It’s not often that radio makes the news, but at 8.30am on Tuesday morning the Radio 2 newsreader Tina Daheley opened her bulletin with a hot-off-the-air headline that Zoe Ball was stepping down from the Breakfast Show
The director of the Edinburgh International Festival reflects on her two years at the helm, on the 'heartbreak' being felt by some in the arts sector and the forthcoming 2025 programme.
There is an argument to be made that comic books started in Scotland. “Possibly the earliest comic paper was The Glasgow Looking Glass,” notes David Roach in his mammoth survey of British comic books, Masters of British Comic Art (Rebellion, 2020). A tabloid-sized newspaper that mixed up illustrations, humorous text and comic strips, The Glasgow Looking Glass published some 19 issues in 1825 and 1826.
Our Price, the record chain, was the subject of this week’s business show Toast on Radio 4.
An old and toxic love: so why was it so alluring?
For the past 20 years Peter Kelly has been doing, well, just about everything. He’s been working as a teacher (at the same school in Hamilton for 21 years in fact), he’s been a musician and for most of the last two decades he’s been a dad too.
This is the weekend for remembering. A time for the country to stop and recall those who sacrificed their lives in the fields of France, in the deserts of Africa and the hills of the Falklands.
The most entertaining biography since Roger Lewis’s Taylor and Burton memoir Erotic Vagrancy? Quite possibly. I certainly don’t think I have enjoyed any book this year as much as Anouk’s joint memoir of Los Angeles writers Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. It’s a gossipy, shocking, intimate, very funny and always smart take on the two writers. A very revealing one too. I wasn’t expecting to learn quite so much about Joan Didion’s sex life.
I've just added a bit more and made a couple of corrs so best use this version: It can be a difficult thing, saying goodbye. It can be a challenge to get the tone right, making sure you’re not too sentimental, that you don’t stray into mawkish, while still sounding sincere. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that, after 58 years on the radio, Johnnie Walker did it perfectly on Sunday afternoon when he signed off for the last time at the end of Radio 2’s Sounds of the Seventies.
