This week’s best radio: Alan Dein’s Don’t Log Off
Following on from the excellent Radio 4 show Don’t Hang Up, Dein uses Facebook and Skype to discover..
Following on from the excellent Radio 4 show Don’t Hang Up, Dein uses Facebook and Skype to discover the lives behind online profiles
Alan Dein’s excellent Don’t Log Off, now in a new slot (11 November, 10.30am FM, 10.45am LW, Radio 4), began life as Don’t Hang Up. In it, the oral historian would ring phone boxes in distant lands, hoping to establish a relationship with whoever picked up. The contemporary iteration uses social media to engage with far-flung people such as Syrian refugee Abdulkader – who journeyed to Europe from the ruins of Aleppo – and Sam and Anna, two disgruntled workers in a Ukrainian call centre.
Songwriters often seek the company of fellow songwriters to help finish what they’ve started, and these days many do it at songwriting camps. In The Art of Living: Songwriting With Soldiers (12 November, 1.30pm, Radio 4)Trevor Dann reports for Remembrance Sunday from one such camp, which gives military veterans the opportunity to turn their often traumatic experiences into songs with experienced songwriters. Darden Smith, founder of the project, explains how the seed of the programme lay in a song about the service that repatriates the dead. This is known as an Angel Flight, a name that was begging to be turned into a song. As Wilfred Owen, who was not familiar with singer-songwriters, wrote 100 years earlier, that’s “the pity war distilled”.
