Radio is a creative and intimate medium delivering strong and exciting programmes to large and committed audiences.
CTVC has in recent years expanded its output on the BBC networks, in particular World Service and Radio 4.
UPCOMING RADIO PRODUCTIONS:
IRAQ’S FORGOTTEN CONFLICT
Radio 4, TX April 6, 8pm
Presenter Edward Stourton
Untold until now is the story of a campaign of liquidation against Iraq’s religious minorities who, post invasion, have faced extinction via persecution, exile, murder. As troops move out, politicians herald ‘the beginnings of a pluralistic democracy’. Catholic Archbishop Louis Sako, of Kirkuk, begs to differ – ‘15,000 Christians fleeing Mosul alone, and 1,000 murdered, cannot be much of a basis for either pluralism or democracy’. Now a Bishop in Beirut has said that the Iraqi model of extinguishing Christians could be extended to the whole of the Middle East.
Does nobody understand what is going on here? asks Archbishop Sako. Does nobody care about our ancient and honoured heritage, our religious and cultural traditions?
CTVC Radio does. Edward Stourton, of Radio 4 fame, visits Iraq, to discover what is happening to an urbane, educated people, and why it matters in the context of ambitions for a pluralistic democracy.
THE PRICE OF BIOFUELS (2 parts)
World Service, Next on: Mon, 26 Apr 2010, 09:05
Presenter Gerry Northam
The West is investing heavily in bio-fuels (liquid fuels derived from plant materials), despite mounting evidence that what was once seen as the answer to global warming and dwindling oil stocks is now playing a negative role in the world food crisis. The UN has variously labelled bio-fuels as a nightmare, a silent tsunami, even a crime against humanity. Yet still production targets grow. Why? Because, say NGOs, behind the environmental havoc, huge rises in food prices, and worsening poverty, lie deals done between governments and energy companies.
Gerry Northam, of TV’s Panorama and Radio’s File on Four, investigates.
USEFUL IDIOTS (2 parts)
World Service, TX July 7 / 14
Presenter John Sweeney
Lenin once labelled intellectuals, politicians, reporters, who praised tyrannies and tyrannical leaders as ‘useful idiots’. In his context it meant those who thought the Soviet Union and Communism heralded ‘heaven on earth’, whereas not only were they grimly wrong, but were also held in contempt by those they praised.
It is a phrase to fit so much of history, right up to current times. Hitler (adored by Diana Mitord) slaughtered 35 million people, Mao (admired by Tony Benn) murdered 70 million, Stalin (the world’s great hope, said George Bernard Shaw) killed even more. Today, celebrities and journalists fit the bill, whether gushing naively about the likes of Castro or Chavez, or submitting to the spin of presidents and politicians.
John Sweeney visits Russia and America, raids the archives, and confronts some of today’s ‘useful idiots’.
RECENT RADIO PRODUCTIONS:
BOSNIA'S WAR BABIES
World Service Heart and Soul
TX October 28 / November 4
Presenter Wendy Robbins, Producer David Coomes
Radovan Karadzic was on trial in the Hague, indicted for war crimes during the Bosnian conflict of the ‘90s. These crimes included the army’s systematic rape of 20,000 women and children, which continues to have repercussions in the form of stigma, poverty, sickness, shame, and - for those women who bore children AND kept them - the added burden of teenagers asking difficult questions about their identity. In 2 reports, Wendy Robbins hears from women who, 14 years on, still find it necessary to pursue justice for themselves – which perhaps is unsurprising in the context of discovering only intense lobbying ensured that rape was so much as mentioned in the indictment against Karadzic.
LISTEN ONLINE
THE OLDEST BIBLE – Radio 4, Wednesday, October 2009
Radio 4 repeated this programme which was first broadcast a year previously, Roger Bolton’s investigation into a British Library ‘exclusive’ – the publication, after years of painstaking worldwide searches and researches, of Codex, the very first Bible. It’s a fascinating tale, made more so by the differences between that Codex and what we now accept as The Bible.
BBC SITE
CITIZEN JOURNALISM –
DEMOCRACY OR CHAOS?
Citizen Journalism is a fast-growing worldwide phenomenon.
‘We are all journalists now,’ boast the twitters and bloggers who – thanks to the internet – can talk to the world as reporter, broadcaster, publisher, and editor.
In 2 programmes for the BBC’s World Service, Michael Buerk goes to the heart of the phenomenon, discovering the best and the worst, analysing the potential and the dangers, and focusing on issues of Truth and Trust.
‘Authenticity’ is what Citizen Journalists believe they are about, seeing themselves as Davids fighting against Goliaths. But critics point to problems of fakery, manipulation, partisanship, bias, and lack of accountability – and ask why it should be assumed that ‘the little man’ is necessarily morally superior to ‘the big organisation’.
Yet in countries where freedom of expression is repressed, it is bloggers who are challenging authoritarian regimes in ways traditional journalists cannot. It is Citizen Journalists who are enabling the rest of us to read stories and to see pictures that repressive regimes would rather stayed secret.
The critics remain vocal. What has really been achieved? they ask. Small victories, perhaps, but no Watergates as yet. And will this phenomenon extend democracy or end in chaos?
Michael Buerk investigates.
In Programme 1 he talks to bloggers and critics from Sri Lanka, Iran, Burma and Iraq.
In Programme 2 he visits Cairo, and experiences for himself how bloggers – arguably among the most hounded anywhere in the world - are taking on the Egyptian government.
‘What is going on,’ he reports, ‘is a struggle between old power and new technology for the control of cyberspace itself.’
LISTEN ONLINE
THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES
In Guatemala four years ago, 80 million documents were discovered in a warehouse. They contain evidence of police atrocities during Guatemala's 36 year long civil war. Gerry Northam investigates the story of the archive’s chance discovery.
LISTEN ONLINE
BBC Radio 1's The Surgery
CTVC and Truetube recently contributed 2 short documentaries – Postcards Back from the Edge - to a Mental Health Special on Radio 1’s The Surgery.
These – presented by a character from Hollyoaks – told the stories of three young people whose experiences of mental illness had taken them to the edge of an abyss, but who were beginning the long hard road back to normality.
PREVIOUS RADIO PRODUCTIONS:
Countdown to the Olympics
BBC WORLD SERVICE
2 programmes which investigate the dark side of the build-up to the China Olympics.
Presenter Gerry Northam
Click HERE to listen to Programme 1
Click HERE to listen to Programme 2
The Cult of Kidnapping
Radio 4, 2000, Monday, June 9
Kidnapping is a growing phenomenon worldwide.
Motivation is about politics and religion, but also increasingly about money. Funding of revolutionary movements dried up in the aftermath of the Cold War, so the revolutionaries had to look elsewhere for financial support. The so-called War on Terror has exacerbated things, and also the opening up of new economic territories which has led to more people than ever before entering dangerous places.
Top of the kidnapping ‘hotspots’ are Venezuela, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan, with India not far behind. Until very recently, Colombia was undisputed ‘kidnap capital of the world’ – that was before its government decided to put into practice some hard-line policies, which are reducing the kidnapping figures but alienating a lot of Colombians most involved.
Frank Gardner, the BBC’s Security Correspondent investigates the phenomenon worldwide, and also visits Colombia where – with access to both sides of the battle to beat the kidnappers – he captures unique insights into kidnapping. It is also where he discovers that the Church is the only non-government organization allowed to get involved with kidnappers and the kidnapped.
Frank Gardner on the culture of kidnapping, in which he talks to kidnappers and kidnapped, vsits Colombia - the kidnapping capital of the world - and considers winners and losers long-term.
Presenter Frank Gardner
The Child Preachers
BBC Radio4
John McCarthy visits America to report on the phenomenon of children as young as 7 engaged in a ministry of evangelism and healing.
NOMINATED FOR 2009 SANDFORD SAINT MARTIN AWARDS
From Calvary to Lambeth
Radio 4 and World Service
Archbishop Desmond Tutu expresses shame for a worldwide Church which - as he sees it is - is homophobic and obsessed with issues of human sexuality. In the context of a suffering world,. God must be weeping to see a Church with priorities so different from those of its Founder. The likes of George Carey, Ann Widdecombe MP, and the US conservative Bishop, Robert Duncan, take a different line.
Presenter Michael Buerk.
Click HERE to listen to this Programme
God Of War, God Of Peace
Radio 4 and World Service
In 2 programmes, the conviction that where Religion has played a part in starting a conflict Religion has to be involved in stopping it. First, the Middle East where the Alexandria Process has had some unpublicised successes - and secondly, Kaduna in Nigeria where Muslims and Christians have been reconciled.
Presenter John McCarthy
Click HERE to listen to Programme 1
Click HERE to listen to Programme 2
Turning Right
Radio 4
The rise of the Far Right in Britain, and what many see as the threat posed to British society by fascism, nationalism and racism. What does the BNP really believe? And why is it claiming to have its roots in the Christian faith?
Presenter Gerry Northam
Click HERE to listen to this Programme
Who Killed Christianity?
Radio 4
In 5 programmes, the historian, Dr David Starkey, argues that major Christian figures distorted, even betrayed, the Christianity of its Founder, Jesus Christ. St Paul, the Emperor Constantine, Martin Luther, Sir Isaac Newton and Pope John Paul II are all put in the dock - and Starkey, in each instance, engages with two defenders.
Click HERE to listen to Programme 1
Click HERE to listen to Programme 2
Click HERE to listen to Programme 3
Click HERE to listen to Programme 4
Click HERE to listen to Programme 5
