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The Food Programme

Wassail! Wassail! A celebration of cider, orchards and song

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4943 Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dan Saladino goes in search of the history, meaning and spirit of wassails and cider. In Somerset he takes part in a village wassail sung door to door and one sung in an orchard.

Contributors: The Drayton village wassailers. Gerard Tucker, wassail master of ceremonies. Nell Leyshon (novelist and dramatist, play: Folk). James Crowden, author, Cider Country: How an Ancient Craft Became a Way of Life.

Music: Drayton Wassail (as documented by Cecil Sharp in 1903) Tam Lin, Fairport Convention (1968) Bruton Town, Pentangle (1968)

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

0:03.8

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

0:08.6

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

0:15.3

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

0:19.8

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

0:23.7

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

0:28.4

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

0:30.2

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

0:36.1

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

0:39.7

BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

0:44.5

Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio Falls, the food program.

0:49.2

I'm Dan Saladino.

0:50.6

Welcome to our world.

0:52.4

From cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy

0:56.8

this edition. Delve into the BBC's archive and what is now a century of sound and you can feel like a time

1:06.1

traveler. Here through the hiss of old recordings you encounter voices from the

1:12.1

past who at a click of a button suddenly come alive.

1:17.0

Far the years ago when I was a, well, snotty kid about size at table. I've naughty... This conversation led me to a place and a story of food and drink, one I'm about to share with you.

1:31.0

It was captured in Somerset more than 80 years ago between a

1:35.5

collector of folk songs, Maud Carples and a singer named Sydney Richards.

1:42.0

The song... named Sydney Richards. This song was laid down for years and years.

1:47.0

And in this village, this is the one, but in some villages there's different words to it and yet there's the same meaning

...

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