Adam (Power of Nightmares) Curtis is the guest on Little Atoms this evening.
7.00pm Resonance 104.4fm. Or you could subscribe to the podcast.

I wonder if tycho_b will ask him about the Gang of Four/Mekons connection I was previously unaware of?

1. I've just ordered this for myself with some money I got for my birthday. Ages 8-12 apparently. My son will get use of later on, of course. I still find Lego incredibly theraputic. It's a lovely house though, isn't it?

2. The latest collection of ancient 78s to be released by Honest Jon's is Sprigs of Time and it's splendiferous. In fact it makes a nice companion volume to the inexplicably unre-issued 60's classic "John Peel's Archive Things", both are terrifically wayward collections of recordings from all over the world and mainly from the first half of the last century - a joyous celebration of sound, music and geography.

3. Hurrah! Tonight's guest on Little Atoms is the fantastic Jonathan Meades, making his third appearance on the show no less, to discuss the forthcoming box set of his TV stuff, and no doubt many other things. Full details at the website. It will be podcast in due course.

1. Very enjoyable morris practice last night - including the best "Upton-on-Severn Stick Dance" I've ever done. I've forgotten just how great I feal after strenuously leaping about for a bit. Endorphins, I suppose...

2. I found a badge in the street this morning for "1965 Records". Doesn't look like my kind of thing, but the padlock design is quite nice.

3. I'm really digging the first Bombay Connection LP at the moment. The track "Burning Train" is the oddest thing I've heard for a while. An MP3 excerpt is here.

4. I'm not the only one who finds the end sequence of "In The Night Garden" upsetting.

5. I intend to spend tonight getting rid of a lot of stuff that I no longer have time for. This includes a pile of the American critical fanzine Science Fiction Eye from the late 1980's. It occurs to me that some readers of this blog may be interested in this, let me know. Home found!

6. The guest on "Little Atoms" this evening is the former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway. Details here. Resonance 104.4 fm 7.00pm.

Julie Burchill is on Little Atoms tonight.

7pm Resonance 104.4 fm

Podcast later.

Most importantly, all of those 21st Century listeners who've been hollering for the last 3 years for LA to be podcast, your "prayers" are answered. Little Atoms has teamed up with the venerable magazine "The Skeptic" and shows are now available as podcasts from i-tunes. Subscribe to future podcastshere.

Secondly the Little Atoms Website has been rejuvinated, including an essay by tycho_b explaining how the series came about.

All the previous shows (bar a couple lost in the ether) from September 2005 onwards, are still available as MP3 files from the site. If I say so myself (and I am no longer a part of the production team due to family commitments) the list of previous guests is looking pretty impressive.

Little Atoms, much to the annoyance of our enemies, is not going away.

Congratulations to Neil, Padraig and Anthony, and thanks to ukskeptic for facilitating the "Skeptic" link-up...

Wow, Little Atoms' own Neil Denny was on Richard Bacon's show on Radio Five last night with arch paranoid loon Alex Jones (as featured, hilariously, in Jon Ronson's "Them").

And yes it's on Listen Again, (just over one hour in)

I'm listening while the kids are having an afternoon nap.

The Little Atoms show featuring tycho_b and myself talking to the wonderful Marcus du Sautoy is now online.

Listen to the MP3 here...

I'm out all day - but can I remind you about Little Atoms at 7pm today with Marcus Du Sautoy?
Details here, or why not just add littleatomsblog to your friends list to get regular updates directly?

Oh, and the Xenakis gig was great yesterday - nice to see some of you there!

If you haven't had enough of Teesside accents on Resonance recently, you can hear my dulcet tones alongside tycho_b, chatting to the mathematician Professor Marcus Du Sautoy on Little Atoms this Friday at 7pm.

He's been on before, and he's charming and colossally brainy.
His last appearance was one of my favourites...since then he's been on a TV a bit, including doing the Royal Institution Lectures at Christmas.

Further details to follow soon.



And he plays the trumpet and likes Xenakis.

Friday evening was a gas , and even busier than I imagined.

I thought I was having a week off from Little Atoms, as Anthony Burn was set to co-present, but then I got a message from tycho_b asking if I could help out, as Anthony couldn't make it.

So I met gazbro at a packed Museum Tavern, before we headed off to Borough where tycho_b and I interviewed Professor David Colquhoun for Resonance. He turned out to be a sprightly and passionate defender of science, and, as usual, the show could have gone on for twice as long, as we discussed homeopathy, placebos and the irony of an attempted creationist meeting in the Darwin Lecture Theatre. It should be online soon.

gazbro was present during the interview, sitting quietly in the corner - he remarked later that the experience had "taken the magic out of it" as he watched me fumbling with my notes and dropping my pen lid on the floor...

Then it was onto the White Hart in Borough. This was also packed - so much so that it was more comfortable to stand outside, despite the thin drizzle. The pub was equiped with what appeared to be an automatic awning which seemed to detect the rain. It slowly spread out above our heads to widespead cheers. Unfortunately it was also fitted with an Anemometer which detected it was also quite blusterous, and wound it back in again.

We met up with the rest of the musicians (Spider, Tish, Janine, Eaglescliffe, Newson, Mick the Pole, Geva) and squeezed in, eventually setting up around a couple of tables. It was very noisy inside, but spider had brought a snare drum which cut through the chatter and gave us an added rhythmic thwack. We got the usual range of reactions- from puzzlement, to big smiles and cameraphones to pissed blokes in suits clapping along ecstatically...all good stuff.

Damian Thompson at Counterknowledge has described tycho_b and myself as "Dyed-in-the-wool lefties" whilst mentioning the Little Atoms show in which we interviewed him...and he writes leaders for The Telegraph, so he should know.

You can listen to the show in question here. It's a good one.

I always knew I was a leftie of course, it was just some of you lot who had doubts!

Neil and I's interview with Linda Grant (recently seen swapping punk reminiscenses with Steve Beresford on an ealier thread!) is now available to listen to. Her new book "The Clothes on Their Backs" is really marvellous, by the way.

This evening Neil and I will be talking to Damian Thompson.

Damian Thompson is a leader writer for The Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of The Catholic Herald. He blogs for the Telegraph on religious affairs and is the author of a number of books, including Waiting for Antichrist: Charisma and Apocalypse in a Pentecostal Church and The End of Time: Faith and the Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium.

In February 2008, Damian's latest book, Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History, will be published. You can discover more by visiting www.counterknowledge.com.

Listen live at 7pm, at 104.4fm (in London) or at Resonance FM.

The guest on Little Atoms today is Derek Pasquill.

Bit of a scoop.

Resonance 104.4 FM 7.00pm tonight...

Neil Denny and I will be talking to Linda Grant on Little Atoms this evening (7.00pm on Resonance FM)

"Linda Grant is a journalist and author. Her first novel, "The Cast Iron Shore", won the David Higham First Novel Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. Her second novel, "When I lived in Modern Times", won the Orange Prize for Fiction. "Still Here" was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She is also author of "Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution", "The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel" and "Remind Me Who I am, Again -a family memoir". Her latest book, "The Clothes on Their Backs" will be published in February 2008."

According to the internet resource Journa-List-
"Linda Grant has written more about 'dior' than anything else"
and
"A lot about 'burberry' in the last month"

I think it's a pretty safe bet that I won't actually be talking about either of those subjects with her...

The two most recent Little Atoms programmes are now available to download from here.

Somewhat contrasting, the shows feature novelist, columnist, failed Labour Party candidate and comedy scriptwriter John O'Farrell from December, and last week's with the "Institute of Ideas" founder Claire Fox.

Enjoy, or not, as the case may be.

Little Atoms is now being repeated on Resonance 104.4fm on Tuesdays (ie Today)at 4.30pm, every week. So the show is live on Fridays at 7pm and then the same show is repeated the following Tuesday.

So if you wish, you can listen to Claire Fox chatting to tycho_b and I, all over again in an hour and a half.

I'm back on the radio tonight with tycho_b.
This is the announcement on the Little Atoms Blog-

On this weeks show Neil Denny and Richard Sanderson are joined by Claire Fox.

Claire Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas (IOI), which she established to create a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint. Claire initiated the IOI while co-publisher of the controversial and ground-breaking current affairs journal LM magazine (formerly Living Marxism). The IOI has since worked with a variety of prestigious institutions in Britain and abroad. Claire has a particular interest in education and social issues such as crime and mental health. She is highly critical of authoritarian developments such as New Labour's 'antisocial behaviour orders'. She is also a passionate supporter of the arts, and strongly believes that they should be valued for their own sake. She argues that efforts to dilute the arts for the benefit of 'the socially excluded' are patronising rather than democratic.

Claire is a co-convener of the yearly Battle of Ideas festival, which last took place in London in October 2007. She is a panellist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze and is regularly invited to comment on developments in culture, education and the media on TV and radio programmes such as Question Time, Any Questions?, and BBC Breakfast. Claire writes regularly for national newspapers and a range of specialist journals. She has a monthly column in the MJ (municipal journal) and presents ‘Claire Fox News' on the internet TV channel 18 Doughty Street.

Join us at the usual time, this friday 11th Jan at 19.00 GMT on Resonance 104.4FM in London or the Resonance website worldwide.



Hmmm, this could be an interesting one...

The guest on Little Atoms tonight at 7.00pm is John O'Farrell, should be entertaining.

Details here.

Also previous shows featuring Simon Ardizzon and Howard Jacobson are now available to download from the Little Atoms website

Tomorrow evening it appears that I'm interviewing Howard Jacobson for Little Atoms. Hopefully I'm the Secondary on This Case, because I'm ashamed to say I know very little about Howard Jacobson. I've not read any of his novels, but I think I saw a programme about Bernard Manning that he did.

I also wrote a Haiku about him two years ago.

He seems like a nice bloke.

But if anybody can think of interesting things about Howard Jacobson, or point me towards stuff, I'd be grateful.

Rather annoyingly, this Live Interview follows my work meal and piss-up, which means I'm going to have decline most of the free liquid fun, if I want to avoid making even more of a fool of myself than I'm already likely to do...

EDIT Panic Over!
Just got a notice on Facebook -
"On this weeks show, Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy are joined by writer Howard Jacobson. Howard Jacobson is a writer of both non-fiction and novels, and a journalist, with a regular column in The Independent. he has described himself as "a Jewish Jane Austen," and is often described as "A British Phillip Roth" by others. Howard's novels include "Coming From Behind", "No More Mister Nice Guy" and "The Mighty Walzer". His most recent novel is "Kalooki Nights", which he described as "the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere." Two of Howard's non-fiction books, "Roots Schmoots" and "Seriously Funny", have been made into television series."

I'm off the case!

Can I draw your attention to the Little Atoms Blog, for information about tonight's show- An interview with Simon Ardizzone, who made the film Hacking Democracy...