I am a big fan of BBC Radio 3 - their serious music station*. Of late I've seen a few people complaining about it dumbing down because more of their programming has parts of longer compositions, rather than playing, say, a whole symphony or concerto. However, I think that those who moan have got it wrong. The accusation of dumbing down is partly because this is what the lighter commercial rival, Classic FM, does, and partly on the assumption that serious music lovers should stick with a whole piece as the composer intended not just listen to an edited highlight. The comparison with Classic FM, which almost always plays 'classical favourites' doesn't make much sense - Radio 3 continues to play a much wider range of music, from tudorbethan through to contemporary composers. But, for me at least, the sampler approach of often not playing a whole piece makes a lot of sense. Like many music lovers I subscribe to an all-you-can-eat music streaming service. For me, Radio 3 doe...

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from October 2014 I find it interesting the way that the media gets in a state of outrage when someone defaces a Banksy artwork. It feels a touch hypocritical. The image shown here has according to Wikipedia been 'defaced by a paintball gun’. Actually the 'defacing' is quite effective as it looks as if someone has shot at the people with a paint gun, which itself could be interpreted artistically (in fact, I didn't know it was 'defaced' until I looked it up). Admittedly if all someone does is scrawl a tag over it, it's not a great contribution. But even so, I'm not sure we have any right to complain. The artists in question need to expect that their audiences may abandon the reverence that is adopted by the audience for traditional art. This occurred to me when a friend was describing attending a play at Bristol's fairly avant garde Old Vic Theatre. Apparently the performance was of a Samuel Beckett radio play, and a...

I have been a fan of the British fantasy writer Alan Garner since meeting him, age 11. Garner attended the same school as me (significantly earlier), and came to give a talk, not to a huge auditorium but just a classroom of young readers.  For nearly a decade he brought out books that almost perfectly aged with me in their target audience, from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to Red Shift (with the last we parted company as I found it too depressing). I was sufficiently fascinated by his books that I made a home movie in the late 70s visiting many of the locations used in them.  For those who remember the copper mine on Alderley Edge used evocatively in his writing as a dark underground location, a friend and I (probably illegally) explored a bit of it - which is where the photos below come from. In The Weirdstone there is a strange booming noise in the mine, coming from the goblin-like creatures, which meant we did eventually decide to leave in a hurry when we heard a simila...

At the moment I’m commuting to Bristol once a week to do some work at the university on behalf of the Royal Literary Fund . I’m very fond of Bristol as a city, but there times when I wonder if their green policies have been entirely thought through. When they first introduced rental e-scooters I pointed out that they were sometimes left in hazardous locations - this seems less the case now, though I did come across one recently nearly blocking a pedestrian crossing. But the most dangerous aspect is some of the central bike lanes. I’m all in favour of getting people out of cars and buses, but I wish there was more focus on walking. This is significantly better for you over a particular time duration than using a bike or e-scooter - but that’s not my point. Inevitably fitting bike lanes into an old city centre can be tricky. And some of them here are downright dangerous. The only time I’ve been nearly killed by a bicycle was someone coming down the steep slope of Park Street in Bristol a...

To the south of Swindon, just outside the village of Wroughton (where my daughters went to school) is what's now rather grandly known as the Science and Innovation Park . This huge 540 acre site houses the Science Museum's store facility. It's also home to the museum's amazing library, where I can be seen telling the (then) BBC's Robert Peston about quantum theory - and acted as a track for the TV show Grand Tour before it stopped being a Top Gear lookalike. Last Tuesday, I was honoured to be invited to the unveiling of the new Hawking Building a massive store housing over 300,000 items from the huge to the tiny. The scale of the building is remarkable - it really does look like one of those CGI, bigger than anything you can really imagine, store houses you see in movies. But this is for real. Walking round is quite an experience. Unlike a modern, carefully curated museum, this is a wonderful jumble, where you might find a Dalek lurking near a submarine alongside...

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from October 2009 Some of the old posts I'm revisiting are merely still interesting (hopefully), but I was surprised to see as far back as 2009 that the impact of social media on the spread of news and views was already clear, even if I perhaps underplayed the negatives. It's also notable as I had totally forgotten about this story in writing my new book,   Brainjacking , out next month, which very much picks up on the way the ability of storytelling to inform, influence and manipulate has been amplified by technology, from writing through to AI. There has been much comment  and complaint  in the electronic world as a result of  Jan Moir's unpleasant Daily Mail article  about the death of  Stephen Gately . What I found most fascinating was how out of touch Moir was in her response to the wave of complaint that surged around the internet like a tsunami. She described this as a 'heavily orchestrated internet campaign.' Th...

When I wrote my first popular science book, Light Years , I got some lovely reviews - and one or two stinkers. I asked my editor if I should respond to the negative remarks. She said 'Definitely not - unless the review contains something that's factually untrue, you only do yourself damage by attempting to put straight what is, in the end, an opinion.' This is an attitude I've stuck with through thick and thin. Since then I have also reviewed many hundreds of books. I have only twice had an author or publisher kick back against a negative review. One was of an adult colouring book (a genre, I confess, I detest - I ought to stress I didn't ask for a review copy, I was sent it unsolicited), where the author felt that, as an author myself, I was letting the side down - we've all got to earn a living. I did, as a result, remove my review from Amazon. The other has just happened - and the response was not just a moan. Either an author or the publisher put in a DMCA ...