The Forum (BBC podcast)

[bgmnts]

Anyone else give this podcast a listen? I listened to a bit of one episode and it seemed like In Our Time with fancy introductions. It's put out by the BBC World Service, a lot of their programming I quite enjoy, rather than Radio 4.

It's been around since 2009 apparently but haven't heard it before.

Is it a good alternative or accompaniment for In Our Time? If so, are there any particularly good episodes fo start off with?

[Theoretical Dentist]

I've been meaning to mention this in the In Our Time thread, since it's a very similar programme and may well be of interest to IOT fans.

The format is virtually identical to In Our Time – a presenter and three experts discussing one topic for the whole programme. The experts are almost always academics as with IOT, although I've occasionally heard episodes where one of them is a writer of popular books or someone with a direct connection to the subject. Looking at the descriptions of the very early programmes, it looks like it had a different format then, possibly interviews with several unconnected people. But I've only been listening for the last few years, and not to every episode even then.

The main difference is the selection of topics. Some of the episodes are about the kind of things that In Our Time covers, and there have probably been some topics covered by both programmes. But the history and culture episodes have a more globally diverse range of subjects, as you might expect from the World Service. And The Forum also covers topics that feel a bit more modern, things like economics, sociology and technology, that IOT doesn't tend to do (although IOT does have some episodes with more of a pure science focus that cover recent developments). Looking at recent Forum epsiodes there are topics like supermarkets, throwaway consumables, and deepfakes, which I wouldn't expect IOT to cover. In fact most of the most recent episodes are things like this, although if you go a bit further back there are plenty of IOT-like subjects too. Some of the cultural subjects are more recent too – it's hard to imagine IOT doing an epsiode about the birth of hip hop, for example.

The other big difference, for better or worse, is that it isn't presented by Melvyn Bragg. There are a few rotationg presenters (probably others in the past) and I don't have any particular favourites, which is probably a sign that they take less of an active role in the discussion.

Another slight difference is that it sometimes deviates slightly from the studio discussion format by including recordings about the things they're discussing, but that's never a big part of the episode, at least in ones I've heard.

I don't have any particular recommendations for episodes, I think it depends more on the kind of things you're interested in. But if you're looking for episodes the hard-to-find programme website is much more useful than the BBC Sounds page that comes up if you search the BBC website. In particular there's a page categorising episodes by subject, althugh I don't know if it includes all the episodes.

It used to be broadcast on BBC World Service immediately after In Our Time on Radio 4, so if you liked you could listen to one after the other, although I never listened to IOT live because of the podcast extras. But The Forum has moved to Wednesdays now, and like all World Service progrmames it's repeated several times. Of course it's all available online too.

[bgmnts]

Cheers much! I did listen to an episode and it did go down pretty much like an In Our Time episode without it revolving around the host as much, as well as those one or two deviations where they add some production value and have a dramatic reading of some text.

Definitely might have to put this on the roster of podcasts though.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

state of the forum thread