Free Thinking

Novelist Will Self, shark expert Gareth Fraser and film expert Ian Hunter join Matthew Sweet for a discussion about sharks, whales and the impact of the book and film Jaws.

Jaws started out as a novel which reads as a sociological study of a small American coastal resort full of rather unlikeable characters. It ended up as an iconic film whose heroes engage in a fight to the death with a Great White Man-Eating Machine.

Matthew Sweet discusses how the shark came to fill the space once held by the whale, why big teeth still fill our nightmares and whether all publicity is good publicity for the denizens of the oceans with writer Will Self, whose novel 'Shark' was inspired by the film, and Gareth Fraser, who now studies the dental configurations of sharks all because he once sat in a dark cinema, as did life-long Jaws fan, the film expert Ian Hunter.

The artist Fiona Tan, whose exhibition was partly inspired by 'Jonah the Giant Whale', a preserved whale exhibited inside a lorry which toured across Europe from the 1950s to the mid-1970s will also appear out of the deep.

Presenter: Matthew Sweet

Guest: Gareth Fraser, Dept of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Christopher Harding talked to the philosopher Mark Vernon and New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes about figures from the past and present who have searched for a sense of transcendence and experienced ecstatic states.

Historians Laura Rowe and Saul David discuss the controversy surrounding the 1915 German torpedo attack that sank the RMS Lusitania, killing 1198 passengers and crew. Presented by Anindya Raychaudhuri.

The Bible has provided much fruitful inspiration to poets, novelists and composers over the past two thousand years. BBC New Generation Thinker Dr Joe Moshenska teaches Milton at the University of Cambridge. He discusses ideas of doom, chaos and Biblical themes with the novelist Salley Vickers, whose novel Mr Golightly’s Holiday features God as protagonist. They look at the “weeping prophet” Jeremiah, Job, Cassandra and Tiresias and discuss whether creation is impossible without chaos with Nandini Das, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool and an audience at Imperial College in London.

A series of classical tales, from the Iliad to the Inferno have been recast by modern poets. Sean O’Brien has written a version of Dante’s Inferno, and, for the stage, Aristophanes’ The Birds; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Poets Gillian Clarke and Peter Mackay discuss the rich seam of folklore that has influenced their work and the danger of losing our connection to these tales. Gillian is a former National Poet of Wales and winner of the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. Peter is a New Generation Thinker, originally from Lewis, and an expert in Scots and Irish poetry.

Novelists John Lanchester and Diana Evans, both chroniclers of contemporary London, discuss the many and diverse communities and villages that make up the UK capital, exploring the differences between north and south, east and west, the suburbs and the inner city. John Lanchester’s novel Capital, set in London prior to and during the 2008 financial crisis, was dramatised for BBC Television in 2015, while Diana Evans’ most recent novel Ordinary People offers a portrait of contemporary London and modern relationships, framed by Barack Obama’s election victory and the death of Michael Jackson.

The Alps have loomed large in the artistic imagination since the Romantic poets explored them in search of ‘the sublime’. Historian Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough talks to writer Abbie Garrington and climber Dan Richards. His book Climbing Days tells the life of his Great-Great Aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a pioneering woman climber, and reflects on the appeal of the mountains and how the landscape can be a force for creativity, in music and literature. Abbie Garrington, from Durham University, has a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a literary history of mountaineering.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Inspired by Beethoven's penchant for musical jokes, Sahidha Bari is joined by writer Meg Rosoff for a selection of readings of comic fiction from Kingsley Amis to Paul Beatty. The reader is Carl Prekopp.

Ever since the ancient Greeks, writers have waxed lyrical about rural life, associating it with beauty, innocence and goodness. Will Abberley, BBC New Generation Thinker and senior lecturer in English at the University of Sussex is joined by writer Melissa Harrison & archaeologist and sheep farmer Francis Pryor to discuss the British countryside real and imagined.

Producer: Luke Mulhall