libby purves and midweek

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So today she had a very moving a positive account of a holocaust childhood by thomas buergenthal.

And then an interview with a pig farmer?

Not the best combination in the world!

But hey at least it wasn't someone who has sailed around their own bath tub, or rowed up the drain pipe.

I don't know why they stopped doing that!

Check this lass out from another midweek, classic contributor
SALLY CRABTREE
Sally Crabtree is a former world class gymnast and now a poet, artist, singer and writer. She performs all over the world with her cartwheeling poems and magical Poetree where members of the audience are encouraged to pick an object off the tree and listen to what it inspires.

Jeezuz
Who comes up with this self indulgent twadlle.

I guessed they stopped it as it amounted to free advertising, but whenever I hear mention of the Yvonne Arnaud the memories flood back!

Surely that last one was taken from Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner?

no, bocca, I couldn't make it up, straight from the midweek archive!!

oh, here's another quintessential guest!

JOHNNY KINGDOM
Johnny Kingdom is the poacher turned Exmoor naturalist, cameraman and conservationist. After suffering a terrible facial accident when felling trees, he vowed never to kill another animal, turning instead to shooting them with his video camera and making wildlife films. In his book Bambi and Me he tells of how he rescued a badly injured deer, how she survived and became part of Johnny's family. Bambi and Me: A Deer in the Family is published by Bantam Press.

Is that a joke???

Queenceleste - I'm sure you didn't make it up. It's just that Pseuds' Corner specialises in reprinting that sort of pretentious, self-absorbed twaddle. Perhaps you should submit it (I think there's a prize)?

No! check it out here!

Ahhhhhh, it never stops, I could go on and on and on:
HUGH WARWICK
Hugh Warwick has been a hedgehog obsessive for over twenty years ever since an expedition to the Orkney Islands. In his book A Prickly Affair he tells of how he spent months on nocturnal tracking missions, his work being instrumental in stopping the hedgehog cull on South Uist. He is, of course, a life member of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and has travelled to the International Hedgehog Olympics. A Prickly Affair: My Life with Hedgehogs is published by Penguin Books.

Go on, queenceleste. You could earn £10!

FRAN CROWE
Fran Crowe is an artist. After reading that a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report in 2006 estimated that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic pieces per square mile of ocean worldwide, she set herself the challenge of collecting 46,000 pieces of litter whilst walking on local Suffolk beaches in order to 'save' one square mile of sea.

Oh I hate it. It gives me the same sense of embarrassed awkwardness as Loose Ends used to... "here are a load of tenuously linked, not-all-that-good artistes/writers/whatever, all topped off with an excruciatingly poor musical performance and you all have to clap"

I feel awful for LP about her son but that aside, she is the most patronising and clueless interviewer. It's like being quizzed by your embarrassing MIL who doesn't really understand the first thing about you, in front of a roomful of people, and somehow being made to look stupid.

However I would listen to Midweek all day every day rather than have to endure... The Moral Maze. aaaaarrrrrggggggghhh

Oh snowleopard I disagree! The Moral Maze is there for you to hate them all! I love to hate Melanie Philipps! I love to hate her!

But the awful thing about LP is the way she gets all huffypuffyposhygiggly about anything POSH, like when she gets a chance to use any cognoscenti oxbridge language or when she gets to talk about her AYA in INJA!!! It's just too awful because she's so excited and feels so superior and special because she's so terribly clever and posh and such a magnificent sailor!. I just find it all so self-regarding. And so me me me.

I love the Moral Maze. It's so cathartic to hate strangers. Melanie Phillips and Michael Gove should be available on prescription.

I'm fine with hating the people on the Moral Maze, but I hate them SO MUCH I just can't bear it. They are just so intensely STUPID and I get furious because it's such a waste when they could be getting people who have a bit of sense to discuss important issues and instead it's like the Mary Whitehouse Experience's "History Today" sketches. I have to turn it off so I don't fling my nice radio against the wall.

What gets me most about LP is her championing of quirky, different, alternative etc people. What she is basically saying is, "aren?t you boring stick-in-the-muds, you mundane listeners at home? Your dull lives are spent doing wearisome things like funding infrastructure (emergency rescue for sailors and mountaineers anyone?) and paying licence fees so that my whacky guests and I can look down our noses at your tedious existences."

It?s like all those Gap Year students asking me to sponsor their trip of a lifetime charitable outreach.

LOL R4, so true, and so true snowleopard, but still my pleasure in hating La Philipps triumphs over all. I like waiting to see how truly offensive they can be too. It's like the Daily Mail Live!

But R4, be honest, you deep down wish, like me, to be a hedgehog juggling, resting actor/acrobat/vegan commune dweller recovering from being rescued from a cult and having written a book of music for people to play on bottles don't you?

Gosh you do sound an interesting cove Celeste. I'm afraid that I am nothing so exciting although I must admit that I am in the middle of writing a book about Great Uncle Mungo (you know, the one who crossed Antarctica on a llama) based on some of his diaries that I found in the attic of the East Wing. Are you free to come down for the weekend, I'm having a dinner party on Saturday and dear Libby will be there. Do say that you will come.

I haven?t heard MM in ages. I couldn't stand listening to Richard (I'm the Rudest Man in Britain doncha know and it's totally genuine and not put on for effect) Starkey.

Ho Hum, I like LP, midweek, and her columns in the Times. They are nice.

So so I, crumpet - you're not alone. I also enjoy her books - the first childcare book I read was by her - How Not To Be A Perfect Mother, which is packed with humour and sane advice.

She's also written a number of novels, and a book called One Summer's Grace, about how she and Paul Heiney spent 4 months one summer sailing right round the coast of Britain with their children, who were aged about 3 and 5 at the time.

I'm there R4! Shall I bring my hedgehogs?

Oh I feel bad about being mean about LIbby. But can we at least agree that being called Libby is, in itself, is a kind of Horror? What is Libby? Where does it come from? Was she called Elizabeff and her ickle wickle bwover couldn't pwonounce Elizabeff and called her Libby!! Is that what it is?? Help!

Libby can be a shortening of Elizabeth or Olivia, as far as I know - I don't think Libby or her parents invented it though.

Staying Sunny, I read those books too and sent copies to my sisters when they were pregnant. Hers was the first baby related book that made me think, 'I can do this and still be me.'

You're right, LowSlung - and they didn't make me feel like a total failure as a mother either.

this thread has made me laugh - can I add the occassions when LP broadcasts from her own home (Suffolk farm house of course) usually at Christmas ?
am v sad about her son though.
Jenni Murray irritates me - it's partly that peering over her glasses but largely her voice - I think it was Jan Ravens who said she was very hard to do.
And yes, some of the performers on Loose Ends are cringingly bad

Oh Mary Anne, don't please start me on Loose Ends! I haven't got the strength for any more chuckling theatrical anecdotes that have been told a million times and are neither true nor funny!!!

arghhhhhhh!