A new short story by Ali Smith, read by Olivia Williams
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a festive special episode, the actor Olivia Williams reads 'I Heard it on Classic FN', a new short story by Ali Smith, author of the novels How To Be Both, Autumn and Winter. The story was commissioned by FT Weekend; you can read it at ft.com/books. Everything Else returns in January.
"Maybe because they could hear the Beach Boys greatest hits playlist. We were playing it because Bel had insisted. It's not winter. It's summer.
It was winter, obviously. But all through Christmas she'd been playing the new game she'd invented, which she called Classic FN. (The F and the N stood for the words fake and news.) You played this game simply by claiming that something that was true wasn't true. You said the false thing as if it was true, then you added the words I heard it on Classic FN, or just said Classic FN at the end of whatever your statement was, like that fashion that people had of adding the word not after something they'd said. I'm so looking forward to spending all of Christmas with you. Not."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to everything else, the FT's Culture Podcast. |
| 0:09.2 | I'm Griselda and my co-host Al is away at the moment. |
| 0:13.8 | This is a special extra episode, a short story by Ali Smith called I heard it on Classic |
| 0:19.8 | FN. It was commissioned by Weekend FD for the festive season and it's by Ali Smith called I heard it on Classic FM. |
| 0:24.3 | It was commissioned by Weekend FD for the festive season and it's read here for everything else by the actor Olivia Williams. |
| 0:28.7 | Normal service of our weekly podcast will resume in January. |
| 0:32.0 | Until then, happy New Year. |
| 0:42.4 | It was between Christmas and New Year, and we were in the car between home and the recycling centre. We'd been in the queue now for more than two hours. In this time, we'd moved |
| 0:49.2 | about a mile and a half. The queue on the other side of the road, going in the opposite direction, |
| 0:54.0 | was moving |
| 0:54.4 | at roughly the same rate. If we'd wanted, we could have opened our car windows and got to know |
| 1:00.4 | the people in the cars next to ours quite well in a brief encounter sort of way, given it was |
| 1:04.7 | pretty much touching distance through the panes of car glass. But nobody even looked at each other. |
| 1:12.6 | Though we were right next to each other, we all sat looking stonily ahead. No, that's not strictly true. Occasionally someone in a car |
| 1:18.8 | next to ours gave us a look like we were really outlandish and weird, or like they found |
| 1:24.0 | something about us distasteful. This made being next to them uncomfortable. |
| 1:30.0 | Maybe it was because the back of the car was packed full of bags and boxed up stuff |
| 1:34.0 | and perhaps this made us look suspect. |
| 1:36.7 | Though I can't think why. |
| 1:38.6 | Maybe because they could hear the Beach Boys' greatest hits playlist. |
| 1:43.6 | We were playing it because Bell had insisted. It's not |
| 1:47.4 | winter. It's summer. It was winter, obviously. But all through Christmas, she'd been playing the |
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