BBC Radio 4 : A Point of View

At the kind invitation of Mark Damazer, controller of BBC Radio 4, in January 2007 I began preparing a set of broadcasts for the series “A Point of View”: each one running at just under ten minutes, or just over 1,500 words. The implications of an alliance between a website and an institution like the BBC are quite large, but all we need note at this point is that at least one contributor to a broadcast medium has now moved into a new world of here today and here tomorrow.

— London, 2007

Archive Editor writes:

Thirteen years ago the BBC News Website was still a model of intelligent Web layout: dense, full of information and with little of the bloat, white space, trivia and tabloid headlines that have since afflicted it. Most of the episode titles used by the Beeb's website editors differ in detail from those used by Clive in his 2011 Picador collection, and I suspect he had no part in the selection of images the BBC used to illustrate their pages. Here, shown full size, is the start of Clive's first article as presented by the BBC, in which he expresses his abiding conviction that the theory that has come to be called ‘anthropogenic’ climate change is in fact wrong. He named the piece “Attack of the Wheelie Bins”:

Here's that INTERVIEW mentioned in the above BBC website image.

When Clive compiled these essays for his book of A Point of View, he added a ‘Postscript’ to each story, expanding on and in places updating the thought behind the script. I have included these postscripts here. I've also included in each page a link to the corresponding page on the BBC News Magazine site, for indeed at the time of writing these pages still exist. Though they lack Clive's postscripts, they do include a valuable selection of readers' comments. In case you wish to read them without interruption while listening to Clive, I've arranged for these ‘BBC versions’, to open in a separate browser tab, regardless of your ‘Tab Behaviour’ preference set in the top menu bar. All the broadcasts are available here to listen to, as they were in the original clivejames.com: they are all duplicated in playlists on our AUDIO pages, and for simultaneous listening I've also placed an audio player interface on each page here — choose a story from the clickable menu at left.

Listen to A POINT OF VIEW in our Audio section.