It’s a new year on BBC Radio 4 and Karl Marx is in his cups. After a pint at every pub on London’s Tottenham Court Road, he’s arguing with the regulars, singing rowdily with his friends and running away from the police after some 2am stone-throwing at streetlamps. “Being on the run was something that shaped Karl Marx’s entire life,” says Naomi Alderman, opening the second series of her Radio 4 show Human Intelligence by connecting the thinker’s boozy escapades with his broader autobiography.
In lesser hands this link could sound crass, but Alderman – a feted novelist and video game writer – deftly fleshes out her subjects with a lightness of touch. Her second series about “great minds (that) don’t think alike” repeats the successful format of the first, launched at the beginning of last year. Broadcast after the World at One every weekday, each 15-minute episode drops like a vitamin shot for the brain in the murk of a midwinter afternoon.
Alderman reads a letter from Marx’s disgruntled father to illustrate her point; he’s not, she says, ‘someone with a talent for stability’
Alderman reads a letter from Marx’s disgruntled father to illustrate her point; he’s not, she says, ‘someone with a talent for stability’
The first five episodes focus on individuals who created their brilliant work in exile, such as Marx, who landed in London after being kicked out of Prussia, France and Belgium. We’re also encouraged to change our perceptions of him as a “man with a big beard writing very long books about economics” to someone who, while a genius, found it hard to finish projects unless under extreme pressure. In a lovely moment, Alderman reads a letter from Marx’s disgruntled father to illustrate her point; he’s not, she says, “someone with a talent for stability”.
The series is a co-production with the Open University, and Alderman’s zippy approach makes her subjects accessible across generations, taking the idea of history away from heroes on pedestals, which is much-needed today. Her roll call is also global and diverse. I loved learning about how Marie Curie’s mind was fed by Poland’s Flying University (an educational organisation operating secretly in the repressive Russian empire) as much as I did discovering the progressive literature and letters of the Mexican nun, poet and thinker Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Ten episodes are already online and perfect for an early year reset.
This commission, among others, shows how well BBC radio teams have thought about programmes fitting into people’s lives at this time of year. Full disclosure, though: I say this as a freelance programme-maker with an Archive on 4 documentary being broadcast on Radio 4 this weekend.
Photograph by Pål Hansen/The Observer
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