Latest news with #DavidDimbleby
BBC News
02-04-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
The History Podcast Invisible Hands 2. The Mad Monk
A man throws up in a taxi on his way to an interview. He is nervous because he is about to make an argument. It's an argument that would change politics forever. His name was Keith Joseph. And this would be the start of a radical journey - from conventional conservative politician to ideological warrior and guru for Margaret Thatcher. Joseph set out on a tour of the country. He had eggs thrown at him, Marxist flags waved in his face. He was spat at. Heckled. All because he was arguing for one thing - the free markets. David Dimbleby traces the history of an idea that spans his life. It started on a chicken farm in Sussex, gained traction in the shadows of post-war London and rose to heights of excess in the new champagne bars of the City. It's 2025 and this once radical idea now defines every aspect of life in Britain. An idea that transformed the economy, politics and, ultimately, society itself. But how did it happen? Who are the little-known people behind it? What did they want? And - as Donald Trump threatens to overturn the global economic system - is the free market here to stay? Or are we entering a new era? Presenter: David Dimbleby Producer: Jo Barratt Executive Producers and Story Editors: Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitsina Sound design: Peregrine Andrews Commissioning Editor: Dan Clarke A Samizdat Audio production for BBC Radio 4
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
David Dimbleby's hugely compelling history of capitalism: best podcasts of the week
David Dimbleby takes on the history of capitalism. It's a slick listen that opens in a barrage of air raid sirens and rumbling aircraft engines as Anthony Fisher watches his brother die while they both fly planes during the second world war – before going on to found the free-market thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs. The half-hour episodes don't allow for deep dives but are as hugely listenable as anything featuring its host's voice is. Alexi DugginsBBC Sounds, episodes weekly A new series of the pared-back podcast in which a parent and their child sit down for a conversation, with the Rev Richard Coles in his major return to audio since leaving Radio 4. Vanessa Feltz, who just launched a new daytime show, is first up chatting with her therapist daughter Saskia – and, unsurprisingly, they are a talkative, candid pair. Hollie RichardsonWidely available, episodes weekly A rare story of social media being used for good. When LA teenager Daisy De La O was murdered outside her Compton apartment in 2021, her friends launched a TikTok campaign to find the perpetrator – and it worked. Jenn Swann reports, while Paris Hilton executive produces. Hollie Richardson Widely available, episodes weekly 'I like to be five or six years late to any trend,' says Parks and Recreation alumnus Amy Poehler in her super-fun new interview show. It opens with a daft, hysterical laughter-strewn brainstorm about questions with other celebrity pals, including Seth Meyers and Fred Armisen, before its main guest Tina Fey. Or in Poehler's words: 'My wife, really, in life.' AD Widely available, episodes weekly This series about wacky crimes features a brief intro from Steve Buscemi before diving into its tales. The first episode is about a Floridian teen whose victory in a homecoming queen election saw and her teacher mother accused of falsifying students' votes to ensure she won. The resulting tale of fraud, arrest and national scandal is a tad thin, but certainly entertaining. ADWidely available, episodes weekly
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in audio: Invisible Hands with David Dimbleby; Artworks: Talk Talk – Living in Another World; White Hot Hate; Luigi
The History Podcast: Invisible Hands with David Dimbleby (Radio 4) | BBC SoundsArtworks: Talk Talk – Living In Another World (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds White Hot Hate: Agent Pale Horse CBCLuigi Wondery+ David Dimbleby is a broadcasting quality mark, isn't he? Not just a guarantee of intelligent content delivered succinctly and with style, but a host who's at once establishment and outsider. His eminent career – hosting Question Time and general elections, as well as commentating on royal jubilees and state funerals – means he is intrinsically connected to Britishness and holding Britishness to account. His new Radio 4 series, Invisible Hands, unpicks a real establishment fundamental: capitalism and the free markets. Many people in Britain – me included, and I'm hardly a spring chicken – can barely remember a time when this country wasn't in thrall to the idea that the best way to run an economy is by handing power to a market where everything – strappy sandals, war weapons, water supplies – is up for sale. The series starts with Antony Fisher, a second world war RAF pilot who took up farming after 1945. There's a touch of Jon Ronson in picking Fisher: the pinpointing of a flapping butterfly event that cascades into a future that could never be imagined. Here, the flap is to do with Fisher's frustration with the postwar Attlee government and its meddling in everything. 'The heavy hand of state,' says Dimbleby. 'Government bodies with dreary bureaucratic names like the Milk Marketing Board and the Egg Marketing Board.' At some point Fisher reads a Reader's Digest article by Prof Friedrich Hayek, in which Hayek argued that the government's micromanagement of the economy was actually 'pretty well what the Nazis had proposed', and actually what the allies had been fighting against. A light goes on in Fisher's head. The butterfly flaps its wings. By the end of episode one, Fisher is in the US at a competition called the Chicken of Tomorrow(!) and everything is about to change. Invisible Hands covers a lot of ground, but it's well paced, and Dimbleby makes it all enjoyable and easy to understand. Politics students may be familiar with the Fisher story but I didn't know it, and the programme is an engaging way to learn how the Chicken of Tomorrow became the State of Today. Also on Radio 4 last week, Elbow's Guy Garvey, the warm and eloquent 6 Music presenter, hosted an episode of the excellent series Artworks. The subject was British pop group Talk Talk and, specifically, their 1988 album Spirit of Eden: a great work, completely at odds with the times. Garvey is a romantic, and he clearly delights in the bucketful of romantic tropes in this tale. Mark Hollis, Talk Talk's leader, was a musical genius unaffected by (capitalist) dreams of fame and fortune. After three albums, as stardom beckoned, he turned left; made a deliberate retreat from the commercial in favour of art. Spirit of Eden took nine months to make and was done in the literal and metaphorical dark. Every note had to be spontaneous, insisted Hollis, who kept the bad guys (the record company) at bay by simply locking them out. The result? An album so groundbreaking and out of sync that the record company had no idea how to sell it. Talk Talk became unmarketable, Hollis and EMI sued each other (EMI said the album was 'not commercially satisfactory': lovely use of words there) and Hollis bid a retreat. And – yep, you guessed it – almost 40 years on, Spirit of Eden is lauded as a masterpiece. It was interesting to hear the effect on Tony Wadsworth, then head of marketing at EMI, who worked his way up to become the company's boss. 'It was a great lesson that came in very useful later on with artists like Radiohead,' he said. And Hollis, a man who, outside the studio, was affable and companionable, said this: 'I can't imagine not playing music, but I don't feel any need to record music or perform it.' A message that's often forgotten: it's in the doing that the delight in art is found. A couple of shows about US antiheroes for the single-minded-obsessive lovers among you. Actually, the first, White Hot Hate: Agent Pale Horse, about an undercover FBI agent called Scott Payne, reveals his very un-loner-ish approach. Though Payne is tattooed, bearded and leather-jacketed – all things that freak out many Americans – he's a fun guy, able to make friends easily. And his look and demeanour have meant that he has been able to infiltrate neo-Nazi cabals, biker gangs, dodgy fringe groups – though always with the fear of being discovered. Payne is painted as a tattooed angel on the side of the righteous, but whether or not you enjoy this show will depend on how much you warm to his convivial but rather egotistical company. Finally, brace yourself, ladies, there's a podcast about Luigi Mangione. Of course, no show can ever go deep enough on the man accused of killing the CEO of United HealthCare in December. The circumstances – and, to be honest, Mangione's looks – trump any banal insights offered by friends and neighbours. He might have been brought up with 'a strong foundation of community', have been 'a friendly, lovely young man' with 'intelligence and ambition', and had 'a relentless, grinding struggle' with back pain, but that's not really why people will listen. It's for Mangione's hood-up smile before he allegedly committed the murder, and for the Italian loafers (no socks) he wore while in court. Fans can never get enough of this kind of thing, it seems. Still, this four-part series has the right amount of silly schlock to keep the Luigi legend bubbling.
BBC News
03-03-2025
- Business
- BBC News
David Dimbleby to host Invisible Hands and Joe Dunthorne to present Half-Life for The History Podcast on BBC Radio 4
BBC Sounds has announced two brand new series which will air this spring as part of the popular history strand, The History Podcast. Invisible Hands is a landmark six-part narrative podcast in which David Dimbleby tells the seismic story of the free market revolution - perhaps the most powerful political idea of the 20th century. But this is not a dry story of economic models, this is the story of the little-known visionaries, mavericks and outcasts who made it their life's work to transform Britain's economy forever, setting the stage for Margaret Thatcher's reforms, the City's big bang and beyond. Dimbleby, who witnessed the idea unfold first-hand across his years as a BBC political reporter and presenter, takes us through the dramatic twists and turns of its evolution. His story starts - unexpectedly - on a chicken farm in Sussex, with the man who went on to set up the influential Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, before tracking the idea as it moved its way through the shadows of post-war London, and exploded onto a scene of opulence and excess in the new champagne bars of the City. Today, free market capitalism dominates every corner of British life, but how did it happen and who were the masterminds behind it? The History Podcast: Invisible Hands will begin on 26th March on BBC Radio 4 and Sounds. David Dimbleby, broadcaster and presenter of Invisible Hands, says: 'Looking back on a lifetime interviewing politicians and debating their ideas I think that none was more radical than the theory of free market capitalism. In the mid-1970s no one knew what it really meant or where the idea came from. This is the story of how this revolutionary idea took hold, challenging old assumptions and redefining British society. It begins with a fighter pilot shot down in the Battle of Britain, an ambitious chicken farmer and a politician nick-named the mad monk who embraced the idea with such enthusiasm that he persuaded the government to abandon the old way of running Britain for a new and as yet untried theory. I was seven when the Second World War ended, and in this series, I trace the history of the revolutionary idea that spans my own lifespan, and now defines every part of our lives in Britain.' Following closely this May, Half-Life follows award-winning poet, novelist and journalist Joe Dunthorne as he embarks on a deeply personal investigation into his own family history. The gripping eight-part series starts with the story of his great-grandfather, Siegfried, a German-Jewish chemist who made radioactive toothpaste in the 1920s. While trying to write his family's history, Joe discovers Siegfried's nearly two thousand page memoir, a turgid and repetitive account of his life that few members of his family ever managed to finish reading. Joe was going in search of the details of his family's dramatic escape from Nazi Germany in 1936 but found a far more disturbing history, a confession from his great-grandfather hidden on page 1,692. This unearths a story of unexploded bombs, radioactive soil and erased histories that takes Joe from Berlin to Ankara to North Carolina and back to Swansea. Joe Dunthorne, presenter of Half-Life, says: 'Half-Life is about the stories we tell ourselves, who we are and where we come from – and how these stories often hide a more complex truth. As I explored the messy inheritance left to me by my great-grandfather, I learned first-hand the many ways history continues to haunt our present. It lives on inside us, even when we try to ignore it.' Daniel Clarke, Factual Commissioning Editor at Radio 4, says: 'We are delighted to add not one but two new history series to our popular history strand, The History Podcast. These new commissions follow the success of The Lucan Obsession, which reignited the nation's fascination with one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century, and The Brighton Bomb, which featured fresh testimony on the 1984 IRA plot to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. Such engaging and high quality titles saw The History Podcast ranked as the fourth most-listened to podcast on BBC Sounds in the last quarter of 2024.' The History Podcast is Radio 4's home for story-driven history documentaries. The new series follows a string of successful titles under the same strand, available to listen to now on BBC Sounds: The Lucan Obsession, The Brighton Bomb, Escape from the Maze, D-Day: The Last Voices, Shadow War: China and the West. In addition to this, beginning on Wednesday 2 April, BBC Radio 4 will treat listeners to a new weekly five-minute feature called This Week in History. Each episode will be read by Radio 4 announcers. They will spotlight a selection of the most fascinating and significant events that occurred this same week in the past. The feature will air on Wednesdays, with repeats on Fridays. Listen to The History Podcast on BBC Sounds Credits The History Podcast: Invisible Hands Begins on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds on 26 March 2025 Presented by David Dimbleby A Samizdat Audio production Producer: Jo Barratt Executive Producers and Story editors: Dasha Lisitsina and Joe Sykes Sound Design: Peregrine Andrews The History Podcast: Half-Life Available on BBC Sounds from 7 May 2025 Written and presented by Joe Dunthorne A Falling Tree production Produced by Eleanor McDowall. Executive Producer: Alan Hall Story Consultant: Sarah Geis Original music composed by Jeremy Warmsley AT2
