Radio Listener by Jim Gilchrist

Published on 09/09/2012 17:21

FED UP of people bending your ear about how bad the weather is? Then don’t tune in to Book of the Week, which boasts a suitably gloomily titled celebration of our national obsession,

Book of the Week: Bring Me Sunshine: A Windswept, Rain-soaked, Sun-kissed, Snow-capped Guide to Our Weather

Mon-Fri, Radio 4, 9:45am

A Brief History of Blame

Tonight, Radio 4, 8pm

Stephen Mangan reads the book by Charlie Connelly, whose previous excursion into the realms of meteorology, Attention All Shipping, became a best-seller. In Bring Me Sunshine, Connelly examines exactly what causes our weather and how it is allegedly predicted, with reference to such unlikely sounding sources as Aristotle, Jane Austen and Frankie Howerd.

If you don’t feel inclined to blame the weatherman, there are plenty of other scapegoats; in fact blame seems as much of a national preoccupation as the weather, as the Philadelphia-based satirist and author Joe Queenan suggests tonight in A Brief History of Blame, described as “an archive opera in six parts”.

Queenan looks at the way we all too readily pass the buck, blaming the stars, the bankers ... in fact anyone but ourselves. To help state his case, he trawls from the archives comment from such likely suspects as Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Niall Ferguson and the Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as interviewing the likes of Germaine Greer and John Sergeant to ascertain that, when it comes to the blame game, we are all guilty as charged.