08/11/2020

Available for over a year

Fi Glover presents the longer weekly edition of the programme on the shared experience of being in lockdown and beyond. In this edition small business owners in the north-west, Catalina who runs a children’s play centre in Bolton and Conor is a licensee who runs two venues in Liverpool, share their thoughts and anxieties about lockdown; Lisa from Liverpool and Christina from Gloucestershire, both funeral celebrants, exchange notes on their working lives during the pandemic; and Fi interviews two people who would like to record chats with strangers for the Project. The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moments of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in this decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject Producer: Mohini Patel