David Hepworth learns the lessons of failure, meets 'the kids', and finds out about life inside a brown box
There's plenty of good advice in *The Value Of Failure* (Weekdays, 1.45pm, R4). Novelist Anne Enright tells would-be writers: "The book you're writing is not the final book. What you are writing on any given day is the inferior version." Headteacher Heather Hanbury lectures her girls: "If you don't get in the team, go away and practise and try again." Entrepreneur Keith Cotterill looks for the difference between the honest failure of a project and the dishonest failure of the person behind the project. Former professional cricketer Ed Smith, who assumed he would be an England regular and wasn't, has decided: "A good portion of the value of sport is in the failure; through failure we learn more about people."
This ought to be a series, so badly do we need a corrective to the fantasy that everybody can achieve if only they want it badly enough. It's a fantasy that's taken an even tighter hold since we were encouraged to follow other people's personal "journeys". The journey of the person who fails follows much the same route as that of the person who succeeds. The only difference is the outcome. As Smith says: "Want and hunger are necessary but not sufficient." The real comfort of this programme lies not so much in the advice as in the smile you can hear in the back of the speaker's voice as they tell you about the things that went wrong. That's the true value of failure.
In *The First Generation X *(Saturday, 8pm, R4), oral historian Alan Dein tracks down some of the people interviewed as teenagers for Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson's 1964 book Generation X. He also uncovers some very early attempts to find out What The Young People Want back in the days of Mr Cholmondley-Warner in programmes such as The Under-Twenty Club and To Start You Talking. Here we are temporarily plunged back into a world where a 14-year-old's daily duties might include "polishing the back kitchen" and a girl could be the envy of her friends down the Palais because her mother was always running her up a frock. As Jon Savage, whose book, Teenage, was recently been made into a documentary film, points out, society's concerns about teenagers tend to remain constant for the simple reason that "ver kids"– as we used to call them at Smash Hits magazine – tend to repeat back to society what society has dinned into them, only in a less polished way.
*Radiolab* is a programme from WNYC and NPR in the USA that brings together compelling stories around a science theme. It presents them in that chummy, discursive style, which for some reason seems not to be allowed in British radio. The programme you should start with is Brown Box (the very kind of title that's banned in British radio). In it, self-styled "lady reporter" Mac McClelland talks about her experience of working undercover in one of those massive warehouses 17 football fields long, in which lots of the things that you may have ordered while lying on your couch at home – nappies, books, marital aids, olive oil misters and millions of things to put on and around an iPad – are stored. The customer's greater convenience is bought at the expense of unforgiving pressure on the pickers, who walk many miles in a day to fill the orders, all the while under the inhuman scrutiny of their little hand-held scanner. You'll never order in quite the same way again. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
There's plenty of good advice in *The Value Of Failure* (Weekdays, 1.45pm, R4). Novelist Anne Enright tells would-be writers: "The book you're writing is not the final book. What you are writing on any given day is the inferior version." Headteacher Heather Hanbury lectures her girls: "If you don't get in the team, go away and practise and try again." Entrepreneur Keith Cotterill looks for the difference between the honest failure of a project and the dishonest failure of the person behind the project. Former professional cricketer Ed Smith, who assumed he would be an England regular and wasn't, has decided: "A good portion of the value of sport is in the failure; through failure we learn more about people."
This ought to be a series, so badly do we need a corrective to the fantasy that everybody can achieve if only they want it badly enough. It's a fantasy that's taken an even tighter hold since we were encouraged to follow other people's personal "journeys". The journey of the person who fails follows much the same route as that of the person who succeeds. The only difference is the outcome. As Smith says: "Want and hunger are necessary but not sufficient." The real comfort of this programme lies not so much in the advice as in the smile you can hear in the back of the speaker's voice as they tell you about the things that went wrong. That's the true value of failure.
In *The First Generation X *(Saturday, 8pm, R4), oral historian Alan Dein tracks down some of the people interviewed as teenagers for Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson's 1964 book Generation X. He also uncovers some very early attempts to find out What The Young People Want back in the days of Mr Cholmondley-Warner in programmes such as The Under-Twenty Club and To Start You Talking. Here we are temporarily plunged back into a world where a 14-year-old's daily duties might include "polishing the back kitchen" and a girl could be the envy of her friends down the Palais because her mother was always running her up a frock. As Jon Savage, whose book, Teenage, was recently been made into a documentary film, points out, society's concerns about teenagers tend to remain constant for the simple reason that "ver kids"– as we used to call them at Smash Hits magazine – tend to repeat back to society what society has dinned into them, only in a less polished way.
*Radiolab* is a programme from WNYC and NPR in the USA that brings together compelling stories around a science theme. It presents them in that chummy, discursive style, which for some reason seems not to be allowed in British radio. The programme you should start with is Brown Box (the very kind of title that's banned in British radio). In it, self-styled "lady reporter" Mac McClelland talks about her experience of working undercover in one of those massive warehouses 17 football fields long, in which lots of the things that you may have ordered while lying on your couch at home – nappies, books, marital aids, olive oil misters and millions of things to put on and around an iPad – are stored. The customer's greater convenience is bought at the expense of unforgiving pressure on the pickers, who walk many miles in a day to fill the orders, all the while under the inhuman scrutiny of their little hand-held scanner. You'll never order in quite the same way again. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
