Dec 24, 2011
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2011
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A dead man's suitcase in Cape Town transports Tim Butcher from today's Africa via World War Two Italy to Renaissance Tuscany. The most cosseted pets in the world: it's no dog's life, says Joanna Robertson, for the pampered pooches of Paris. High in the Himalayas Joanna Jolly goes searching for a little yellow idol which once wreaked terrible vengeance. Allan Little shares some of the jokes which have fuelled the big news stories in years gone by and Petroc Trelawny on the extraordinary history of Odessa and its enduring passion for music.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is the from our own correspondent office at Bush House. |
| 0:03.2 | We have a daily edition on the BBC World Service, |
| 0:06.2 | but this is a download of the program broadcast on BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:10.3 | It's presented by Kate Adi. |
| 0:12.3 | Today, in deference to the season of goodwill to all men and women, |
| 0:16.0 | we take a look at parts of the news agenda which might otherwise go unreported. |
| 0:21.0 | The jokes that correspondence don't get to tell, a shiver of excitement during a night |
| 0:26.5 | at the opera in Odessa, a search for a vengeful idle in the foothills of the Himalayas and a tale of art, bravery and love in the hills of Tuscany. |
| 0:37.0 | It's been an extraordinary year for news, 12 months in which in many places in North Africa and the Middle East, the old order has |
| 0:45.8 | been overthrown. |
| 0:47.6 | The change came about through people power by sheer numbers turning out to make their views |
| 0:52.2 | known, or as a result of a long and |
| 0:54.7 | bloody struggle. It has of course presented our correspondence with a variety of |
| 0:59.3 | challenges, but it's a year they'll never forget. Alan Little says that if there's one frustration in covering the big news events, |
| 1:07.0 | it's that reporters sometimes can't pass on the most telling lines they hear, |
| 1:12.0 | those which come in the form of a joke. |
| 1:14.9 | We were taking a break from the tumult of the Arab Spring in a small Gulf state. |
| 1:19.2 | We were at lunch. |
| 1:20.2 | Oh good, a colleague said, there's an item on this menu that will enable me to illustrate one of my favorite phenomena |
| 1:26.7 | the untranslatable joke I collect he said jokes that can't be translated from English into any other language. |
| 1:34.9 | The waiter approached. |
| 1:36.5 | Tell me, my colleague said, what is Casulet? |
... |
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