7 August 2007
Welcome to After Our Time!
Posted by Adrian under About The Show, Meta
When I first began listening to In Our Time two years ago, the only times I’d ever tuned in to Radio 4 were by accident. In fact, I didn’t even own a radio, so when someone recommended the programme to me, I had to subscribe to the podcast. This suited me fine; at the time, I was travelling back and forth from London to Oxford every week, so this meant I’d have something to listen to on the coach.
I’d watched and listened to interdisciplinary programmes before, and I hadn’t liked them. Most producers had an aversion to letting people talk continuously for more than one minute (at most!), and if the programme was on TV, a good chunk of time would be spent on pretty but uninformative visuals. Panel discussions were more like confrontations, and often treated more as entertainment rather than anything else. I was skeptical that, when it came to learning about a new subject, it was possible for anything to beat reading a book.
In Our Time genuinely surprised me. The very simple idea of bringing in three guests to talk about a single subject for 40 minutes in a live recorded programme seems rife with danger. How do you keep the guests on topics? How do you make sure you cover everything in time? What if a guest turns out to be a lemon? And yet In Our Time managed, fairly consistently, to provide excellent introductions into subjects as varied as Merlin, Human Evolution and the History of Hell. I quickly became addicted to the show and would happily relate anecdotes and facts I’d heard to friends.
Over the past two years, I’ve concluded that there are three main reasons why In Our Time works so well. Firstly, the production team clearly works very hard to research each subject every week and work out the time course of each show; which areas to cover, which to avoid, and which guest is appropriate for each. The guests, of course, provide the meat of each edition, and it’s their expertise that makes them so informative and interesting. You would think that the notion of getting experts to explain their subjects in their own words wouldn’t be strange, but In Our Time is one of the few shows that lets them.
Finally, there’s Melvyn Bragg, the host of In Our Time. It’s safe to say that without Melvyn, the show would be very different, and probably the worse for it. Without his badgering and questions, programmes would rapidly spiral out of control or become bogged down in minutiae. Yes, he sometimes misunderstands what’s going on and gets strangely irritated when guests disagree with his notes, but equally, he manages to coax the best out of the guests who appear - even the incredibly shy ones.
Putting these three elements together - a thorough production team, expert guests and an experienced host - and you get an operation that is able to take on any subject and come out with a programme that’s both accessible and detailed, that explores fascinating digressions and opposing views, and do this every single week. For this reason, when In Our Time became one of the BBC’s first shows to be podcast, it rapidly became one of the most popular in the world.
It’s not perfect. Sometimes there are weeks that fall flat, where guests have a hard time explaining the subject, or where it doesn’t seem like there’s enough to talk about - or where there’s too much to cover. But I’ve felt that each week is always worth of comment. When I found my own personal weblog being taken over by thoughts and quotations from In Our Time, I decided to set up this website.
After Our Time has three parts. The first is the weblog, which you are reading now; this will cover each edition of In Our Time every week with links, commentary and eventually interviews. If you’re interested in contributing, please let me know!
The second part is the forum. Forums are one of the best things about the Internet when they work, and it’s always fascinating to see how a particular subject will attract a particular crowd. One of the most intelligent and amusing forums I take part in is about a computer game called Civilization. Civilization is a complex and thoughtful game that explores military, scientific, cultural and historical issues. Unsurprisingly, much of the discussion on the forum is about tips and strategies for playing the game. However, the majority of the discussion has absolutely nothing to do with the game whatsoever; it’s about politics, history, science and economics. When members of a community shares one interest, it should come as no surprise that they share others - and wants to talk about those as well.
In the same way, it strikes me people who share an interest in In Our Time will also be a generally smart, thoughtful and friendly bunch of people (no doubt very handsome, to boot). Hopefully you’ll be interested in talking about the subjects that the programme covers - as well as others that have nothing to do with In Our Time, but everything to do with the community that listens to it. So, I’m looking forward to seeing how the forum, both the on-topic and off-topic parts.
Finally, there’s the wiki. I’ve created a page for each of the 200+ editions of In Our Time, sorted into five broad categories. My hope is that these pages will be filled with additional resources and information relating to the editions. This is obviously hard work, and I suspect it’ll be the newer pages that get filled in first, but ultimately it’s the community that will set the direction for the wiki.
Right now, we’re in the summer break between series, which is a good time to start this site. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be makes posts about old editions of In Our Time from the archives, so that when the next new edition comes out on 27th September, there’ll be a decent amount of content here for newcomers to have a look at. So, have a look around the site, join the forum and introduce yourselves!
2 Comments so far...
Steve Says:
22 June 2008 at 9:36 pm.
I’m glad that this site was mentioned on Feedback. I’ve been hooked on IOT for many years now, even if sometimes like the proverbial 747, the debate goes straight over my head. However, there are many times when a passing interest in a topic is kindled into a desire to follow up on the subject debated. At other times it’s like going back to conversations with friends over many years in which we’ve muddled our way through, although in a less erudite fashion, to some of the same conclusions. Melvyn’s weekly newsletter is often illuminating, throwing light on the frustrations of having been unable to cover other issues arising in the course of the programme. I suppose one of the things that I really enjoy about IOT is the thread used throughout to stitch together the Science and Art perspectives of many of the arguments.
Paolo Says:
1 May 2009 at 9:00 pm.
I began listening to IOT when the discussion was about the (recently solved) Poincaré Conjecture — then I listened to more episodes and never stopped.
I commute by train to go the university every day and I always enjoy a good IOT podcast. I also enjoy those of scientific journals like Nature or Science, or Scientific American.
If you haven’t already, do sign up for Melvyn’s Newsletter (on the BBC site), they are also quite nice.