MUSIC POLITICS BRAIN FREEDOM SPACE Free GENETICS DRAMA Thinking Festival of Ideas 2011 RIOTS BODIES INTERNET CHANGE TICKETS FREE Radio 3 brings together leading thinkers to debate the ideas changing our world Friday 4 – Sunday 6 November 2011 at The Sage Gateshead bbc.co.uk/freethinking Friday 4 – Sunday 6 November 2011 Introducing BBC Radio 3’s festival of ideas returns to The Sage Gateshead for the BBC a weekend of thought-provoking Anne McElvoy talks, debates and performance. Radio 3 This year’s festival theme is presenters CHANGE, exploring the mania for Free Thinking is hosted by presenters from change sweeping the globe. Rana Mitter Radio 3’s Night Waves Anne McElvoy, Rana Mitter, Matthew Sweet, Juliet Gardiner, and Philip Dodd, The Verb’s Ian McMillan and With Wikipedia founder Jimmy Music Matters presenter Tom Service. Wales, Germaine Greer, William Hague, Susie Orbach, Margaret Drabble, and live original drama Matthew Sweet by Skins writer Jack Thorne. Tickets for all events are FREE. To book call The Sage Gateshead on 0191 443 4661 or visit www.thesagegateshead.org. Juliet Gardiner Standby tickets will be available on the day. Free Thinking is produced and broadcast by BBC Radio 3. Philip Dodd Giles Fraser © Graham Lacdao Giles Fraser Ian McMillan Thinker-in-Residence Rev Dr Giles Fraser is Canon Chancellor Free of St Paul’s Cathedral, a popular broadcaster on Radio 4’s Thought for the Thinking Day, and this year’s Thinker-in-Residence, Festival of Ideas who will put his personal stamp on 2011 Tom Service several events during the weekend. 02 Free Tickets: 0191 443 4661 bbc.co.uk/freethinking 03 PRESENTED BY New Generation Thinkers PHILIP DODD Jimmy Wales Founder of Wikipedia Join the New Generation Thinkers at Free The Free Thinking Lecture: How the Thinking, the winners of the inaugural talent Internet will Keep Changing the World scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts Fri 4 | Hall Two and Humanities Research Council to find ● 6.30pm – 7.45pm the brightest academic minds in the arts American internet entrepreneur Jimmy and humanities with the potential to turn Wales has created the most referenced their ideas into fascinating broadcasts. They source of knowledge on the planet. His will be taking part in many events during ever-expanding invention Wikipedia has the weekend, including Speed Dating with over 19 million free articles and is one of the a Thinker, where you can meet them on a internet’s top five websites. Jimmy Wales one-to-one basis and hear about their ideas. has helped to revolutionise our access to information. This is a rare opportunity to hear the man Time magazine named one of the world’s most influential people give his vision of how the internet will continue to radically alter our world. Jimmy Wales PRESENTED BY IAN MCMILLAN Words and Music Fri 4 | Northern Rock Foundation Hall Friday ● 8.30pm – 10.00pm Poet Ian McMillan hosts BBC Radio 3’s award-winning Words and Music programme 4th as it returns for an atmospheric mix of music, poetry and prose on the theme of Change. November Members of Northern Sinfonia and soprano Lisa Milne perform a selection of music including Brahms, Chabrier, Debussy and 2011 Shostakovich, accompanied by readings from Shakespeare, Kafka, Shelley and others. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. Darwin New Generation Thinkers Lisa Milne © Clive Barda ArenaPAL Ian McMillan 04 Free Tickets: 0191 443 4661 bbc.co.uk/freethinking 05 PRESENTED BY PRESENTED BY JULIET GARDINER Margaret Drabble TOM SERVICE Music Matters Books at Breakfast Sat 5 | Northern Rock Foundation Hall In association with New Writing North ● 12.00pm – 1.00pm Sat 5 | Northern Rock Foundation Hall Has Music Changed the World? BBC Radio ● 9.45am – 10.45am 3’s Music Matters programme is broadcast Dame Margaret Drabble is one of Britain’s live from The Sage Gateshead. Presenter finest contemporary writers, whose award- Tom Service will be debating classical winning novels have chronicled the political music’s impact on the world with a panel of and social conditions of their time, from guests including Pamela Rosenberg, former Margaret Drabble motherhood in the sixties with The Millstone Tom Service director of San Francisco Opera and the to her searing portrait of the English middle Berlin Philharmonic, composer Christopher classes The Witch of Exmoor. Younger sister Fox, and musicologist Christopher Page. of A.S Byatt, she grew up in Yorkshire and acted at the RSC before pursuing a life on the page. Join Margaret Drabble as she discusses PRESENTED BY PHILIP DODD Susie Orbach her writing and thoughts on literature. Sat 5 | Hall Two ● 1.00pm – 2.00pm Saturday Why do we persist in thinking we can be perfect? PRESENTED BY Susie Orbach is Britain’s most high-profile ANNE MCELVOY William Hague psychotherapist, whose book Fat is a Feminist 5th Sat 5 | Hall Two Issue revolutionised the way we understand ● 11.00am – 12.15pm our bodies. She co-founded The Women’s At the age of 50 the Rt Hon William Hague Therapy Centre, has been a consultant November must be our youngest elder statesman. for The World Bank and NHS, and is an The MP for Richmond (Yorks) has been Susie Orbach © Charlie Hopkinson advocate for body diversity and emotional Welsh Secretary, Leader of the Conservative literacy. At Free Thinking Susie challenges 2011 Party for five years, and since May 2010 the our obsession with personal change. British Foreign Secretary and First Secretary They must often of State. William Hague will discuss his political philosophy, the dramatic changes change, who would NO TICKETS NEEDED taking place throughout the globe, and be constant in New Generation Thinker: Britain’s role in this changing world order. happiness or wisdom. Rachel Hewitt Sat 5 | The Joan and Margaret Halbert Space Confucius ● 1.15pm – 1.45pm Mapping the Border. The dividing line between Scotland and England has been a source of tension over the centuries, but it wasn’t until the 1750s that the border was mapped from scratch, with the most sophisticated instruments and methods the Enlightenment had to offer. Rachel Hewitt, author of an acclaimed history of the Ordnance Survey, tells the story of that mapping, the motives that fuelled it, and the role of maps as icons of national identity. William Hague Rachel Hewitt © Naomi Christie 06 Free Tickets: 0191 443 4661 bbc.co.uk/freethinking 07 PRESENTED BY PRESENTED BY JULIET GARDINER Sarah-Jayne Blakemore ANNE MCELVOY Revision Time! What are Sat 5 | Northern Rock Foundation Hall Schools Really for Today? ● 1.30pm – 2.30pm Sat 5 | Northern Rock Foundation Hall What’s going on in the teenage brain? ● 3.00pm – 4.00pm Teenagers act on impulse, are lazy, emotional As our school system undergoes massive and get into trouble with the police and levels of reform, with the proliferation of parents. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is Professor academies and free schools and proposals of Cognitive Neuroscience at University for a new curriculum, shouldn’t the real College London and a leading expert on question be: what is school actually for? Sarah-Jayne Blakemore teenage brains. Using new research about David Almond © Sara Jane Palmer Are we so fixated on exam results that the radical changes taking place in the we ignore alternative ways to bring up adolescent brain, she argues it’s time our children? Debaters include the best- to rethink our attitudes towards youth selling children’s writer David Almond, and the place of teenagers in society. author of Skellig, and Paul Kelley, Head of Monkseaton High School in Whitley Bay. PRESENTED BY RANA MITTER Linda Colley Sat 5 | Hall Two PRESENTED BY MATTHEW SWEET Francis Wells ● 2.30pm – 3.30pm Sat 5 | Hall Two In association with Newcastle University’s ● 4.00pm – 5.00pm Insights Public Lecture Series Francis Wells is one of the world’s top heart The Present and the Past of Change. Linda Linda Colley © Denise Applewhite surgeons, having successfully carried out Colley is an historian with influence. An over 5,000 operations including open heart expert on the history of Britain, empire and surgery live on Channel 4. An expert on nationalism, she was invited by Tony Blair to the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Any change, even a change give the Downing Street Millennium Lecture Vinci, he’s a passionate advocate for closer and is Professor of History at Princeton for the better, is always links between art and medicine. Come and University. Linda will explore how we have hear Francis Wells discuss the future of accompanied by drawbacks dealt with periods of dramatic change in the heart, his work at the cutting-edge of and discomforts. the past, and how history can help us to surgery, and his fascination with Leonardo. understand the sweeping changes of today. Arnold Bennett Francis Wells NO TICKETS NEEDED NO TICKETS NEEDED New Generation Thinker: New Generation Thinker: David Petts Alexandra Harris Sat 5 | The Joan and Margaret Halbert Space Sat 5 | The Joan and Margaret Halbert Space 4.15pm – 4.45pm ● 2.45pm – 3.15pm The North-East of England was once one of The Art of Fireworks. Roman candles, rockets, the industrial heartlands of Britain, yet today peonies of fire… each Bonfire Night the skies the physical traces of entire industries have are lit up with ever more ingenious effects, but been swept away. Archaeologist and Durham where did it all begin, and what have fireworks University Lecturer David Petts argues that meant across the centuries? Alexandra this is no way to treat the past, and that the Harris, author of Romantic Moderns, physical remains of our recent history should draws on music, painting and literature to be preserved now before they are lost forever.