In Our Time (BBC Radio 4) - History

History

See also: List of In Our Time programmes

In Our Time was conceived for Bragg in 1998 after he was forced to quit his decade-long role as presenter for Start the Week due to a perceived conflict of interest arising from his appointment as a Labour life peer. He was offered the Thursday "death-slot" and decided he would "do what always wanted to do," and "hastily battered out a simple idea" with producer Olivia Seligman expecting the show would only last a few months. By September 1999, he had taken a time slot that was previously attracting an audience of 600,000 and grown it to 1.5 million. By 2000, the half-hour show was expanded to 45 minutes and to include three guest speakers. In 2005, the programme was made available as a podcast from the BBC website and iTunes for one week after broadcast.

In 2005, listeners were invited to vote in a popularity contest for the "greatest philosopher in history" with the winner selected as the subject of the final programme before the summer break. With 30,000 votes cast, the contest was won by Karl Marx with 27.9% of the votes. Other shortlisted figures were David Hume (12.7%), Ludwig Wittgenstein (6.8%), Friedrich Nietzsche (6.5%), Plato (5.6%), Immanuel Kant (5.6%), Thomas Aquinas (4.8%), Socrates (4.8%), Aristotle (4.5%) and Karl Popper (4.2%). The poll was controversial but led to widespread reporting, and a boost in the programme's overall listenership, as various UK celebrities and news outlets championed their favourites.

In 2009, selected transcripts of episodes from the programme were compiled in the book In Our Time: A Companion to the Radio 4 series, edited by Bragg .

Since 2010, every episode of the programme has been available from its website as streaming audio, making it one of the first BBC programmes to have its entire archive released.

Since October 2011, the entire archive has been available to download as individual podcasts.

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