MIANE 'WIMBO'

Prove me wrong...

Lord Bragg & BBC In Our Time - The Millenary Edition

In Our Time is a weekly BBC R4 conversation hosted by Melvyn Bragg with usually three top scholars or academics in their field of study. I've been wanting to complete this since the 1000th episode I drafted, and so it's now or never. 

We must press on.

 I've been listening to IoT from the early episodes if not just a wee bit later than 1998. The information we're allowed to overhear, the quality of conversation, is valuable and often precious, but not just for what we learn. It continually adds more context to what we already know. I can't say school was a good experience for me but IoT has contributed to my ongoing education more than any other source in my life.

A thousand episodes is an extraordinary achievement. IoT is now an online resource that will always encapsulate the life and times of Lord Bragg, with a range and depth of subjects that are now steadily topping up ours.

Now, on that subject when I was an adolescent before Melvyn Bragg was ennobled, he had a Television production called The South Bank Show. He was always comfortable around authentic, inquiring minds and a wide range of interesting people. To top it off he was handsome on the Telly and a public intellectual you'd want to hang around with, and he still is. Do you know how hard it is to be all those things in British culture and still be well regarded?

Tough call. There are many pretenders but fewer successors and regrettably impostors are everywhere, lisping their way though the third act. Jonathan Myles-Lee perhaps came closest. Now there was a man who likewise had an enormous appetite for, the true, the beautiful and the good.

It's impossible for me to hold back on a few theories I've picked up, like lucky pennies and tuppences over the years from listening to IoT. 

This may come as a surprise to many listeners but Lord Bragg is awake, and red-pilled. Maybe even initiated, and possibly not as well. The questions asked of his guests are seldom easy to answer. It's not doctrinaire responses we're looking for it's the differences in the views of the guests as well when they're all singing from the same spreadsheet. It's all informative.

From time to time questions are answered with a little hesitation that is not expected from our best and brightest. One of the best questions regularly asked by Baron Bragg is 'How do we know that?' and the answer is we don't. We're relying on accounts often written centuries later.

I invite you to revisit the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - March 2017. I can't emphasise enough to listen over and again till a familiarity with the material emerges. This may then fuel your own questions about the official version of human evolution with respect to the climate, weather and atmosphere that initiated our launch from primordial soup to sentient biped. Be sceptical and if you have the ability, be cynical.

Got that?

That's the warm up although there are more absolute gems in that episode, but the objective here is to be limbered up for the kind of detached and cool headed analysis from the Climate Change episode produced much earlier on 6 January 2000

It takes a sort of cobbled-stone stubbornness, and refreshing use of reason, logic and curiosity to listen properly to In Our Time. Kissinger said only academics fight over tiny details, as the stakes are so low.

Don't get me wrong. In our Time is invariably warm, authentic and collegial, it's edited but not in a way that seems anything less than generous. Though rare, I've noticed over the decades that a guest or two appear to be scoring points. It's out of order. They diminish themselves while blaming the victim for the very qualities of restraint they are lacking in. I only mention it because Melvyn Bragg doesn't engage in tit for tat and also leaves it in the episode for us overhear. That's aristocratic integrity. You can't buy that, especially from a working class background.

Over the years I have learned more about great women in history (often the first notable writers in the United Sates and Europe) from Lord Bragg than anywhere else. I  was a prolific book reader who tried as many genres as possible up to my 30s. I've said it before in the Hildegaard of Bingen post but its worth a reminder. If feminism means emancipating women with opportunities they are ordinarily excluded from, Lord Bragg is the greatest living feminist I know. It's unmissable that he enjoys and appreciates women as well respecting them. 

One more playful observation. Again, over the years so it doesn't happen every time but I've noticed that Melvyn (if I may) has the ability to make people laugh at the drop of a hat. Now he may deny that, but it's a quality suppressed through self control, because his work isn't as an entertainer. Funny, charming and erudite are all qualities he has but Lord Bragg is a serious contributor to understanding the nature, as well as the times that our lives are living in.

I shall be adding episodes below that I feel have been most important to me over the years. There's no rush to list them all immediately, and so I'll start with Strabo who like Jesus, nobody had bothered to document until centuries later.

Strabo's Geographica

States of Matter

Edward Gibbon

Parasitism

The Upanishads

The Nutcracker - English National Ballet

The ticket fairy flew by and dropped an invitation in my lap, so I got to see the English National Ballet's 'The Nutcracker' last night and it was worth it for the last six minutes alone. Helicopter view first. When the opening curtains parted the set was dripping in richness, luxury and elegance, and this continued with every set change throughout the performance. The art of set designing has improved beyond description since my theatre days in London. If like me for quite some, you haven't been to the theatre, I urge you to try again. It's so much more immersive.

The first act caught me by surprise, there were about 25 ballet dancing children as the mice or skating soldiers, and they were really good, I didn't see a single mistake. How do they get all those children off school and performing around the country? All of them transformed into real mice at one point with collective fingers waggling like the whiskers and paws twitching as mice eat. However I was anticipating the grown ups to take over and to be candid, I didn't see the kind of performance I was expecting. Now, it might have been the view I had or the excessively hot theatre, or even the version being watched, but the only performance worth noting was the lead female dancer. I believe her name is Fernanda Oliveira from Brazil. Where Yijing Zhang of Birmingham Royal Ballet was magnetically tall, Fernanda's Sugar Plum fairy was diminutively hypnotic. Precision, levitation and elegant symmetry all rolled into one. Superb stuff.

The second act was closer to my expectations. More Corp de Ballet, more Batterie and an astonishing Coda. I think it says more about me than anything but I don't understand why Swan Lake, not The Nutcracker is most popular in the United States. I've also come to the conclusion that if there's no orchestra I'm not going to attend. The richness of sound, in this case the ENB Philharmonic, is something no sound system can come close to. When I went to see Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty earlier this year I didn't write it up as I thought it was crap for various reasons but more expensive tickets and no Philharmonic Orchestra will suffice. Anyway, the wrap up Coda of ENB's The Nutcracker was a dazzlingly baroque, twisting Rubik's Cube of light, shadow and writhing bodies, internally-externalising with the mechanism and precision of a watch. I'll add close examples to the post below. It was worth every penny just for that and I left delighted.