Radio Listener

Published on Sunday 6 December 2009 11:11

Visionary bard of the Scottish Renaissance or crusty, xenophobic misogynist ... 31 years after his death, Christopher Grieve, aka Hugh MacDiarmid, still provokes contradictory reactions which threaten to distract from his enduring poetry.

In the final programme in Radio Scotland's IN THE FOOTSTEPS series, poet and author Janet Paisley goes on the trail of the "Langholm byspale" to discover certainly a wilfully thrawn character, but a complex one, who fell out with both the Scottish nationalist and Communist parties of which he was a member, could be patronising to women yet still give a glowing testimonial to their heroic role during war, and challenge a cynical journalist who suggested otherwise.

Paisley talks to novelist James Robertson, Carl Macdougall, current writer-in-residence at MacDiarmid's former home of Brownsbank Cottage, outside Biggar, and MacDiarmid's grandson, Christopher Grieve, about the man and his legacy.

Another cultural giant, but one who is still with us at 90 years old, is Pete Seeger, the banjo-toting American singer-songwriter whose songs became part of the very fabric of protest against war and human rights abuses. In HE SHALL OVERCOME, another forthright US voice, Steve Earle, recounts the story of a man who took up the torch from Woody Guthrie (whose This Land Is Your Land he sang with Bruce Springsteen at Barack Obama's inauguration), to sing about Americans and their rights – with the result that he was black-listed for decades. Other contributors include Nanci Griffith, Tom Paxton and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds.

But when it comes to getting art to the masses, nothing has quite succeeded like the humble jigsaw puzzle, according to GOING TO PIECES IN THE BOX, in which Janey Ellis, host of the Eighties children's TV show Jigsaw, traces the history of these devilishly fragmented pictures, which started off as an 18th-century educational tool and have since probably introduced more famous – if infuriatingly piecemeal – paintings into ordinary homes than any other medium.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS

Thursday, Radio Scotland, 11:30am

HE SHALL OVERCOME: PETE SEEGER AT 90

Wednesday, Radio 2, 8:30pm

GOING TO PIECES IN THE BOX

Tuesday, Radio 4, 11:30am

&#149 This article was first published in The Scotsman on December 5, 2009