I'm a massive fan of Melvyn Bragg's Radio 4 series In Our Time. It's absolutely the best of what public service broadcasting should be. Melvyn and three experts gather in a studio and explain exactly what's important and worth knowing about some vastly important subject. The last series included an hour on things like: Greek comedy, the heart, carbon, negative numbers and the Carolingian renaissance. It's brilliant. You feel cleverer just listening to it.
Except I never know enough about any of the subjects to have my own opinion, or to feel I could add something, or to argue with the radio. It's simply too clever and high-brow for me.
So I began to think about those conversations you have with your friends about stuff you all know about, the stuff of pop culture, not high culture and I thought how much fun it would be to replicate those kinds of chats in an In Our Time format. So it's not professionals talking about an area of expertise, it's enthusiastic amateurs, talking about something they love. With the passions, conceits and errors that entails. I thought of calling it In Our Own Time to signal its amateur status.
And today, a couple of friends of mine were kind enough to come and do a bit of a demo with me. To see if it'll work. I play the Melyvn role, since it means I don't have to know much, and I've got Helen Castor (who's a bit of a coup, since she's been on the real In Our Time, in an expert capacity, she knows about history) and Jeffre Jackson to come and talk with me about Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
I really enjoyed doing it, Jeffre and Helen are smart and interesting people and I learned a lot. Huge thanks to them. The audio is a bit quiet, but OK. And I think it worked out well. Love to know what you think. Is this at all listenable? What other pop culture subjects would we like to see covered? Do any of you fancy being amateur experts in something? I'm looking for people for programme two.
(It's about an hour, and 60MB)