Andrew Malkinson Guest Edits Today
Best of Today
BBC
4.0 • 837 Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2023
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Andrew Malkinson is Today's latest Christmas guest editor. He spent 17 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit before being cleared in July.
He uses his programme to look at justice and how one can cope with being locked up unjustly. He speaks to John McCarthy, who was held hostage for more than five years in the 1980s.
While in prison, the world of astronomy and space offered Andrew a sense of release and sanctuary from the immediate confines of his daily experience and a way to expand his world. So as part of his guest edit, he visits Jodrell Bank observatory.
And he tells Today's Justin Webb about the months since his conviction was overturned and how he still feels anger.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Hello and welcome to the best of today with me, Justin Webb. |
| 0:08.4 | Our guest editor for this edition was Andrew Malkinson. |
| 0:12.8 | He is the person who spent 17 years in prison for a rape that he did not commit. |
| 0:20.4 | He came and did a very emotional interview on the |
| 0:23.3 | Today program in which he called for various things to change, some of which are changing, |
| 0:28.5 | but he also talked more widely about his life and about what he hopes to happen now to him. We |
| 0:35.6 | gave him the opportunity to talk in this guest-edited program about a |
| 0:40.6 | wide range of things, including the things that he is interested in. And there are a lot of them, |
| 0:46.5 | because when he was in prison, he studied for an open university science degree. He focused |
| 0:50.9 | mostly on maths, but he found he was denied access to some of the resources |
| 0:55.9 | he needed for that course because of various blocks in the system. So, for this program, |
| 1:01.3 | for the first of his contributions, we tracked down his Open University tutor, who he had never met. |
| 1:08.1 | His name is Dr David Giddings. This is some of the conversation they had when we introduced them. |
| 1:13.6 | Hello, pleasure to meet you. |
| 1:15.1 | And you? |
| 1:15.8 | I rarely see an OU student face to face. |
| 1:18.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:18.6 | I always imagined what you looked like. |
| 1:22.0 | Yeah, I'd just like to a quick conversation about what the OU meant to me. |
| 1:26.1 | And the course that I did particularly, |
| 1:28.3 | the mathematics and the physics, was a real lifesaver. It gave me direction and structure while I was |
... |
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