Free Thinking - Prisons & Anthropomorphism
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2014
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Sweet interviews Karen Joy Fowler author of a novel which looks at the consequences of introducing a primate into a family and the human fascination with anthropomorphism with animal studies experts Susan McHugh and Giovanni Aloi. From Cape Town the South African man of the theatre Athol Fugard pays tribute to his late friend and fellow activist the author Nadine Gordimer. After today’s Howard League conference on community sentencing Matthew asks David Wilson and Gerard Lemos, commentators on the penal system, whether there is an alternative to prison or if prison is the alternative.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | A former employee of Disney once told me that he'd received a shirty email from a colleague that read, |
| 0:38.1 | Remember, Pluto is a dog, but goofy is a man in a dog suit. |
| 0:42.8 | Tonight, we'll pull the tail and ruffled the fur of anthropomorphism, |
| 0:46.8 | and maybe rattle a few cages on the planet of the apes. |
| 0:49.7 | We'll also deal with the hairy problem at the heart of the latest book by the American |
| 0:53.8 | novelist Karen Joy Fowler, she's here live in the studio at the heart of the latest book by the American novelist Karen |
| 0:54.8 | Joy Fowler. She's here live in the studio. And one of the great beasts of South African literature, |
| 1:00.4 | the playwright Athol Fugard, remembers a fallen comrade. Nadine, when she was alive and a living |
| 1:07.3 | presence in the country, provided a moral compass in terms of the very troubled waters |
| 1:14.0 | we are sailing through at the moment. |
| 1:17.0 | Athol Fugard. Later you'll hear more of his tribute to his friend, the writer, activist, |
| 1:21.8 | a Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, whose death was announced yesterday. |
| 1:26.1 | We begin, though, with a short spell in prison. |
| 1:28.7 | Today, the prison's minister, Jeremy Wright, was promoted to the post of Attorney General. |
| 1:33.6 | And who's replaced him? Well, we rang the Ministry of Justice, and they said that right now |
| 1:37.7 | there is no prisons minister, though one will be appointed in due course. It's not great timing, |
| 1:43.3 | because today the Howard League for Penal Reform |
| 1:46.1 | presented its Community Programmes Awards, the Oscars of Community Sentencing. Community |
| 1:52.1 | Sentences Cut Crime is the name of the conference at which the awards were handed out, which |
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