Tom Stoppard's weird, trippy reworking of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was way out there on bank holiday Radio 2
• Darkside
• Dream
Post-watershed, bank holiday Radio 2 isn't the first place you would look for trippy, abstract programming. Monday night is *Big Band Special night*, the Antiques Roadshow of the airwaves. If it made no sense that Tom Stoppard's massively hyped new play, a philosophical interpretation of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, would premiere here then the next hour would be an even bigger bag of weird.
*Darkside* opens with a train full of passengers saved from crashing by Ethics Man (Rufus Sewell), who diverts the carriages on to another track, killing a boy who was playing on them. Ethics Man later tells us that he is a utilitarian consequentialist – the ends justified the means, and so he'd achieved the greatest good for the greatest number. It's the first and last bit of concrete rationality you can pin on Stoppard's acid-tinted, Wizard of Ozzed take on Floyding.
Emily (Amaka Okafor) a philosophy student, is off to seek the Wise One (Peter Marinker) with a pal (Iwan Rheon) who has no name and doesn't exist because, like a juggler on the radio no one could see or hear, he's a thought experiment. All the songs from Dark Side are played in the hour. Nietzsche, Kant and Hobbes are referenced in a superbong haze of half thoughts and elliptical subplots that unravel in chin-stroking loops. Who is the Fat Man? (Answer: Adrian Scarborough.) Why is the Witch Finder playing at being Bill Nighy rather than the other way round? When will Stoppard tire of being such a complicated egghead?
From the daft and experimental to the historic and moving. Radio 4 aired Martin Luther King's 50-year-old *I Have A Dream* speech on Wednesday. Twenty notable figures, including the Dalai Lama, Doreen Lawrence, Albie Sachs and Stevie Wonder, were asked to recite King's words. Their contributions were mixed with snippets from the minister's original, rousing roar of an address on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, Washington. Malala Yousafzai was chosen to pick up King's most famous line – "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character". Powerful then, momentous now. Reported by guardian.co.uk 23 hours ago.
• Darkside
• Dream
Post-watershed, bank holiday Radio 2 isn't the first place you would look for trippy, abstract programming. Monday night is *Big Band Special night*, the Antiques Roadshow of the airwaves. If it made no sense that Tom Stoppard's massively hyped new play, a philosophical interpretation of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, would premiere here then the next hour would be an even bigger bag of weird.
*Darkside* opens with a train full of passengers saved from crashing by Ethics Man (Rufus Sewell), who diverts the carriages on to another track, killing a boy who was playing on them. Ethics Man later tells us that he is a utilitarian consequentialist – the ends justified the means, and so he'd achieved the greatest good for the greatest number. It's the first and last bit of concrete rationality you can pin on Stoppard's acid-tinted, Wizard of Ozzed take on Floyding.
Emily (Amaka Okafor) a philosophy student, is off to seek the Wise One (Peter Marinker) with a pal (Iwan Rheon) who has no name and doesn't exist because, like a juggler on the radio no one could see or hear, he's a thought experiment. All the songs from Dark Side are played in the hour. Nietzsche, Kant and Hobbes are referenced in a superbong haze of half thoughts and elliptical subplots that unravel in chin-stroking loops. Who is the Fat Man? (Answer: Adrian Scarborough.) Why is the Witch Finder playing at being Bill Nighy rather than the other way round? When will Stoppard tire of being such a complicated egghead?
From the daft and experimental to the historic and moving. Radio 4 aired Martin Luther King's 50-year-old *I Have A Dream* speech on Wednesday. Twenty notable figures, including the Dalai Lama, Doreen Lawrence, Albie Sachs and Stevie Wonder, were asked to recite King's words. Their contributions were mixed with snippets from the minister's original, rousing roar of an address on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, Washington. Malala Yousafzai was chosen to pick up King's most famous line – "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character". Powerful then, momentous now. Reported by guardian.co.uk 23 hours ago.