Rhetoric has consequences and we cannot stand by and do nothing, says Ceri Phillips.
"I’m sick of people saying, “gosh, you must have thick skin". That’s not the way it should work." Daisy Benson on the threats political activists face today.
Peter Watts explains why Battersea power station is down to one chimney and asks if it could now be facing demolition.
"As things stand, English cricket is in danger of becoming a sporting version of the Church of England, with an ageing demographic who attend because they always attend, and believe because they have always believed. Meanwhile younger generations will barely notice its slow and graceful slide into irrelevance." Roy Greenslade quotes Sean Ingle while arguing that newspapers' retreat from cricket coverage reflects the game's demise.
Cara Buckley celebrates Garrison Keillor as he announces his retirement.
The Australian grandmaster Ian Rogers pays tribute to Viktor Korchnoi
The latest of these recordings deals with the site now occupied by BBC Radio Leicester.
Now the radio station's building is a shadow of what it used to be. The cafe and internet cafe (where I sometimes wrote this blog in its early days) are long gone, and now the BBC shop mentioned here has closed too.
In his pomp Muhammad Ali was just about the most recognisable man on the planet. Supreme as an athlete, he risked everything that had earned him to stand up for his people and for what he believed to be right.
One reason for his extraordinary fame was that he was a great athlete in a sport that enjoyed a popularity it hard to imagine today.
Heavyweight boxing was the blue riband event. In the years of rationing after the second world war British men like Bruce Woodcock, who were really no more than middleweights, had to take on American heavyweights so we had someone to compete in it.
When I was a small boy the great heavyweight bouts were global events of extraordinary significance. I have a clear memory of listening to them on the radio late in the evening.
So much so, that when I was in New York I went to look round the foyer of Madison Square Garden, where so many of those great fights were held, just so I could say I had been there. (Admittedly, the recent Clapton and Winwood concert there may have had something to do with it too.)
Time moves on and sports lose popularity. In the first year of this blog's life I wrote:
Thirty years ago the British heavyweight boxing champion was just about the biggest name in sport - think of Henry Cooper. Can you name the current holder of the title without using Google? I can't.
That would have to read 42 years ago today. There are several credible British heavyweights around today, but I have not idea if any of them is British champion.
I fell out of love with boxing when Michael Watson suffered brain damage in a bout with Chris Eubank. That had been an era when there were great British middleweights - Watson, Eubank, Nigel Benn - and their clashes made for wonderful fights.
It was magnificent when Eubank got off the canvass and from God knows where found a punch to knock Watson out and win the fight. But the damage it caused convinced me that professional boxing was insupportable.
I did watch Eubank's son Chris Eubank Jr fight Nigel Blackwell. The younger Eubank is clearly a very talented fighter, but I found the proceedings sickening.
Not just because Blackwell ended up in a coma and almost died, but also because of the dishonesty of the commentators.
It was clear almost at once that Eubank could unload combinations on Blackwell's head at will and that Blackwell lacked the weapons to stop him. Yet the commentators talked up the idea of Blackwell fighting back right up until the point that the fight was stopped.
The nearest equivalent to Muhammad Ali today in talent and personality is Usain Bolt. It is hard to see how a boxer could ever achieve that sort of fame again.
Until things change (and they will), you have to put your money on the next sporting figure to matter beyond sport in the way Ali did being a footballer.
These is a dramatised ghost story on the BBC iPlayer at the moment called The Parson.
What interested me at once is that it is clearly based on the traditional bottle-kicking and hare-pie scrambling that takes place in the Leicestershire village of Hallaton every Easter Monday.
Sure enough, the dramatist David Varela confirms that the play was:
inspired by the ancient pagan tradition of Bottlekicking in my parents’ home village of Hallaton. The reality is pretty horrific, so turning it into a horror story was easy.
I have not heard the end of it yet, but I do not fancy the chances of the meddling new vicar.
These days I find something too premeditated about televsion comedy. The idea of sitting down to watch something for 30 minutes because it will be funny, feels odd. I much prefer wit in the pursuit of another goal.
But the comedies we watch when we were young don't just form our sense of humour: they form who we are.
When I was in the sixth form ... we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.
Recently Radio Four Extra, my new favourite station, has stated repeating two comedies that take me back further than that.
When I was 11 my favourite radio comedy was The Men from the Ministry. I suppose its anti-Whitehall ethos has its roots in post-war resentment of socialism by the comfortably off - think of the fuss over the Tanganyika ground nut scheme - but it was immensely good natured.
The comedy was in the hands of pros like Derek Guyler and Richard Murdoch,* and it managed to be funny despite, even because of, its formulaic plot.
Their General Assistance Department would have two projects on the go, get them mixed up (perhaps sending the letter referring to one project to the other and vice versa) and there would be a news bulletin describing the resultant chaos.
They would fear the sack, but then discover that their boss was happy with it for some reason and live to cause chaos another week.
So ingrained is the show's comedy in my own sense of humour that I recently heard a joke that I stole for one of the first couple of Lord Bonkers' Diaries. (It is a sobering thought that those first diaries are nearer in time to my 11-year-old self than they are to me today.)
But I can go back further than that.
Radio Four Extra has started to repeat The Clitheroe Kid, which was my favourite radio comedy when I was 8.
You'll get a good idea of Jimmy Clitheroe's schtick if you watch the video above of him with George Formby. He was the ultimate precocious, cheeky schoolboy.
Except that Much Too Shy was made in 1942 and Jimmy Clitheroe was born in in 1921. Which means that he was already 20.
Because Jimmy Clitheroe - and that was his real name - suffered thyroid gland a birth and never grew after the age of 11, remaining 4ft 3in tall.
So by the time I fell in love with his show in 1968, he was 47. He still turned up for recordings in schoolboy cap and short trousers, but he had the face if a middle-aged man. That is why his television and film career had foundered by then.
Jimmy Clitheroe died in 1973, at the age of 51, after taking an overdose on the day of his mother's funeral.
* Richard Murdoch married into the family of Market Harborough's doctor. When he had his appendix out in the cottage hospital here he was plagued by urchins demanding to see "Stinker". He entertained them by putting his bare feet up on the windowsill and wiggling his toes.
"We are watching as social conservatives push against economic conservatives who are increasingly more socially liberal. No longer, it seems, can these two groups share the same Republican Party." Darin Self analyses the significance of Donald Trump.
There is no such thing as a humane execution, says Maya Foa.
"If we’re not careful, we will soon find ourselves operating trials in Kafka-esque fashion ... where a Defendant will be arrested on charges of which he is unaware, and plunged into a court system where everything is secret, from the charges to the rules of the court, and the guilt of the Defendant is assumed." CrimBarrister stands up for old-fashioned values in the law.
Clinical psychologist Jay Watts on the Archers, domestic abuse and gaslighting. Chris Havergal reports on a study exploring the role of the Jack Wills brand in student life: "In choosing Jack Wills as their uniform, students from less privileged backgrounds were taking their lead from role models around them, Dr Smith argued, and his research details the role that the company has played in this process."
It tells the story of Vince Taylor, a British rocker from that lost period before the Beatles.
As the iPlayer blurb says:
Ziggy Stardust was a rock and roll fantasy. But David Bowie's fictional rockstar, around whom his 1972 album, stage show, and film were built, was inspired by a real performer, Vince Taylor, born in Isleworth, Middlesex.
This programme uncovers the truth about a singer whose wild lifestyle ultimately destroyed him, but in so doing he gave rise to a myth that transcended glam-rock and science fiction.
His record "Brand New Cadillac" remains to this day a British rock 'n' roll classic, covered later by The Clash.
And Bowie is interviewed in it:
Vince Taylor underwent a kind of public breakdown at his next gig, where he started claiming he was a divine being. David Bowie bumped into him in London and later said:
"Vince Taylor was the inspiration for Ziggy...He always stayed in my mind as an example of what can happen in rock n roll. I'm not sure if I held him up as an idol or as something not to become. There was something very tempting about him going completely off the edge."
A couple of years ago Lord Bonkers reminisced about an incident from the 1920s:
One bright April morning the 11:15 for Northampton Castle left Nottingham London Road Lower Level as usual, but it never reached its destination. It was seen to call at Melton Mowbray North, and there were unconfirmed reports of it reaching Clipston and Oxendon, but one thing is sure: it never arrived in Northampton.
Extensive searches were undertaken and reports of sightings from as far afield as Bodmin Road and Leeming Bar were followed up, but not a trace of the train or its passengers was ever found.
What I didn't know then was that this is strangely reminiscent of a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle called The Lost Special.
It is not a Sherlock Holmes story, but he surely makes an appearance as the writer of a letter about the affair to The Times.
You can listen to a reading of it by David Schofield on the BBC iPlayer for the next four weeks.
A final thought... Can I be sure that Lord Bonkers was not pulling my leg?
This afternoon, as I do every Sunday, I went over to my mother's house to cook her a meal.
I generally listen to the repeat of Choral Evensong on Radio 3. The music is sublime and the Old Testament lessons often barking mad, so it's great entertainment all round.
Today, after it was over, I switched to Five Live to see how Spurs were getting on in their attempt to catch Leicester City.
But Spurs were not on Five Live. You needed their Sports Extra channel to listen to that game. Five Live itself had the Manchester derby - the battle for fourth place, if you are being generous.
This is of a pattern with the BBC's conviction that everyone in the country loves Manchester United.
I can even recall Match of the Day deciding,n during the club's prime under Alex Ferguson, that every goal in its Goal of the Year competition should be from a United player. How other clubs' fans loved that!
There was a short period when Chelsea were cruising to their second title during Jose Mourinho's first coming when the BBC recognised that we were the leading team in the country. You could rely on Chelsea being the commentary game on Five Live and being first on Match of the Day.
Then we slipped a little. The BBC immediately pounced and restored Manchester United to first place in its affections.
Why this obsession? Maybe it's half-memories of the Munich disaster or of United winning the European Cup in 1968.
More likely it is because BBC staff live in Surrey like so many of the club's fans.
We all know that the comedian Al Murray is a direct descendant of the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.
But our Trivial Fact of the Week reveals that he is also the great nephew of the actor Stephen Murray.
A young person writes: Who was Stephen Murray?
Only the star of the radio comedy The Navy Lark, Sir Francis Walsingham to Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R on television and star of such post-war films as London Belongs to Me and The Magnet.
The wonderful Nancy Banks-Smith has written a piece on The Archers for the Guardian. I assume it will be in tomorrow's G2.
She begins:
My grandmother – now, we’re going back a bit – used to describe pregnancy delicately as "being confined". It’s a phrase that suits Helen very well. Ever since she became pregnant, she has been a wraithlike presence, a pale face at the window of Blossom Hill Cottage, lank-haired and wearing the charity-shop clothes her husband, Rob, prefers, making occasional disconcerting distressed forays into an oblivious Ambridge. Wilkie Collins would have spat on his hands and whistled.
This sorry situation burst into flames recently when a toad-in-the-hole caught fire. Who Torched the Toad escalated into a full-scale fight, with Helen showing a flash of spirit, Rob hitting her and five-year-old Henry, entering into the spirit of things, shoving a small school friend called Xanthe. Though, frankly, I think any child called Xanthe is just asking to be shoved.
You'll have to hurry to catch it, because it closes on 12 March, but I can thoroughly recommend the Albany Theatre Company's Round The Horne: 50th Anniversary Tour at the London Comedy Museum.
In the 1960s the radio comedy Round the Horne was extraordinarily popular and this production puts you in the place of the audience at the recording of a couple of episodes of the show.
Much of the script was filth (if only in the listener's mind) but the writers Barry Took and Marty Feldman got away with it because the show was centred on the urbane, establishment presence of Kenneth Horne.
Here are a couple of examples of the humour. Kenneth Williams as Rambing Syd Rumpo singing The Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie above and the opening of the sketch Bona Law below...
HORNE: Can you help me? I've erred.
SANDY: Well, we've all erred, ducky. I mean, it's common knowledge, ennit, Jule?
HORNE: Will you take my case?
JULIAN: Well, it depends on what it is. We've got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.
Of all the tales told on these islands, few are as strange as that of William Palmer. Cursed, apparently, on the road to Canterbury in the spring of 1185 for denying the presence of the other world by the king of the grey folk – or Fairy – himself, and compelled to walk from that day to this between the worlds of magic and of men, and subsequently known in all the strange and wonderful lore attributed to the mysterious William Palmer, as Pilgrim.
My sleeping pattern has been all wrong this week. I have gone to bed early, fallen asleep and then woken again to be fully alert in the small hours.
The only upside of this is that I have heard a lot of Sebastian Baczkiewicz's fantasy series Pilgrim, which Radio 4 Extra has been broadcasting through the night.
You can find many episodes of it on the BBC iPlayer at present and it is well worth listening to.
The item runs from 7:38 to 12:32, though the opening one on how Elton John now fits in touring around the school run makes good listening too.
Sarah Gaventa, the curator of the exhibition, talks about some of the lost works she would like to locate (if they have not already been melted down).
I blogged about Historic England and its quest for these lost public artworks in December.
One of the works Sarah mentions in her interview is the sculpture Astonia by Bryan Kneale, which she said was housed at "a Leicestershire school" between 1973 and 2014.
That school was my alma mater - now the Robert Smyth Academy. I remember the sculpture clearly, though I am afraid we never thought much of it.
It was sold two years ago by Gilding's of Market Harborough (frequent stars of TV's Flog It!) from whose website I have borrowed this image.
Astonia fetched £360 but should have made something like £30,000. Its whereabouts are now a mystery.
Leicestershire County Council had acquired it at the end of a mid 20th century era when the authorities believed the people, and children in particular, needed good public art. The wonderful School Prints come from that era too.
I mourn that era's passing, even if Astonia does not appeal to me today either.
The Liberal Democrats should cut their spending by moving their headquarters out of London, argues Simon McGrath.
"Pickering, North Yorkshire, pulled off protection by embracing the very opposite of what passes for conventional wisdom. On its citizens’ own initiative, it ended repeated inundation by working with nature, not against it." Geoffrey Lean explains how one town that beat the floods.
James O'Malley wants the left to stop retweeting bullshit.
"If it looks completely at home in this northern European setting, that's because a mosque has stood here, roughly 20 minutes' drive south-west of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, since 1558." Tharik Hussain on the Muslims of the Baltic.
There is an edition of Meeting Myself Coming Back currently available on the BBC iPlayer in which Paddy Ashdown looks back on his career with the help of some archive recordings.
It was first broadcast in 2012 when we still hoped the voters might reward us for entering government at a time of severe economic difficulty. As it turned out, in politics (as in the rest of life) no good deed goes unpunished.
One of the recordings comes from 1983 when the Liberator spread above was not not only on the front page of The Times but was also the lead item on the BBC evening news.
It is characteristic of Paddy's generous spirit that, unlike his predecessor as Liberal leader, he said nice things about the magazine.
There is still crucial work to do on the campaign to reform the pub trade, says Gareth Epps.
"Dickensian would not only be inspired by Dickens’s novels: in its alternating layers of melodrama and comedy, like the ‘streaky bacon’ effect he wrote about in Oliver Twist, its style would also be truly Dickensian." Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is literary adviser to the BBC series.
"The heritage minister, Tracey Crouch, announced that Clouds Hill, the tiny home of T E Lawrence , near Wareham in Dorset has been given Grade II* status," reports David Hencke.
Alwyn Turner introduces us to William Charles Boyden-Mitchell, better known as Bill Mitchell, and better known still as Uncle Bill of British Forces Broadcasting Service.
"The churches of mostly rural Suffolk ... harbour a curiosity - woodwoses (literally 'wild-men-of-the-woods'), hirsute manimals brandishing clubs." Matt Salusbury on creatures that make Jacks in the Green look tame.
Since I got myself a digital radio I have fallen in love with a new station: BBC Radio 4 Extra.
I suppose you have to be of a certain age to appreciate a station based on the archives, but who would want to listen to the Today programme when you can go to work cheered by an episode of Round the Horne?
This morning Julian and Sandy, as Bona Mediums, were demonstrating their gift of second vada.
Another programme I have heard on it recently is Alick Rowe's play from the 1980s Crisp and Even Brightly,which Stephen Tall has written about today.
In some ways, with its varied, interesting schedule, Radio 4 Extra resembles that other resort of the insomniac, BBC World Service, before it was transformed into a rolling news service. And it's certainly more fun than the World Service is today.
