Free Thinking - Sound Frontiers: Success debated by Peter Frankopan, Edith Hall, Kwame Kwei-Armah
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Historian Peter Frankopan and Classicist, Edith Hall, join the author and drama practitioner Kwame Kwei-Armah in a Free Thinking session, chaired by Anne McElvoy, on the concept of success. Success was scrutinised in a documentary on the Third Programme in 1967. Personal or public - how do we imagine success in the contemporary world? Have our hopes for a successful society grown or diminished, is a sense of personal integrity as strong as it was? Archives from the Third Programme include a transcript from 5 June 1967 of a programme produced by Douglas Cleverdon in which Philip Toynbee, Sir Michael Redgrave, Malcolm Muggeridge and John Berger talk to host Philip O'Connor about the nature of success. Have our definitions changed at all?
Peter Frankopan from Worcester College, Oxford is the author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Edith Hall's latest book is called Introducing The Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind Kwame Kwei-Armah, author, actor and Artistic Director of CENTERSTAGE Baltimore directs One Night in Miami by Kemp Power at London's Donmar Warehouse October 6th - December 3rd 2016
Producer: Jacqueline Smith.
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 |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. Welcome to the |
| 0:33.0 | arts and ideas download from the free thinking team at the BBC. Hello if, as Woody Allen once said, 80% of success is simply showing up, |
| 0:42.6 | then my three guests can all give themselves a pat on the back. |
| 0:45.9 | Here in the BBC transparency glass box that is tonight's studio |
| 0:50.1 | to a musical accompaniment of gentle public hubbub and canteen crockery, we have Peter |
| 0:55.5 | Francapan, best-selling historian and businessman, Edith Hall, a well-garlanded classicist, |
| 1:01.6 | and Kwame Kwe-Amer, playwright, actor and artistic director of Centre Stage in Baltimore in the |
| 1:08.0 | United States, all to give us their best shot at a successful free thinking, |
| 1:12.5 | as we lie. Now I can reveal that one thing we all have in common is that we're all slightly |
| 1:17.8 | passed halfway through our allotted three score years and ten with the benefit of accumulated |
| 1:23.6 | wisdom and experience. So guests, can you reflect briefly, please, on your youthful ambition |
| 1:30.1 | and the extent to which it's still intact or something you chose to leave behind, Peter? |
| 1:35.6 | I think I had two dreams when I was a boy. One was to play football for England, and I suppose |
| 1:41.6 | this week there's a reasonable chance that might still happen given the chaos of the |
| 1:45.2 | football team so my dream is still burning and the other one was to be in the 19th century Russia |
| 1:50.3 | which I'm pretty sure is not going to happen right so England we have Peter's number if anyone |
| 1:55.8 | needs to know it Kwame what about you I think my I think my ambition when I was a boy was to be Lionel Richie. |
| 2:02.7 | I think I've left that one behind. |
| 2:07.0 | You're going to tell us in a minute what might have replaced it. |
| 2:09.4 | Edith, what about you? |
... |
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