stories Le Carré sets loose into the world. Some chapters are devoted to the tortuous process by which his books were brought to the screen. Or, more often, not brought to the screen. We all know the successes – the peerless BBC adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, and the estimable 2011 film of Tinker Tailor; 2005’s The Constant Gardener; this year’s double-top of Susanne Bier’s The Night Manager and Susanna White’s film of Our Kind of Traitor; the 1965 screen version of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, on which Le Carré had a troublesome relationship w…

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