Month: June 2017

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Start the Week - Power: Fleet Street and Whitehall

On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe talks to the former Conservative MP and last Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. In a candid memoir Patten looks back at his political life. He lost his seat in the 1992 election, despite the Sun newspaper claiming the Tory landslide with the headline, "It's The Sun Wot Won It". James Graham's new play goes back to the birth of this ruthless 'red top' tabloid, when a young and rebellious Rupert Murdoch burst on to Fleet Street, to launch a newspaper devoted to giving the people what they want. Fleet Street is no more and following this month's general election some critics have questioned the continuing influence of the mainstream media. Kerry-Anne Mendoza is the Editor-in-chief of the left-wing political blog, The Canary, and believes new forms of media online are disrupting the status quo in the UK. Baroness Tessa Blackstone was regarded as a kaftaned radical in the 1970s by the Whitehall establishment when she was part of a review of Central Policy which challenged the very workings of Britain's powerful diplomatic corps. Producer: Katy Hickman

Image: The Sun daily newspaper on June 14, 2016, with a headline urging readers to vote 'Leave' in the June 23 EU referendum. Credit: DANIEL SORABJI /AFP/ Getty Images.

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Barbed Wire

In 1876 John Warne Gates described the new product he hoped to sell as “lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust”. We simply call it barbed wire. The advertisements of the time touted it this fence as “The Greatest Discovery Of The Age”. That might seem hyperbolic, even making allowances for the fact that the advertisers didn’t know that Alexander Graham Bell was just about to be awarded a patent for the telephone. But – as Tim Harford explains – while modern minds naturally think of the telephone as transformative, barbed wire wreaked huge changes in America, and much more quickly. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Barbed wire and sun, Credit: Getty Images)
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The Gist - Do Radicals Change the World?

Author Jeremy McCarter (co-writer of Hamilton: The Revolution with Lin-Manuel Miranda) has written a new book tracing five American radicals from the 1910s and ’20s. “I had thought this was going to be a book about a chapter of progress in history we could learn from,” says McCarter. “But 1917 is a lot closer to what I thought I would see in my lifetime.” Young Radicals is available now.  

In the Spiel, a lot of people really, really did not like Otto Warmbier. 

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