Please come and be part of the audience for a new BBC Radio 4 series aimed at anyone who cooks, not just the experts.  We are recording one of the programmes at a breathtaking venue in Whitechapel, London, on Tuesday 17^th January 2012.

Hosted by Jay Rayner, the show will also feature:

• Peter Barham – the food scientist who is a consultant for Heston Blumenthal and Noma in Copenhagen (which some consider to be the best restaurant in the world)
• Henry Dimbleby – food writer and entrepreneur who was one of the founders of the Leon chain
• Angela Malik – Scottish-Indian chef who is known for combining Asian flavours with fantastic and seasonal British ingredients
• Rachel McCormack – the Glaswegian cook who is also an expert on Catalan cooking

The show is witty, fast-moving, and irreverent, but packed full of information that may well change the way you think about cooking. You’ll have the opportunity to ask anything and everything to do with food and cooking, find out lots of great stuff you didn’t know before, and enjoy plenty of good-humoured conversation.

TICKETS ARE FREE, and available by email:

The event starts at 7pm, and will be finished by 8.30pm, but the bar will be open until 11pm!

Jay Rayner (plus carrots and pasta)

The novelist Hugh Walpole was one of the most successful writers of his generation; a consummate story teller. In the 1920s and 30s he was a publisher’s dream ticket. Each new novel dramatically outsold the one before. On his lucrative literary tours of America he pulled in even bigger audiences than Charles Dickens who had done the circuit 80 years before. He was a friend of and admired by Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, John Buchan, Henry James, Clemence Dane, and T.S. Eliot. He wrote more than 50 books including 36 novels. But today Walpole is largely forgotten; what caused this catastrophic decline in Walpole’s reputation?

Produced by Barney Rowntree

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30, on the 5th of May 2011

The first show of the series features the amazing Kate Tempest. With her unique style, blending incredible lyrics with hip hop rhythms, this former winner of New York’s Nuyorican Poetry Slam and hit of 2010 Glastonbury, Latitude and Big Chill festivals is the name on everyone’s lips in performance poetry.

Kate Tempest shares the Bespoken Word bill with Martin Visceral of the Pen-Ultimate Collective based in Manchester, which is being specially featured in this series.

Bespoken Word was the first programme on British radio or television devoted to performance poetry. It’s now in its seventh year. Listen here

Bespoken Word starts Wednesday 27^th October at 11pm, on BBC Radio 4 for 6 weeks.

Goodbye to Berlin on location- outside the apartment

Radio 4 Classic Serial: Goodbye to Berlin

Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood’s most famous book became the inspiration for the film, Cabaret and captures a crucial moment in pre-war history.

Directed by Polly Thomas and with Sound Design by Eloise Whitmore, Goodbye to Berlin makes the most of its location recording – an East Berlin apartment. Little changed for generations, the apartment is just like the one where Christopher Isherwood lived in the early 1930s and where he met many of the memorable characters he recorded in his eyewitness account of Berlin and its people as Facism began to take hold.

The impressive Anglo-German cast breathe new life into the characters and UK radio newcomer James Norton takes on the Christopher Isherwood role with relish.

This is what The Guardian had to say:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/oct/04/goodbye-to-berlin-christopher-isherwood-radio-review

James Norton as Christopher Isherwood

Friday 10th September 2010, 15:00.

Repeated 12th September 2010, 14:00.

All this and more gardening problem-solving from our indefatigable team of experts!

Friday 2nd July 15:00. Repeated Sunday 4th July 14:00.

Bunny Guinness returns to Grace’s garden for a spell of garden design magic. Part of our Listeners’ Gardens series.

Bob Flowerdew visits a nursery with  a difference; while Matthew Biggs returns for an update from Emma Morris and family, as part of our Listeners’ Gardens series.