The Joy of Bureaucracy

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Red tape or accountability? Matthew Sweet is joined by Lord Robin Butler, former head of the home Civil Service, writer and lecturer Eliane Glaser and Professor André Spicer whose recent book looks at meaningless management speak. Deborah McAndrew talks about her stage adaptation of Charles Dickens' Hard Times which examines the results of purely utilitarian education. And journalist Richard Lloyd Parry's new book is an account of the tsunami of 2011 - Japan's biggest loss of life since the bombing of Nagasaki.

Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster is out now Japan Now is at the British Library in London 25 February with events also taking place at Sheffield on Saturday 24th - Programmed by Modern Culture in partnership with the Japan Foundation and Sheffield University, at The Forum in Norwich on Saturday and at the University of Manchester on Monday.

Business Bullshit by André Spicer is available now

Hard Times is at The Viaduct Theatre, Halifax, until 24 February, then The Dukes, Lancaster, from 27 February until 3 March - check the Northern Broadsides website for further dates.

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	Hello, I'm Matthew Sweet.
0:33.5	Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate.
0:42.8	If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe. Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast.
0:48.3	And while you're there, please rate and review us. It'll help other people find us.
0:53.2	This is the BBC.
0:58.6	And now it's 10 o'clock, so here's Free Thinking with Matthew Sweet.
1:02.1	Thank you, Chris. Chris said it was time for free thinking, so I'm going to action that now.
1:07.1	The next 45 minutes will, I think, be a game changer for Radio 3.
1:27.7	We've reached out to some of the leanest ninjas, a most impactful blue-sky thinkers we thought we could deliver. And here they are, in the studio, getting their ducks in a row ready to create value for you. They won't waste time on the low-hanging fruit. They'll cut straight to the chase, so that's all good.
1:32.1	Who are they? Well, I seem to have run out of time to tell you in any detail, but they're here both to attack and defend the language of bureaucracy, the language of management, the stuff
1:37.7	people say in meetings. We'll also talk to the author of Northern Broadside's new stage
1:43.2	adaptation of Dickens' hard times.
1:46.0	First, though, harder times the most of us will ever face.
1:49.6	An earthquake with a magnitude of 8.9 has struck off Japan, triggering a tsunami which has hit the country's northeast coast.
1:57.9	Pictures from Japanese television show buildings, roads, cars and crops being swept away.
2:03.2	Further, huge waves are breaking.
2:05.6	News from the 11th of March 2009, when 120-foot-high tsunami surged in over northeast Japan, killing 18.5,000 people.
2:15.2	A horrifying figure in which it's possible to discern the ghost of a
2:19.5	much bigger number of potential deaths.
	...

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