Free Thinking: Sound Frontiers: People Power
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Bew, Kwasi Kwarteng, Helen Lewis and Alison Light join Philip Dodd live in Radio 3's pop-up studio at London's Southbank Centre. In the week of the Labour party conference, when Radio 3 marks the founding of the Third Programme, which sought to disseminate the arts, by broadcasting from a building constructed as part of a people's festival, this edition of Free Thinking looks at people power, changing politics and cultural tastes and Bertold Brecht's satirical idea that we might need to elect a new people.
John Bew from King's College, London, is author of a new biography of Clement Attlee: 'Citizen Clem'.
Alison Light is the author of Common People: The History of an English Family
Kwasi Kwarteng, Conservative MP for Spelthorne, is the author of books including Ghosts of Empire and Thatcher's Trial.
Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman.
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, 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 is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Welcome to the arts and ideas download from the free-thinking team at the BBC. |
| 0:37.4 | Hello. From Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the recent Brex, ideas download from the free-thinking team at the BBC. |
| 0:42.4 | Hello. From Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address to the recent Brexit referendum, |
| 0:48.3 | faith in the idea of the people has been sacrosanct. Historians called last century, |
| 0:56.4 | the People's Century, World War II, the People's Wall. The People's Museum is in Manchester, the People's Palace in Glasgow, |
| 1:03.7 | and a People's Restaurant was even opened at London's Royal Festival Hall from where Freethinking Broadcast this evening to help mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the third programme. |
| 1:08.8 | Culturally, the people triumphed too in a complex way. |
| 1:11.6 | In 46, Clement Attlee's education secretary may have imagined a third program nation |
| 1:17.6 | or listening to classical music and dons, but that wasn't what happened. |
| 1:22.6 | The people's taste was other popular culture has triumphed as as cultural studies in universities. |
| 1:29.0 | So with populist politicians on the rise, Donald Trump has been called the People's |
| 1:34.6 | billionaire, with a new, noisy and raucous people emerging online and on the 70th anniversary |
| 1:41.4 | of the founding of the third programme, what but a moment to ask if the idea of the people |
| 1:46.0 | is all it's cracked up to be. |
| 1:49.0 | Power to the people! |
| 1:51.0 | At this great victory of the people, |
| 1:55.0 | we have to turn to work to win the peace as we've won the war. |
| 2:01.6 | Power to the people. |
| 2:04.6 | To the people of South Africa and the world, this is indeed a joyous night for the human spirit, |
... |
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