Radio In Our Time is a weekly live BBC radio discussion programme in which the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg and several academics elucidate a topic of a philosophical, historical, cultural or scientific nature. It's been on air since October 1998 and its format has changed little in that time, a moment in the week to listen to a group of very clever people saying some very clever things for forty-five minutes.
The series has clocked up nearly a thousand episodes and its inevitable with an archive that rich that a listener is more likely to catch-up on instalments which cover subjects with which they might casually be interested or being studying at school or university. Except the website only sorts the episodes into very broad topics, culture, history, philosophy, religion and science so someone wanting to hear about mathematics or theatre has to wade through many pages of other topics.
Which is why, with my librarian's brain, I hit upon the idea of sorting the episodes using a library classification system and after the comparing a few decided Dewey Decimal Classification system (DDC) would suit the purpose because it's less complicated to work through than others and will be most familiar to readers due to its prevalence in public libraries. Also Library of Congress can be astonishingly obtuse with all of its letters AND numbers.
Find below the results of my free time this past week and a half. As you can see it's pretty logically ordered, a combination of following an abridged copy of DDC designed for small libraries originally published in 1979, Classify (an experimental classification site which aggregates the choices of thousands of librarians across the planet) and this Wikipedia page which has the most recent names for class names and hierarchical divisions.
Classification is automatically a compromise. You're applying a numerical label to an object which it wasn't really designed for, so on some occasions, especially with something like In Our Time which revels in obtuse topics, there isn't a perfect place for the episode to go. Also I've only used the a heading when it pertains to an episode which is why it looks like there are gaps in the sequence. Melvyn and the gang haven't covered every sub-division in the DDC.
Every title below links to the episode's page on the Radio 4 website.
You'll notice that if you're on a PC and you hover over many of the links have what would be the original shelf number which was part of the initial iteration to show I'd done the work. But it became too fiddly to update since so I've left them out and some of the items have moved around since then too. There are too many of them to remove so we're stuck with them, but this paragraph was by way of explanation.
You might also like to hear, Melvyn talk to Mishal Husain on the Today programme to mark the 1000th episode.
Anyway, I hope this is of some use to you and if it is, please consider leaving a Ko-Fi donation. The most recent episodes are here and I'll try to keep this list updated as much as possible.
