Radio 4’s Today programme has always had its idiosyncrasies. Where else do you find spiritual guidance – Thought for the Day – closely followed by horse racing tips? And Christmas is the season for Today’s guest editors, who in the past have included Greta Thunberg, Lewis Hamilton, Jarvis Cocker and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Imagine that dinner party.
This year’s run has boasted another eclectic mix, starting with head of science at Nasa Dr Nicola Fox – introduced to listeners by Nick Robinson as “The English girl from Hitchin”. Dr Fox was, we heard, lifted out of her crib as a baby to watch the moon landings and the rest, as they say, is astrophysics.
There was a conversation with Carole Mundell, the director of science at the European Space Agency, who described maths rather poetically as “the language that unlocks the universe”. An interview with Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran felt like a big treat for Fox but slightly less insightful for the rest of us. And when asked what Nasa had ever done for us, Fox gave the surprising answer that it was responsible for memory foam mattresses.
The show ended with a poem by the US poet laureate Ada Limón, which will be etched on to the side of the 2024 Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter, featuring the line: “It is not darkness that unites us; the cold distance of space, but the offering of water.”
Next up, author Hanif Kureishi, best known for his novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, was the second guest editor, and had an extraordinary survival story. On Boxing Day last year, he suffered a fall while on holiday in Rome that left him unable to use his limbs. Kureishi described his accident as like “going through a door into a much darker world”.
One of the best interviews Kureishi held was with Ashley Edwards, head gardener at Horatio’s Garden – a fully accessible space outside the London Spinal Cord Injury Centre at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital in Stanmore, where Kureishi was treated. Edwards, a person of colour, spoke to Kureishi about the invisibility of Black people in gardening. There was also a tender moment later in the episode when Kureishi was being fed by one of his friends: “This is a man on the radio eating kale for the first time,” joked Kureishi, before describing himself as a “reluctant dictator”, reliant on those around him in a way he’d never imagined before his accident.
Former Top Gear presenter James May brought a fairly predictable range of subjects to his editing stint: self-driving cars; whatever happened to the good old British cup of tea; the “road sectarianism” between cyclists and motorists, and his model Spitfires hobby. He even brought in his own teapot. All very jolly and British.
During what May dubbed a “hobby amnesty” we met a lay minister making a model of a tractor, a woman doing cross stitch, underwater chess players and the comedian Al Murray, who likes to build model tanks.
In his item on tea, we heard May follow some of the last “tea ladies” at Port Vale Football Club and interview a representative from the armed forces charity Ssafa about how tea can bring communities together. All of this put me in mind of Sathnam Sanghera’s recent Radio 4 series Empire of Tea, although I don’t remember Sanghera doing a quick piece of observational comedy about garden centres selling fudge.
As a goodwill ambassador for the UN Environment Programme, the singer Ellie Goulding used her editorship to discuss climate change, rewilding, activism and how to reduce your environmental impact as a creative person. Katy Watson delivered a striking report from Brazil, talking to young Indigenous people and activists about reversing the ecological destruction brought about by the policies of former president Jair Bolsonaro, in which one person stated: “Nothing was ever achieved without a fight.”
Goulding also went back to her childhood county of Herefordshire to see how land is being used in a more sustainable way, either in nature reserves or using so-called agro-ecology. There’s always something quite nice about hearing someone squelch through mud as their old accent starts to come back.
Then came the big music names: Brian Eno and Chris Martin spoke to Goulding about their attempts to make touring less ecologically damaging and how activism can inspire creativity.
The week came to a close with Andrew Malkinson, who served 17 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. Malkinson could have been released after seven years, had he made what he calls “a false confession” but instead fought to have his name cleared.
As well as an interview with his former Open University tutor, Malkinson spoke to Prof Monica Grady about space exploration at Jodrell Bank and chatted with John McCarthy, who was kidnapped in the late 1980s and held hostage for five years in Lebanon.
There was an interesting tension during the show, as Malkinson’s interviews about incarceration, dehumanisation and the trauma of being locked up jutted against news reports about how Tony Blair had considered a so-called “nuclear option” for asylum seekers, including their being sent back to their countries of origin with no right of appeal, or to a camp on the Isle of Mull.
If you were to try to tease out a common theme among this mix of guest editors, you might say it was about looking at the big picture and taking small actions. Or that there was no unifying feature, save for Thought for the Day and the racing tips.
Today guest editor episodes were on Radio 4 and are available on BBC Sounds: Nicola Fox (until 21 January); Hanif Kureishi (until 24 January); James May (25 January); Ellie Goulding (26 January); Andrew Malkinson (27 January).
