Talk Media The Big Light

Here's a wee look back at April on Talk Media.


Autism Awareness Month - 10th with Paddy DuffyUK Jets Defend Israel - 17th with David PrattEnglish Patriotism & Keir Starmer - 24th with Ruth WishartListener Question - 'BBC Understands' (10th with Paddy)

If you want to keep up to date with the podcast, go to www.patreon.com/talkmedia

At the end of the show a question from Neil.


Recommendations:


Stuart


The Richard Burton Diaries - Book Chris Williams (editor), Richard Burton (author)


Irresistibly magnetic on stage, mesmerizing in movies, seven times an Academy Award nominee, Richard Burton rose from humble beginnings in Wales to become Hollywood's most highly paid actor and one of England's most admired Shakespearean performers. His epic romance with Elizabeth Taylor, his legendary drinking and story-telling, his dazzling purchases (enormous diamonds, a jet, homes on several continents), and his enormous talent kept him constantly in the public eye. Yet the man behind the celebrity façade carried a surprising burden of insecurity and struggled with the peculiar challenges of a life lived largely in the spotlight. This volume publishes Burton's extensive personal diaries in their entirety for the first time. His writings encompass many years—from 1939, when he was still a teenager, to 1983, the year before his death—and they reveal him in his most private moments, pondering his triumphs and demons, his loves and his heartbreaks. The diary entries appear in their original sequence, with annotations to clarify people, places, books, and events Burton mentions. From these hand-written pages emerges a multi-dimensional man, no mere flashy celebrity. While Burton touched shoulders with shining lights—among them Olivia de Havilland, John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, Laurence Olivier, John Huston, Dylan Thomas, and Edward Albee—he also played the real-life roles of supportive family man, father, husband, and highly intelligent observer. His diaries offer a rare and fresh perspective on his own life and career, and on the glamorous decades of the mid-twentieth century.


Eamonn


Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier - Book Patrick Grant


We used to care a lot about our clothes. We didn’t have many but those we had were important to us. We’d cherish them, repair them and pass them on. And making them provided fulfilling work for millions of skilled people locally.


Today the average person has nearly five times as many clothes as they did just 50 years ago. Last year, 100 billion garments were produced worldwide, most made from oil, 30% of which were not even sold, and the equivalent of one bin lorry full of clothing is dumped in landfill or burned every single second. Our wardrobes are full to bursting with clothes we never wear so why do we keep buying more?


In this passionate and revealing book about loving clothes but despairing of a broken global system Patrick Grant considers the crisis of consumption and quality in fashion, and how we might make ourselves happier by rediscovering the joy of living with fewer, better-quality things.






David


Watch Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land - Documentary Josef Koudelka


Josef Koudelka is a fiercely independent artist. Branded an exile, stateless for many years after the end of the Prague Spring, photography is for him a powerful act that shows both humanity and its unsettling strangeness. His images are imbued with bohemian freedom and a dull, inhospitable promise. So when he was asked to go and photograph in Israel, the fear of being politically exploited, the fact of having to accept his designated young guide (to control him? he wondered)... mistrust almost won out. It was overcome by a mixture of rejection of "the wall" and attraction for this symbolic land. He simply insisted on paying for his own plane ticket, so as not to owe anything to anyone. What happened next, between him and his young guide Gilad Baram, is a truly romantic story. A friendship was born between the old photographer and the young filmmaker. Gilad Baram had the intelligence to turn these moments into a magnificent film, adopting the right distance and documenting the work of this demanding photographer.

Today the boys consider Sunak's extremist claims, Labour flying in candidates for Scottish seats, anti-immigration attitudes in Ireland and the latest polls for Trump/Biden in the USA.


At the end of the show a question from James Doonan.


Recommendations:


Stuart


Every Move You Make - Book - C. L. Taylor


Keep your friends close and your enemies closer…


Alexandra, Lucy, Bridget, River and Natalie. Five friends who wish they’d never met. Because the one thing they have in common is the worst thing in their lives: they are all being stalked.


When one of their group is murdered, days after their stalker is released from prison, time stands still for them all. They know their lives could end just as brutally at any moment – all it takes is for the people they fear the most to catch up with them.


When the group receive a threat that one of them will die in ten days’ time, the terror that stalks their daily lives becomes all-consuming. But they know they don’t want to be victims anymore – it’s time to turn the tables and finally get their revenge.


Because the only way to stop a stalker is to become one yourself…


 The multimillion bestseller returns with her most propulsive and addictive book yet. A chilling and terrifyingly real thriller that will keep you up all night – and looking over your shoulder for days to come…


Eamonn


Ian Fleming: The Complete Man - Book - Nicholas Shakespeare


A fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers.


Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote.


Ian's childhood with his gifted brother Peter and his extraordinary mother set the pattern for his ambition to be 'the complete man', and he would strive for the means to achieve this 'completeness' all his life. Only a thriller writer for his last twelve years, his dramatic personal life and impressive career in Naval Intelligence put him at the heart of critical moments in world history, while also providing rich inspiration for his fiction.


Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the most gifted biographers working today. His talent for uncovering new material that casts fresh light on his subjects is fully evident in this masterful, definitive biography.

At the end of the show 2 listener questions from Niall MacKay and Paul Hampton.


Recommendations:


Stuart


Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) - book - Sly Stone


One of the few indisputable geniuses of pop music, Sly Stone is a trailblazer who created a new kind of music, mixing Black and white, male and female, funk and rock; penned some of the most iconic anthems of the 1960s and 70s, from "Everyday People" to "Family Affair"; and electrified audiences with a persona and stage presence that set a lasting standard for pop culture performance. Yet he has also been a cautionary tale, known as much for how he dropped out of sight as for what put him in the spotlight in the first place. As much as people know the music, the man remains a mystery.


In Thank You, his much-anticipated memoir, he's finally ready to share his story - a story that many thought he'd never have the chance to tell. Written with Ben Greenman, who has written memoirs with George Clinton and Brian Wilson among others, Thank You will include a foreword by Questlove. The book was created in collaboration with Sly Stone's manager Arlene Hirschkowitz.


"For as long as I can remember folks have been asking me to tell my story," says Stone. "I wasn't ready. I had to be in a new frame of mind to become Sylvester Stewart again to tell the true story of Sly Stone. It's been a wild ride and hopefully my fans enjoy it too."


Stephen


Shogun - Drama - Disney+


An original adaptation of James Clavell’s novel, FX’s Shōgun is set in Japan in the year 1600 at the dawn of a century-defining civil war. Lord Yoshii Toranaga is fighting for his life as his enemies on the Council of Regents unite against him. When a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village, its English pilot, John Blackthorne, comes bearing secrets that could help Toranaga tip the scales of power and devastate the formidable influence of Blackthorne’s own enemies — the Jesuit priests and Portuguese merchants. Toranaga’s and Blackthorne’s fates become inextricably tied to their translator, Toda Mariko, a mysterious Christian noblewoman and the last of a disgraced line. While serving her lord amidst this fraught political landscape, Mariko must reconcile her newfound companionship with Blackthorne, her commitment to the faith that saved her and her duty to her late father.


Ukraine Russia War Talk - podcast - Phillips P O'Brien


A regular series of podcasts, with guests, in which we discuss the Russo-Ukraine war and larger geopolitical questions.


Eamonn


Pictures from Ukraine - documentary - David Pratt BBC


Veteran photojournalist David Pratt travels to Ukraine after war breaks out. His goal: to bear witness to the biggest unfolding crisis in Europe since World War Two.


Stuart


NIGHT TRAIN TO ODESA - book - Jen Stout

An action packed episode taking a look at the SNP/Scottish Government developments and the SNP leadership reporting.


At the end of the show a listener question from Ian Currie.


Recommendations:


Stuart:


Fragile Animals - book - Genevieve Jagger


When an ex-catholic woman develops a sexual relationship with a vampire, she is forced to confront the memories that haunt her religious past.


Struggling to deal with the familial trauma of her Catholic upbringing, hotel cleaner, Noelle, travels to the Isle of Bute. There, she meets a man who claims to be a vampire, and a relationship blooms between them based solely on confession. But as talk turns sacrilegious, and the weather outside grows colder, Noelle struggles to come to terms with her blasphemous sexuality. She becomes hounded by memories of her past: her mother’s affair with the local priest, and the part she played in ending it.


Catriona:


Night Train to Odesa - book - Jen Stout


When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, millions of lives changed in an instant. Millions of people were suddenly on the move. In this great flow of people was a reporter from Shetland. Jen Stout left Moscow abruptly, ending up on a border post in southeast Romania, from where she began to cover the human cost of Russian aggression. Her firsthand, vivid reporting as she travelled alone, hauling around body armour, brought the war to audiences back home, as she reported from front lines and cities across Ukraine. Stories from the night trains, birthday parties, military hospitals and bunkers: stories from the ground, from a writer with a deep sense of empathy, always seeking to understand the bigger picture, the big questions of identity, history, hopes and fears in this war in Europe.


Eamonn:


THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS - film 


In 1896, a construction engineer from the British Army, J.H. Patterson (Kilmer) is sent to build a railway bridge across Uganda's Tsavo River for the British East African Railway. Soon after he arrives, workmen begin to disappear at night from their tents never to be seen alive again.

At the end of the show a question from Roger Hyam


Recommendations:


Ruth


The Glasgow Girl (Paperback) - Aasmah Mir 


A Glasgow Girl is the coming of age story of Aasmah Mir's childhood growing up in 1970s Glasgow. From a vivacious child to a teenage loner, Aasmah candidly shares the highs and lows of growing up between two cultures - trying to fit in at school and retreating to the safe haven of a home inhabited by her precious but distant little brother and Helen, her family's Glaswegian guardian angel.


Intricately woven into this moving memoir is the story of Aasmah's mother, as we follow her own life as a young girl in 1950s Pakistan to 1960s Scotland and beyond. Both mother and daughter fight, are defeated and triumph in different battles in this sharp and moving story. A Glasgow Girl is a remarkable memoir about family, identity and finding yourself where you are.


This book was previously titled A Pebble in the Throat.


https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-glasgow-girl/aasmah-mir/9781472288554 


Blue Lights - series - BBC


For three police recruits in Belfast, the pressure is immense. Facing criminal gangs and divided communities, they don't know who to trust. The odds are, they won't all make it.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0f2cxpr/blue-lights 


Hollyrood Sources Podcast


The Holyrood Sources podcast analyses Scottish politics through the experiences of those who have lived and breathed it as Special Advisers to the Scottish Government, SNP and opposition parties. Join hosts Calum Macdonald, Geoff Aberdein (Chief of Staff to the First Minister, 2007-2014) and Andy Maciver (Former Head of Communications for the Scottish Conservatives). Their insight is second to none - they've been there. What does Scottish Politics look like after Nicola Sturgeon? Holyrood Sources bring you the insider information you need to navigate the next chapter.


https://holyroodsources.com/ 


Stuart


When a struggling comedian shows one act of kindness to a vulnerable woman, it sparks a suffocating obsession which threatens to wreck both their lives


https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81219887 


Eamonn


Living - film - netflix


Overwhelmed at work and lonely at home, a council bureaucrat's life takes a heartbreaking turn when a medical diagnosis tells him his time is short. Influenced by a local decadent and a vibrant woman, he continues to search for meaning until a simple revelation gives him a purpose to create a legacy for the next generation.


https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9051908/