Night Waves - Doctor Who at 50
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2013
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
50 years of Dr Who is celebrated this weekend by the BBC. Matthew Sweet discusses the TV series with historian Dominic Sandbrook, philosopher Ray Monk and New Generation Thinker and cultural historian Fern Riddell. A Free Thinking career interview with artist William Tillyer, whose work is being celebrated in a retrospective at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art MIMA. Dr Adam Smith reflects on the political philosophy underlying the rhetoric of the Gettysburg address, given by Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago.
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. |
| 0:32.1 | This is a download from the BBC. |
| 0:34.0 | For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three. |
| 0:41.1 | Hello and welcome to Nightwaves, where a series of images is forming on my time space visualiser. |
| 0:47.3 | There's Abraham Lincoln, giving the Gettysburg Address exactly 150 years ago today. |
| 0:53.3 | There's the artist, William Tillier, describing a lifetime of painting. |
| 0:58.2 | What's this? Paris, 1979, an art gallery on the left bank. |
| 1:03.4 | Two critics at a private view enthusing about one of the pieces, |
| 1:07.8 | a large blue object with a lamp on top. |
| 1:10.9 | For me, one of the most curious things about this piece is its wonderful effunctionalism. |
| 1:17.5 | Yes, and I see what you mean. |
| 1:19.5 | Divorced from its function, I've seen purely as a piece of art, |
| 1:24.0 | its structure of line and colour, it's curiously counterpointed by the redundant vestiges of its function. |
| 1:29.3 | And since it has no call to be here, the art lies in the fact that it is here. |
| 1:33.3 | Exquisite. Absolutely exquisite. |
| 1:50.0 | Eleanor Bron and John Cleese, as two critics discussing the conceptual resonances of the Tardis |
| 1:56.0 | in a 1979 Doctor Who story, City of Death. |
| 1:59.7 | We have an appointment with the Doctor now. This weekend, |
| 2:02.5 | he celebrates 50 years of travel in time and space. And we want to mark that by exploring |
| 2:08.1 | some of the big, chunky ideas that he's encountered on the way. The Doctor has visited planets |
... |
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