Radio Oldie

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of if… The Oldie screened Lindsay Anderson’s anti-establishment satire set in an English public school at the Soho's Curzon. David Wood – who played Johnny in the film – spoke to Valerie Grove, the Oldie's radio columnist, afterwards. Here is part of that conversation, followed by a few questions from the audience.

Ten years after Harold Pinter's death – and on the eve of a new season of his plays – actor Kenneth Cranham remembers his friend's advice on how to understand and act in his works

Our Digital Editor, Annabel Sampson, talks to Sara Wheeler about Anton Chekhov’s Russian garden, that has been copied in Devon after a blooming debut at this year’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. Chekhov’s work as a doctor was invigorated by a deep sympathy with the natural world. Listen here.

The Oldie’s Agony Aunt, the stand-up, novelist and columnist Virginia Ironside, opens up about solving reader conundrums, something she has done now for nearly 40 years. She airs her mixed feelings about celebrity agony aunts and the unreadable prose of some of her contemporaries. Our Digital Editor goes to her house in West London, to see Virginia and meet her cat.

They were famous queens, unrecognised visionaries, great artists and trailblazing politicians. They all pushed back boundaries and revolutionised our world. Jenni Murray presents the history of Britain as you've never seen it before, through the lives of twenty-one women who refused to succumb to the established laws of society, whose lives embodied hope and change, and who still have the power to inspire us today. This talk was recorded at an Oldie Literary Lunch at Simpson's-in-the-Strand on July 17th 2018.

Who is your favourite prime minister? Gimson has written a vivid account of the lives of PMs from Walpole to May. The former parliamentary sketchwriter for the Telegraph and biographer of Boris Johnson, Gimson is the dream guide to our First Lords of the Treasury. This talk was recorded at an Oldie Literary Lunch at Simpson's-in-the-Strand on July 17th 2018.

The former head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit and former editor of the TLS will talk about his latest book, Prime Movers. It examines the political ideas of twelve great thinkers across the centuries, including Pericles, Jesus Christ and Edmund Burke. This talk was recorded at an Oldie Literary Lunch at Simpson's-in-the-Strand on July 17th 2018.

Christopher Howse recalls the heyday of London’s boozy artistic bohemia – from the Forties to the Eighties. In conversation with Harry Mount.

From the man who exposed the Jimmy Savile scandal – in The Oldie – comes a book on the mysterious death of Dr David Kelly in 2003. It remains one of the most shadowy episodes in recent British political history.  This talk was recorded at an Oldie Literary Lunch as part of Buxton International Festival on July 7th 2018.

Drawing on lost royal letters from a closed archive, The White King introduces us to Charles I as the monarch at the heart of an epic tale: of populist politicians, the fall of the mighty, religious hatreds, civil war, the power of a new media, and a maligned queen. This talk was recorded at an Oldie Literary Lunch as part of Buxton International Festival on July 7th 2018.