The Essay

With Scotland and all things Scottish very much in the air, acclaimed writer, comedian and now ex-pat, AL Kennedy, reflects on what Scottishness means to her in this series of The Essay. Today: morality and misery - is dourness necessarily such a bad thing?Written and performed by AL Kennedy Producer: Justine Willett.

With Scotland and all things Scottish very much in the air, acclaimed writer, comedian and now ex-pat, AL Kennedy, reflects on what Scottishness means to her in this new series of The Essay. Today: a good sense of humour.Written and performed by AL Kennedy Producer: Justine Willett.

With Scotland and all things Scottish very much in the air, acclaimed writer, comedian and now ex-pat, AL Kennedy, reflects on what Scottishness means to her in this new series of The Essay. Today: tartan, the kilt and a sense of identity.Written and performed by A L Kennedy Producer: Justine Willett.

Novelist and critic Ian Sansom believes that the idea of the average is one of the key terms and principles of the modern age, encompassing human productivity, relationships, politics and art. So, how did average become a byword for mediocrity?In the final essay of the series, he attempts to locate the most average place in the UK, the heart of Middle England, the spiritual home of Joe and Josephine Public. Producer: Stan Ferguson.

Novelist and critic Ian Sansom goes in search of the 'average' man or woman.

Novelist and critic Ian Sansom believes that the idea of the average is one of the key terms and principles of the modern age, encompassing human productivity, relationships, politics and art. So, how did average become a byword for mediocrity? In the third essay of the series, he explores the changing concept of the average working week in an age of zero hours contracts. Is the idea of an average working week now as redundant and old-fashioned as the idea of the tea-drinking, bowler-hatted man on the Clapham omnibus, with his 2.4 children living comfortably in suburbia, in a nation of cheeky-chappie shopkeepers?Producer: Stan Ferguson.

Novelist and critic Ian Sansom believes that the idea of the average is one of the key terms and principles of the modern age, encompassing human productivity, relationships, politics and art. So, how did average become a byword for mediocrity? In the second essay of the series, he uncovers the unlikely history of the scientific measurement of the dimensions of the average man and woman. We learn that our ever-changing dimensions matter - size matters - for all sorts of obvious reasons, not least because average sizes literally determine the shape of the world we all live in: the height of our tables and chairs, the shape of our clothes, our cars, our phones - and of course our coffins. We all live and die according to the average.Producer: Stan Ferguson.

Novelist and critic Ian Sansom believes that the idea of the average is one of the key terms and principles of the modern age, encompassing human productivity, relationships, politics and art. So, how did average become a byword for mediocrity? 'Average Is Over' proclaims the title of one recent best-selling book about economics. 'Start: Punch Fear In the Face, Escape Average And Do Work That Matters' suggests the title of another. 'Conquering Average'. 'Mastering Average'. 'Overcoming Average'. This has become the mantra of our times. In the opening essay of this series of investigations into the average, Sansom takes a sideways look at the history and meaning of the ordinary and the everyday and discovers what it means to be the opposite of 'awesome'. Producer: Stan Ferguson.

World War One ravaged Tanzania. East Africans were recruited as carriers and fighters, and many more were affected by the destruction of crops by retreating forces. As many as a million died from starvation and sickness as well as from their wounds, yet the war is barely remembered there now. Oswald Masebo, Professor of History at the University of Dar es Salaam, explores the conundrum with an audience at the auditorium of the British Council in Tanzania.

The First World War is a difficult history for Indians to remember. Although over a million soldiers from India served, their contribution was not rewarded with independence for their country and disappointment was met with harsh repression. The writer, diplomat and Indian MP Shashi Tharoor presents his essay at the Indian International Centre in Delhi, in partnership with the British Council. In 'Parting Words' he explores the troubled associations of the war and its aftermath, and explains that India is finally honouring its heroes of World War One.

There are currently wars in two of Jordan's neighbouring countries. The kingdom has a long history of absorbing trouble from its orders and has its origins in the settlement after World War One. Lina Attel is Director General of the King Hussein Foundation, National Centre for Culture and Arts. In this essay, recorded with partners the British Council at the Haya Cultural Centre, Amman, she explains how Jordan's strong cultural identity has sustained it through the turbulent century since the First World War. She says it is a knowledge of the stories of its cultural heroes that will keep the country together as it faces further threats.

David Frum is a Washington-based political advisor and an editor of the Atlantic Magazine. He is also the former Special Advisor and speech writer to President George W Bush, and was working at the White House when America was attacked by terrorists on September 11th 2001. In this essay, recorded with BBC Partners the British Council at the United States Library of Congress, he explains how World War One came to shape US Foreign Policy through the twentieth century and still has a strong effect on how American engages with the world today.

Celebrated playwright and theatre director Wesley Enoch is a proud Noonuccal Nuugi man. During his career he has directed many plays by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Building up to the First World War centenary, Wesley developed the Black Diggers project about the experience of indigenous soldiers in World War One with the playwright Tom Wright. In these special editions of The Essay we gain an international perspective on the war as we hear from cultural figures from around the world taking part in an international series of events called The War That Changed The World, made in partnership with the British Council and the BBC World Service. Wesley Enoch's essay, Stories that Bind, is delivered at the ABC headquarters in Sydney. In it he explores the powerful legend of Anzac in Australia and how that can leave out an important part of the story.Producer, Charlie Taylor.

The poet and translator Sasha Dugdale explores the impact of the First War on the great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. Her focus is on the collection, White Flock, published in 1917, but written during the war. In many poems, Akhmatova mentions the war directly, and in others, echoes of loss and war sound, refracted through peculiarly Russian folk imagery. Sasha focuses on a two-part poem called 'July 1914'. In the first stanza, the turf has been burning for four weeks and the dry summer smells of smoke and fumes. The birds aren't singing and the aspen isn't moving. A one-legged wanderer comes to the house with terrible prophecies and predicts that 'soon there won't be room for all the fresh graves'. In the second part, the juniper's sweet smell rises from the burning wood and the widow's cry sounds. Instead of water and the rain they have prayed for, a warm red wetness floods the trampled fields. Sasha's powerful Essay includes a new translation of the poem and a poignant account of how some of its motifs are now reappearing in contemporary writing about the war in Ukraine.

The long-running series in which scholars, writers and critics explore the impact of the First World War on individual artists through a single work of art. 4.The distinguished art critic, Richard Cork, discusses Pablo Picasso's designs for the Ballets Russes production, Parade, which premiered in Paris in 1917, with music by Erik Satie and a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau. Picasso's sets and costumes for Parade are now considered key works, representative of the tumultuous era in which they were produced. At the onset of war, Picasso had left France and moved to Rome, where the Ballets Russes rehearsed. He soon met the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, and married her in 1918, so these were years of personal change as well as artistic. Although the ballet took time to gain critical response, its originality was recognised by some at the time. Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote the programme notes for Parade, described Picasso's designs as "a kind of surrealism" (une sorte de surréalisme) three years before Surrealism developed as an art movement in Paris, partly as a response to the war. Producer: Beaty Rubens.

Virginia Woolf spent the First World War on the Home front mainly in London. It was an anxious time; she lost several cousins in the conflict, and her brother-in-law Cecil Woolf died at the Front; in 1915 she suffered a mental breakdown.For Woolf the war had changed everything, and her three novels written soon after it - Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) - display a marked shift in style. 'There had to be new forms for our new sensations', she wrote in a 1916 essay, and in 1923 went further: "We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale - the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages - has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present."In 1925, Woolf's brilliant novel Mrs Dalloway would amaze readers with its literary techniques and its counterpointing of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway and war veteran Septimus Warren-Smith. Here was a work of fiction in which the principal characters never meet, where the Victorian staples of plot and family relationships are eclipsed by a new emphasis on what the characters think rather than what they do or say.For Dame Gillian Beer this thronging novel with its cast of war profiteers, war casualties, and passers-by ultimately has a positive message. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf draws the reader and the novel's characters together: "Whether known or unknown to each other, in a shared humanity," she says, "her work draws us all alongside, across time.".

How great artists and thinkers responded to the horrors of the First World War in individual works of art.2.Stand-Up comedian Arthur Smith presents a suitably Dada-esque account of Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto.Arthur Smith has long been fascinated by the Dada movement, which began one hundred years ago in 1915. His interest was re-ignited by a recent visit to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Tzara - a French writer and performance artist of Romanian-Jewish descent - first came to prominence. This visit led him to reflect both on the seriousness of the dadists' project - as a protest against the meaningless horrors of the First World War - and on their use of comedy to express their ideas.Juxtaposing the Dada Manifesto with his thoughts on that most conventional of War poets, Rupert Brooke, Arthur Smith's comic and thought-provoking Essay is a document of which Tristan Tzara himself - had he been a radio broadcaster - would have been proud.Producer: Beaty Rubens.

Further Essays in the major Radio Three series exploring how great artists and thinkers responded to World War One in individual works of art. 1.Rabindranath Tagore: Santanu Das explores the great Indian thinker's Nobel lectures Afer Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, he became one of the most feted literary figure of the war years. He was read at home but also in the trenches, by the likes of Wilfred Owen. With his long white beard, flowing Indian clothes and intense gaze, Tagore came across as some sort of Oriental prophet, speaking for peace at a time of war. In 1916, he gave a series of lectures in Japan and the United States on 'Nationalism'. In them he noted: 'In this frightful war, the West has stood face to face with her own creation'. For him, the War was neither a sudden eruption nor a case of Europe sleepwalking into conflict but, rather, the shattering logical climax of unchecked Western nationalism and imperialism: 'suddenly, with all its mechanism going mad, it has begun the dance of the Furies, shattering its own limbs, scattering them into the dust. It is the fifth act of the tragedy of the unreal.'Santanu Das, Reader in English at King's College, London, tells the story of a largely fogotten writer and thnker. Producer: Beaty Rubens.

To mark the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, a series of essays about Napoleon Bonaparte and his relationship with a a group of writers. In this edition, Kirsteen McCue on singing and interpreting the history behind the 'Ettrick Shepherd' James Hogg's Scottish Napoleonic songs.

To mark the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, a series of essays about Napoleon Bonaparte. When the writer Adam Nicolson was a teenager he lived with his father who was writing about Napoleon and 1812. What was it like?

To mark the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, a series of essays about Napoleon Bonaparte. The writer Andrea Stuart was born and raised in the Caribbean. The subject of her second book Josephine de Beauharnais, the first wife of Napoleon, was born on Martinique to a wealthy white Creole family. In a narrative crossing back and forth between their shared Caribbean origins, Andrea Stuart explores Josephine's journey away from the tropics and the significance of her origins in her relationship with another exile from an island, the world-famous Corsican mountaineer.First broadcast in December 2012.

Julia Blackburn tells an extraordinary tale of sleuthing for the ghost of Napoleon on St Helena, his last island and his final unsought home. The first of five essays as part of BBC Radio 3's 2012 Napoleon Season, marking two hundred years since his historic retreat from Moscow.Julia had long wanted to write about Napoleon's final days. She set off for St Helena and Longwood House - the Emperor's last home prison - and tried to enlist the support of two official parties. She contacted the British Governor of the island and the French Consul who took responsibility for what became a tiny piece of France after the Emperor's death. Neither bothered to reply so Julia was forced to seek answers by exploring other paths back into the life of Napoleon's last days on St Helena. A lonely giant tortoise came to her rescue along with some other human inhabitants of the island - or Saints as they call themselves. Producer: Tim Dee First broadcast 03/12/2012.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923, William Butler Yeats is a commanding presence in 20th-century literature and has inspired, and occasionally infuriated, successive generations of readers, writers, and performers ever since. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth on 13th June 1865, five of Ireland's leading cultural figures reflect on their relationship with his work. The authors include novelist John Banville, actor Fiona Shaw, writer Fintan O'Toole and poet Paul Muldoon.In this edition, Ireland's current Professor of Poetry, Paula Meehan, explores the influence of the magical and the mystical in the work of WB Yeats.Producer: Stan Ferguson.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923, William Butler Yeats is a commanding presence in 20th-century literature and has inspired, and occasionally infuriated, successive generations of readers, writers, and performers ever since. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth on 13th June 1865, five of Ireland's leading cultural figures reflect on their relationship with his work. The authors include actor Fiona Shaw, writer Fintan O'Toole and poets Paul Muldoon and Paula Meehan.In this edition, Booker Prize-winning author John Banville explains his long-held love for Yeats's 1928 collection, 'The Tower'.Producer: Stan Ferguson.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923, William Butler Yeats is a commanding presence in 20th-century literature and has inspired, and occasionally infuriated, successive generations of readers, writers, and performers ever since. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth on 13th June 1865, five of Ireland's leading cultural figures reflect on their relationship with his work. The authors include novelist John Banville, actor Fiona Shaw, writer Fintan O'Toole and poet Paula Meehan.In this edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon explores the connections between Yeats's post-World War One masterpiece 'The Second Coming' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' written a century earlier in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. Producer: Stan Ferguson.

Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth on 13th June 1865, five of Ireland's leading cultural figures reflect on their relationship with the poet, dramatist and prose writer, William Butler Yeats.Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923, Yeats is a commanding presence in 20th-century literature and has inspired, and occasionally infuriated, successive generations of readers, writers, and performers ever since. The series includes Fiona Shaw, John Banville and Paul Muldoon.In this edition, writer and cultural commentator, Fintan O'Toole, explains that you don't always have to like everything about the man himself to appreciate the wonder of the poetry of WB Yeats.Producer: Stan Ferguson.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923, William Butler Yeats is a commanding presence in 20th-century literature and has inspired, and occasionally infuriated, successive generations of readers, writers, and performers ever since. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth on 13th June 1865, five of Ireland's leading cultural figures reflect on their relationship with his work. The authors include novelist, John Banville, writer Fintan O'Toole and poets, Paul Muldoon and Paula Meehan. In this edition, celebrated actor and director Fiona Shaw explains the lasting impact of her childhood introduction to the work of WB Yeats.Producer: Stan Ferguson.

Unthank, Brigadoon, Thrums. Scottish literature is filled with place names that can't be found in a gazeteer or GPS. The literary critic Stuart Kelly explores the imaginary locations that have provided the settings for some of Scotland's greatest novels. He concludes his visit to imaginary Scottish places with a visit to Brigadoon.

Scottish Literature is filled with imaginary places. Today Stuart Kelly explores Alasdair Gray's Unthank, the nightmarish setting for 1981's Lanark.

Brigadoon, Unthank, and today Duncairn. Literary critic Stuart Kelly explores the fictional Scottish cities that never appear on any map.

Brigadoon, Unthank, Thrums. There are places in Scottish literature which are missing from gazetteers or GPS. Literary critic Stuart Kelly explores the imaginary places where Scotland's finest writing is set. Today he travels to JM Barrie's imaginary "Thrums.".

Unthank, Brigadoon, Thrums. Scottish literature is filled with place names that can't be found in a gazeteer or GPS. The literary critic Stuart Kelly explores the imaginary locations that have provided the settings for some of Scotland's greatest novels. Today, the novelist John Galt, little known outside Scotland, whose books provide some of the wittiest portraits of 19th-century Scottish life.

In this series of The Essay, recorded in front of an audience at the Hay festival earlier this week, five writers take George Orwell's essay title Why I Write as a starting point for their own explorations. The writers include the screenwriter, novelist and author of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, Frank Cottrell Boyce; the editor and translator Daniel Hahn; Horatio Clare, whose first book was set on the hillsides where he grew up around Hay itself; and the Welsh poet laureate, Gillian Clarke. Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes CD Review, Lunchtime Concert, In Tune, Free Thinking, The Verb and World on 3 all broadcasting from the festival.

In this series of The Essay, recorded in front of an audience at the Hay Festival earlier this week, five writers take George Orwell's title Why I Write as a starting point for their own explorations. The writers include the screenwriter, novelist and author of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, Frank Cottrell Boyce; the editor and translator Daniel Hahn; Horatio Clare, whose first book was set on the hillsides where he grew up around Hay itself; and the Welsh poet laureate, Gillian Clarke.Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes CD Review, Lunchtime Concert, In Tune, Free Thinking, The Verb and World on 3 all broadcasting from the festival.

In this series of The Essay, recorded in front of an audience at the Hay festival earlier this week, five writers take George Orwell's title Why I Write as a starting point for their own explorations. The writers include the screenwriter, novelist and author of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, Frank Cottrell Boyce; the editor and translator Daniel Hahn; Horatio Clare, whose first book was set on the hillsides where he grew up around Hay itself; and the Welsh poet laureate, Gillian Clarke.Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes CD Review, Lunchtime Concert, In Tune, Free Thinking, The Verb and World on 3 all broadcasting from the festival.

Literary journalist and writer Alex Clark has written many of our leading publications, and is a former Booker and Granta judge. She comes to Hay to ask 'Why I Write'.In this series of The Essay, recorded in front of an audience at the Hay Festival earlier this week, five writers take George Orwell's title Why I Write as a starting point for their own explorations. The writers include the screenwriter, novelist and author of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, Frank Cottrell-Boyce; the editor and translator Daniel Hahn; Horatio Clare, whose first book was set on the hillsides where he grew up around Hay itself; and the Welsh poet laureate, Gillian Clarke.Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes CD Review, Lunchtime Concert, In Tune, Free Thinking, The Verb and World on 3 all broadcasting from the festival.

In this series of The Essay, recorded in front of an audience at the Hay festival earlier this week, five writers take George Orwell's title Why I Write as a starting point for their own explorations. The writers include the screenwriter, novelist and author of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, Frank Cottrell Boyce; the editor and translator Daniel Hahn; Horatio Clare, whose first book was set on the hillsides where he grew up around Hay itself; and the Welsh poet laureate, Gillian Clarke.Part of Radio 3's week-long residency at the Hay Festival, with programmes CD Review, Lunchtime Concert, In Tune, Free Thinking, The Verb and World on 3 all broadcasting from the festival.

Welles's career is littered with lost and half-finished projects. Film critic, David Thomson explores the man's complicated relationship with failure.Five essays by five enthusiasts that follow the rise and fall of controversial Renaissance man, Orson Welles. Produced by Gemma Jenkins.

Five essays by five enthusiasts that follow the rise and fall of controversial Renaissance man, Orson Welles. Gatsby expert, Sarah Churchwell on Welles's talent for self-mythologizing and how he compares with fiction's great dissembler, Jay Gatsby.Produced by Gemma Jenkins.

Five essays by five enthusiasts that follow the rise and fall of controversial Renaissance man, Orson Welles. Film critic Peter Bradshaw shares his own Rosebud theory in his personal take on Citizen Kane.Produced by Gemma Jenkins.

Filmmaker, Kevin Jackson, crowns Welles the Prospero of the silver screen as he appraises Welles's Shakespeare trilogy.Five essays by five enthusiasts that follow the rise and fall of controversial Renaissance man, Orson Welles. Produced by Gemma Jenkins.

Five essays by five enthusiasts that follow the rise and fall of Orson Welles, the controversial Renaissance man who was an actor, film director, radio producer and theatre impresario. Essayists include film critics Peter Bradshaw and David Thomson and Sarah Churchwell. Simon Callow, Welles's biographer, tracks the transformation from schoolboy to prodigy and unpicks what really happened during the six months Welles spent at Dublin's Gate Theatre.Produced by Gemma Jenkins.

The novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores the literary, philosophical and cultural history of the table. From dining to designing, drinking and disagreeing; the table is central to our lives; "the departure point and launching pad for a thousand hare-brained schemes and ideas, a drawing board, a battlefield, and also the philosopher's favourite tool". Ian has raised a family round his kitchen table, but his true table as a writer is a solitary one. Bertrand Russell used the table as a symbol to explore the uncertain nature of observed reality; Wordsworth urged readers to rise up from their wooden desk, while Karl Marx used tables to explore the notion of commodities in Das Kapital, but is the table Ian built for O-level woodwork the truest thing he has ever made?'.

In the final programme celebrating comic actors from mid-20th century British film, Simon Heffer turns his gaze on a man whose priapic laugh alone merits an entire radio series. Sid James was at the heart of the phenomenally successful Carry On films and one of the best-loved and most easily recognised comic actors of his day. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, the many roles he played were all, in essence, the same. As Simon Heffer puts it: "To say Sid had range as an actor would be to do him an injustice. Sid not have range. Sid was Sid. And it was as well he was, because the audience expected Sid in the full pomp of his Sidness, and would have been crushed with disappointment by anything else."But Sid was not, by birth, the wise-cracking Cockney geezer whom he came to embody. He traced his roots back to Johannesburg, where he started life as Solomon Joel Cohen and began his working life as a gentlemen's hairdresser. Simon Heffer traces his journey from a few years in rep to bit-parts in British comic films, his years of triumph in the Carry On films and his dramatic and unpredictable death on stage in 1976 - a somehow fitting end to a series on comic actors in their lives and on film. Producer: Beaty Rubens.

A further chance to hear the columnist and historian Simon Heffer with his 2015 Essays on much-loved comic actors of mid-20th century British film.4 of 5: Tony Hancock.Tragedy and comedy have often shared the billing in Simon Heffer's series on British comic actors in mid-20th century film, but never more so than in the case of Tony Hancock.Hancock is warmy recalled for his embodiment on radio and television of a self-deluded failure, a man whose life has been an odyssey of constant frustration. His role in film was less succesful and Simon Heffer examines the reasons why.After critics noted the contributions of both his gifted screenwriters, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and of his main sidekick, Sid James, Hancock refused to work with them. Then he fired his agent.Simon Heffer considers the strengths but also the weaknesses of his two largely forgotten films - The Rebel and The Punch and Judy Man - and the sad demise of a brilliant performer whose influences are still apparent today. Producer : Beaty Rubens.

The columnist and historian Simon Heffer resumes his series of Essays celebrating mid-20th century British film with a new focus on five popular comic actors.In exploring five British comic film actors from the mid-20th century, Simon Heffer's gaze has never strayed far from the British obsession with class. The double-barrelled, single-named actor Terry-Thomas - with his monocle, his cigarette holder and the hallmark gap between his two front teeth - perfected the role of a particular type of British toff. Taking star billing in a series of films such as Private's Progress, I'm All Right, Jack, and Carlton-Browne of the FO in the mid-1950s, his timing was perfect too. Simon Heffer argues that whether playing a cad, a rotten bounder or a charmer, Terry-Thomas came to represent the louche and degenerate side of the upper classes at a time when the class system was coming under full attack. With his trademark mix of celebration and historical analysis, Simon Heffer sheds fresh light on a series of once hugely popular but now often forgotten or overlooked performances. Producer : Beaty Rubens.

Resuming his celebration of mid-20th century British film, the columnist and historian Simon Heffer turns his gaze on five hugely popular comic actors. Alastair Sim is perhaps best remembered for a definitive interpretation of Scrooge, but Simon Heffer also recalls the run of classic comedies in which he perfected his role as a slightly ambivalent, often incompetent and occasionally threatening presence: The Happiest Days of Your Life, Laughter in Paradise, Captain Boycott and An Inspector Calls.He concludes by revealing the little-known story of how Sim came to play the main role - or, rather, roles - in a film which has become a landmark of British cinema - The Belles of St Trinian's. The inestimable Margaret Rutherford had been marked down to play the headmistress, Miss Fritton, but when Rutherford turned out to be unavailable, Alastair Sim offered to take on both his male part and the role of Miss Fritton, granting him the glorious lines: "In other schools, girls are sent out quite unprepared into a merciless world, but when our girls leave here, it is the merciless world that has to be prepared."Producer : Beaty Rubens.

A further chance to hear the columnist and historian Simon Heffer's Essays celebrating comic film actors of early British film. 1. Will Hay, by popular consent the greatest comic actor in films of the 1930s and '40s. With films such as Oh! Mr Porter, Boys Will Be Boys and The Goose Steps Out, Will Hay was, by popular consent, the greatest comic actor in films of the 1930s and '40s. Simon Heffer traces the rise to fame of this music hall star, who became best known for his anti-authoritarian roles, whether playing a policeman, a fireman, a stationmaster, a barrister, a professor, or - perhaps most famously - an incompetent and morally dubious schoolmaster. Producer : Beaty Rubens.

Poet and author Andrew Motion considers the penultimate lines of the Lord's Prayer, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil".Five brilliant voices essay on different sections of the Lord's Prayer for our time. Author Ali Smith, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies Mona Siddiqui, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch and poet and author Andrew Motion examine each thought with a modern day searchlight, bringing theological knowledge, personal memory, poetic insight and imagination to an understanding of this prayer, murmured by millions every day. In all it's not even sixty words long and, as it appears in the Gospel according to Matthew, it's introduced by Jesus as a 'how to pray' guide: 'This then, is how you should pray". Today it's bound with the need to express our longing for a better world and something we all share, but what do these short lines mean and how do they help?Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.Producer, Kate Bland.

Michigan-based poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch considers the lines of the Lord's Prayer "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us".Five brilliant voices essay on different sections of the Lord's Prayer for our time. Author Ali Smith, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies Mona Siddiqui, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch and poet and author Andrew Motion examine each thought with a modern day searchlight, bringing theological knowledge, personal memory, poetic insight and imagination to an understanding of this prayer, murmured by millions every day. In all it's not even sixty words long and, as it appears in the Gospel according to Matthew, it's introduced by Jesus as a 'how to pray' guide: 'This then, is how you should pray". Today it's bound with the need to express our longing for a better world and something we all share, but what do these short lines mean and how do they help?Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.Producer, Kate Bland.