Stanley Spencer, Domestic Servants, Surrogacy
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2019
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Author Nicola Upson has imagined the life of Stanley Spencer from the viewpoint of his maidservant. Ella Parry-Davies researches the lives of women from the Philippines who work as domestic and care workers. The novel The Farm by Joanne Ramos imagines a surrogacy service provided by Filippina women for wealthy American clients. Gulzaar Barn researches the ethics of surrogacy. Naomi Paxton presents.
Nicola Upson has turned from novels featuring Josephine Tey as a detective to write a potrait of the British artist Stanley Spencer, his relationships with his wives Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece and her partner Dorothy Hepworth in her novel called Stanley and Elsie. Joanne Ramos was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was six. The Farm, her first novel, imagines the lives of Hosts at a surrogacy service. New Generation Thinker Gulzaar Barn is at King's College London working on the ethics of surrogacy. You can hear her Free Thinking Festival Essay https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003t1w New Generation Thinker Ella Parry-Davies has just returned from a research trip in Lebanon.
Hear more from the 2019 New Generation Thinkers in this broadcast from the Free Thinking Festival https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p036y2hb/members/all
Producer: Robyn Read
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. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:36.8 | Hello. |
| 0:41.5 | A new novel imagines a luxury surrogacy clinic or farm. |
| 0:44.8 | We'll be looking at the questions that raises for the would-be parents and the women working as surrogates, |
| 0:46.9 | with Filipino-American novelist Joanne Ramos and new generation thinker Gulzar Barn. |
| 0:52.0 | But first, a new take on the life of this British artist. |
| 0:56.2 | I began with this wish to realize something of this sort of happiness that I felt, |
| 1:05.7 | to join in, to have my say in this wonderful world that I was in. |
| 1:11.6 | So I read in stories and I try to conjure up some image, some idea in my mind, |
| 1:22.6 | and do a sort of drawing about it, an illustration. But those illustrations, when I did them, |
| 1:30.3 | they didn't seem to me to contain this kind of magic in a way, |
| 1:35.3 | but they also seemed, if they had contained magic of some kind, |
| 1:40.3 | it was a bit unreal. |
| 1:42.3 | I didn't like the unreal feeling. And I felt somehow that nothing of this |
| 1:47.7 | wonderful surroundings of my life were coming into it. That was Stanley Spencer, speaking in |
| 1:52.3 | 1952. Famous for the pictures set in his home village of Cookham and for his work depicting |
| 1:57.7 | his experiences of both world wars, a new novel imagines his life seen from the viewpoint of his maid servant. |
| 2:04.6 | Stanley and Elsie is written by Nicola Upsen, |
| 2:07.5 | who's had success with a series of detective novels |
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