Show Notes
On the 75th anniversary of the iconic comic strip Peanuts, psychoanalyst and author Josh Cohen shares how Charlie Brown and the Snoopy gang have become his constant companions—and how they can help us navigate the frustrating squiggle of life. Charles Schultz’s daily newspaper comic strip is perhaps the most enduring, beloved and iconic cartoon ever penned. Even if you’ve never read the strip itself, you are unlikely to have escaped its famous characters’ journeys across the decades and the globe. The round-headed, wobbly mouthed Charlie Brown and his dog Snoopy, often found snoozing atop his kennel, have been emblazoned across t shirts, crockery and pretty much every other conceivable piece of merchandise. They have inspired TV shows, pop songs, and even been the namesakes of Apollo lunar modules. Far from just a bunch of cutesy doodles, as many have come to see it, Peanuts’ cross-generational appeal is down to its spot-on depiction of the complex emotions that follow us all from childhood into adulthood. From Charlie Brown’s humiliation on the baseball field to his frenemy Lucy’s unrequited pining for her piano-playing crush, and her brother Linus’ desperate attachment to his security blanket, the strip reflects the everyday pain and frustration of being human. And, with warmth and wit, offers its readers a way to live with it. In fact, Peanuts deals so much in the intense emotional experiences of its young protagonists that one of its most recognisable recurring gags is Lucy’s booth offering ‘PSYCHIATRIC HELP 5¢’. Stepping out from behind his analytic couch and taking a seat at its cartoon simulacrum in that famous booth, Josh unpacks the psychological truths illustrated in the comic’s four main characters - Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy. Hooked by a copy of Peanuts Jubilee aged five, they were his contemporaries. Today, after 50 years of avid reading, he’s on the other side of the two-way channel between childhood and adulthood that Peanuts opens up. He investigates the emotional pull of the comic for him and for so many of us - including the other writers and thinkers we hear from who share his passion. Presenter and Writer: Josh Cohen Producer: Heather Dempsey Executive Producer: Samantha Psyk Editor: Kirsten Lass A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4
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Lois Pryce has a mystery growing in her garden. On the banks of the River Thames stands an enormous old apple tree, producing fruit unlike any she has seen before. For years, Lois has wondered what it is. So she sends off a handful of clues - apples, leaves and a twig - to the experts at the National Fruit Collection. The answer comes back - Annie Elizabeth. It sounds more like a person than an apple. So who was Annie Elizabeth, and why did someone give her name to a tree? Lois sets off on the trail, entering the eccentric world of Britain’s apple detectives. Her search leads from thousands of trees in the orchards of Kent to a house in Leicestershire with a remarkable survivor in its garden. Along the way there are Victorian records to decipher, an unlikely marriage, a missing baptism, a child who seems to vanish from the records - and one tantalising name that keeps leading Lois deeper into the past. Eventually, armed with a map and one last lead, Lois finds herself on her hands and knees in an overgrown churchyard, tearing ivy from a gravestone that has been hidden for decades. What emerges is a Victorian family mystery of love, respectability, scandal, grief and an extraordinary living connection between a little girl born more than 160 years ago and the apple tree still growing in Lois’s garden today. Blending present-day detective work with specially created Victorian drama, The Mysterious Case of Annie Elizabeth asks how a name can survive long after almost everything else has been forgotten. Writer & Presenter: Lois Pryce Producer: Louise Orchard Sound Design: Rowan Bishop Original Music: James Aplin A 2 Degrees West production for BBC Radio 4
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 cemented the Cold War, confirming the USSR’s dominance over Eastern Europe and the limitations of NATO. Many thousands were killed. As we approach the 70th anniversary, Nathalie Olah, whose own grandfather was one of 200,000 people to flee Hungary as the working-class uprising was violently suppressed by Soviet tanks, visits Budapest in search of its traces. The Parliament building is still marked with bullet holes. On the facade of the Magyar Radio building, once occupied by students, she finds a sculpture commemorating four of those killed. After decades of suppression, the uprising is now highly symbolic and used in recent years to serve different political agendas. Nathalie speaks with younger people touched in different ways by ’56. Kornélia Deres is a poet whose family stood on different sides of the conflict, and whose work is informed by intergenerational trauma. Noémi Varga is a filmmaker who observes the memory culture of ’56 and its uses in public discourse. Elemer Balazs is a musician who performed Liszt's Funérailles (composed after the crushing of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution) at the inauguration of the new Prime Minister, Peter Magyar, ushering in what many wish to believe is a new era of hope. Presented by Nathalie Olah Produced by Alan Hall A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4
In 1916, struggling across the mountains of South Georgia after the loss of the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton sensed that his party of three had become four. T.S. Eliot carried the idea into The Waste Land with "Who is the third who walks always beside you?", also a reference to the biblical tale of the Road to Emmaus where a mysterious unseen companion accompanies two disciples. The Third Man has shadowed explorers ever since - the belief, at the far edge of exhaustion, fear or grief, that someone unseen has come to walk alongside. Poet Kathleen Jamie has written a new narrative poem in which that presence speaks, and sets it among people who have met it: Stephen Venables, descending alone from the summit of Everest; Peter Hillary, on the long haul to the South Pole; and Chamonix mountain guide Jean-Franck Charlet who remembers a glacier he had to cross alone, roped to an unknown companion. In a deer hide in the Scottish hills, mountaineer Sandy Allan recalls the white rabbit in a red waistcoat that kept him company on Nanga Parbat, and Liz Duff, the first Scottish woman on Everest, describes the day in 1985 when she and two others watched a figure carry a load along Everest's North-East Ridge. The climbers at the next camp saw no one arrive. Is it the mind protecting itself, or something else? Between the voices, the wind and the ice, Kathleen Jamie listens for who is there. With thanks to Globule Radio Chamonix for recording Jean-Franck. Presenter: Kathleen Jamie Producer: Victoria Ferran A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4
For much of their lives, Micki, Esther, Nicola and Colin were devoted members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Nigerian Deeper Life Bible Church and Mormonism, respectively. Each recounts the moments when certainty began to unravel. In raw and honest detail, their stories explore the difficult line between deep religious devotion and unhealthy control. Along the way, for each of them, the balance tipped. Eventually, the effort of holding on became harder than letting go. With thanks to Faith to Faithless, a Humanists UK service guided by people with lived experience of leaving controlling religious environments. Original music by Steve Urquhart. (Photograph: Nicola Brophy) Produced by May Robson A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4
Young Polish field-recordist Izabela Dłużyk travels to the Amazonian rainforest of Peru. Izabela, blind from birth, is a self-taught recordist with a wonderful ears for sound and limitless passion for the natural world. She is ‘rather shy and modest’ by her own account, but indefatigable in her adventurous pursuit of lovely recordings, leaving her recorders running night and day. She knows around 300 creature sounds by heart and in Peru she meets Red Howler Monkeys, Scarlet Macaws, Cobalt winged parakeets and many others. But what do these names and animals mean to someone who 'cannot imagine' colour or any other visual mapping? Izabela in Peru leads sighted listeners to a deeper understanding of blindness, especially the innate blindness that has shaped her inner world. Join Izabela as she climbs fearlessly up a 40 metre scaffolding rig to record above the tree canopy. 'I cannot understand height emotionally or intellectually,' Izabela says 'I cannot touch it with my hands or feet...what is 40 metres?' Izabela first delighted BBC audiences with ‘Izabela in the Forest’ in 2023 when she guided us around the ancient forest of Białowieża in her native Poland. Producer Monica Whitlock Mix by Peter Ringrose