What a great name for a BBC TV and Radio Show

It's a pure coincidence, honest, guv...

The “Beeb”, as we know the national broadcaster in Britain, produces some great TV and Radio programmes (oops- I’ve lapsed into English English…)

It is a pure coincidence that the name of this publication has also been used by the Beeb for both a TV AND a radio program

Here’s a 5 minute snippet of one of my all-time fave musicians James Taylor from an April 1994 episode of the Words & Music TV show describing and performing one of his more memorable songs, recorded unplugged and live at the BBC studio in Maida Vale…

The Words And Music radio show is a wonderful blend of words and music and is aired every Sunday evening on the classical music oriented Radio 3. At more than 1 hour in length, it’s an old fashioned long form radio show, produced to the exacting standards of the Beeb. Episodes are available for a few weeks after they are broadcast on the Beeb web site

Only the Brits could produce a single program with the title Fruits and Vegetables that combines readings from:

• Beatrix Potter

• Milton’s Paradise Lost

• Emily Dickinson

• Shakespeare

• the King James Bible

with music from

• Nina Simone

• Scott Joplin

• Handle

• The Beach Boys

• Ravi Shankar

The episode that was first broadcast in January 2021, and repeated in August 2023

Perhaps this is a little challenging for the attention span of the podcast generation of the 2020s, but it’s absolutely wonderful stuff, and your humble narrator can only dream of putting something like this together. I hate to think of the effort involved in clearing the rights for all that literature and music…

Try it for yourself - you can always press the stop button on the player

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music