Radio: Bob's Big Freeze Tuesday | Take a Hike North

Published on Thursday 20 November 2008 17:33

Bob's Big Freeze Tuesday, Radio 2, 10:30pm Twenty minutes: Take a Hike North Thursday, Radio 3, 7:50pm

MUSIC trivia time: remember Blind Boy Grunt? Thought not. Let's put it a different way: who, under that pseudonym, cut an LP, destined for thunderous obscurity, in a record shop in London's Charing Cross Road during the bitter winter of 1962-63?

All right then; it was a youngster from Minnesota by the name of Robert Zimmerman – by then calling himself Bob Dylan. Yet to become the reluctant figure of American political protest, the emerging young singer was "spotted" in a Greenwich Village club by the English TV director Phillip Saville, who promptly invited him to London to appear in a BBC play, Madhouse on Castle Street, that he was directing. Dylan duly played the part of a young rebel – without too much difficulty, one imagines – and the play was transmitted in January 1963.

As Bob's Big Freeze recounts, the singer arrived just as Britain was in the throes of one of the coldest winters on record, but the visit proved hugely influential for him. He stayed with the doyen of the English folk scene, Martin Carthy, who introduced him to the burgeoning London folk club circuit, where he became, briefly, a familiar voice and even ventured so far as to cut that long forgotten album. He also wrote several songs, including Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.

In Radio 3's Twenty Minutes: Take a Hike North, poet and travel writer Christopher Somerville and Dave Richardson, of folk band Boys of the Lough, go for a stroll in Aberlady nature reserve on the East Lothian coast, as one tenth of the world's population of pink-footed geese arrives to overwinter there.

Cue poetry, music, and the astonishing shoreline cacophony of the birds themselves.