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The Big Idea episodes
- Programme 86: BollywoodSome people don’t like the term Bollywood, feeling that it suggests that Indian cinema is just a kind of appendage of Hollywood. But it’s in wide circulation, sometimes taken to refer to modern Indian cinema in general, more specifically the output of...29 min
- Programme 85: ConservationThis week’s theme is conservation – not environmental conservation, but the care of artefacts. In a recent programme we talked about creativity, but the work of creative artists and craftsmen is dependent on many others for its realization, dissemi...29 min
- Programme 84: FishOf our living neighbours on the planet – land animals, birds, and fish – fish are the ones that seem most aloof from us. Cold-blooded and elusive, they go about their watery existence, indifferent and invisible to us most of the time, until our lives i...29 min
- Programme 83: Chinese OperaOpera in China has a history of many centuries, and many different forms. Some 350 different kinds of musical drama were identified in a survey in the 1950s. With its colourful costumes and make-up, its stylized and sometimes acrobatic movement, Chines...29 min
- Programme 82: ReportingThis week we want to consider how events become information, and how information becomes news. Crucial to this process is the figure of the reporter, filing the copy for print or electronic media which remains our main source of knowledge about what’s ...29 min
- Programme 81: Moby DickHerman Melville’s Moby Dick was described by the novelist D. H. Lawrence as “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world”. Everyone knows the story of Captain Ahab and his obsessive pursuit of vengeance against the white whale; most rea...29 min
- Programme 80: The Art ImageBy “art image” we mean the artefacts produced by painters, sculptors and other artists in the visual realm, but our subject today is not so much the images themselves, as the way we experience and think about them. When an exhibition of work by Claud...29 min
- Programme 79: Eileen ChangOur topic this week is the author Eileen Chang – Zhang Ailing. Born in Shanghai in 1920, she was a novelist, short story writer, essayist and translator, and is now recognized as one of the most important of modern Chinese writers. She is associated es...29 min
- Programme 78: Artificial IntelligenceHuman beings have long been fascinated by artificial intelligence. Science fiction could hardly exist without it. But machines that can solve problems by a process that simulates thinking belong to our modern age, and loom very large in any imagination...29 min
- Programme 77: The Maclehose YearsSome time ago we did a programme on John Pope Hennessy, the most interesting of the nineteenth-century governors of the colony of Hong Kong. This week we are considering the governorship of one of the giants of the twentieth-century administration of H...29 min
About The Big Idea
From the publisher's feed
Our presenters Douglas Kerr, Vanessa Collingridge and guests explore the history, meaning and significance of ideas in contemporary society.
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The whole series of the Big idea is available in our podcast station
Podcast: Weekly update and available after its broadcast.
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Douglas Kerr
Douglas Kerr is Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses in literature and rhetoric. He has lived in Hong Kong since 1979.
He was born and brought up in Scotland, but went to Cambridge University in 1969 to read Modern Languages and English, and then moved on to the University of Warwick, where he studied English and French literary responses to the First World War, leaving with a PhD in Comparative Literature. During this time, a penurious year working in the French National Library in Paris gave him a taste for living some distance from home. He satisfied this taste by moving to Hong Kong, and has been here ever since.
A continuing scholarly interest in the literature of the Great War eventually produced a book on the English war poet Wilfred Owen, and this was published by Oxford University Press in 1993. This was followed by George Orwell, published by Northcote House in their Writers and their Work series. Living first in colonial and then in postcolonial Hong Kong, it is no surprise that he became deeply interested in the way Asia (or the East, or the Orient) was experienced by foreigners, and this became the subject of his next book, Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing, published by Hong Kong University Press in 2008.
Like many others, Douglas had first encountered the Sherlock Holmes stories as a child, but it was a lot later that he began working on their author, Arthur Conan Doyle. Though he is best known for his detective fiction, Conan Doyle was a prolific writer in all sorts of genres and subjects, and an important figure in the cultural history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Douglas's book Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession and Practice, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2013, is a "cultural biography" of Conan Doyle and a study of all his writing.
Douglas is a regular book reviewer for the South China Morning Post, and was on the Board of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival for five years; he still acts as an Advisor to the Festival. Though Hong Kong is a small place and he has been a resident here for more than thirty years, like other professors he still has a tendency to get lost.
Vanessa Collingridge
Vanessa graduated from Oxford University in 1990 with a first class honours degree in Geography and started working in television, quickly moving into the field of science, environment and history which remain her passion both on and off screen. Since then, she has been a regular face on all the major UK TV channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5), along with Discovery and The Learning Channel (USA) and The History Channel (worldwide). In Spring 2007, she took over the chair of the long-running weekly series Making History, the flagship history series for BBC Radio 4. Her 4x1hr documentary series, Captain Cook – Obsession and Discovery (2007-8) based on her best-selling book, has now won five major international awards including a Canadian “Gemini” (“Oscar”) for Best History Programme, Australia’s prestigious National Culture Award and the Sydney Morning Herald Readers’ Award for Best History Programme. The series has so far been screened in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, North & South America, North Africa and most of Europe.
A former columnist for the Daily Telegraph, The Scotsman and BBC History magazine, she writes a monthly column for BBC Who Do You Think You Are magazine along with features for the national newspapers, particularly the Daily Mail, Scotsman and Sunday Herald. A reviewer for The Literary Review, her own books include Captain Cook (2002), Boudica (2005) and The Story of Australia (2008) plus multiple chapters for Thames & Hudson’s Seventy Greatest Journeys in History and The Greatest Explorers in History (2010).
Vanessa is currently researching her PhD on the history of cartography of the Great Southern Continent (Antarctica), based at Glasgow University and Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute. She lectures on science, history, geography, presentation skills and the media across the UK, including at Cambridge, Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, the RGS and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. She is a Fellow of the RGS and RSGS and co-founder & host of Glasgow’s Café Scientifique to stimulate debate between the scientific community and the general public. She is a regular speaker at Book Festivals including Edinburgh International Book Festival, Cheltenham and Christchurch (New Zealand).
She is director of her own production company, Monster Media Productions, which makes radio and television programmes for broadcast and corporate clients; the company also provides a range of training for media and presentation skills. She moved to Hong Kong in November 2010 with her husband and four young sons from where she continues to write and broadcast, and research her PhD.