PODCAST · society
Letter from A. Broad
by Muriel Murch
Letter from A. Broad starts with a picture and a pang of the heart. From there it must beat into life, be penned as a letter and finally produced into a radio broadcast.
Episodes
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Autumnal Harvest
This summer we did it again. Mostly here in London, as Walter held my less-than-best microphone while correcting my still hopeless dyslexic stumbles over long words and names. My voice and I are old, and with no true acting training we worked in short bursts. Granny Smith apples or big juicy…
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The Sun Also Rises
The summer has been long and hard. We retreat to the cottage, subdued by the evening dance between the sun and the moon, wondering at the worth of our work.
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Happy Birthday Sir David and KMWR.org
And while still a part of the KPFA-FM Drama and Literature Department, I am also gleaning programs for our new small, tiny-at-the-moment station-that-could. Next up in the studio is Sir David Attenborough with his new book, ‘The Private Life of Plants’. I’m more than on home ground and the book…
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The Holiday Season
The card table is balanced on the old coffee table - giving us a square surface on which to play. The fire is on, we are warm. Crumbs from the Dundee cake land on the table and the cards and we brush them to the floor. There are two egg cups perched on the corners of the table. They each hold an...
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Thank you Jesus
A faint light flickers up and down as a small converted golf cart is driven slowly along the rows of vegetables growing in the fields beyond. The light bobs and then pauses for some minutes before carrying on along the row. The cart is idled and I imagine the Jesuses and Josés of the world…
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Board Games
But board games of a far more serious nature are being invented and played in Geneva. The Presidents of America and Russia are staying out of the fray, lobbing spit balls of scrunched old ideas across telephone lines as their hatchet men of the moment re-write the rules of this game.
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Decisions
While I write, the United States President has risen up from 20,000 leagues under the sea and murky waters of the Eastern Seaboard. Not content to wave his tentacles across the American media, crushing those who displease him he has, in a circular sweep with his pal Benjamin, now focused on the...
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The Salon Season
Amidst a mess of gunfire three people are dead and Manchester is wounded. Despite the Prime ministers pleas - never a good sound bite - for the weekend Pro-Palestinian demonstration at Parliament Square in London to stop - it didn’t - and the police moved steadily through arresting nearly 500...
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Let’s Talk About It.
Several elephants go around and around a circus ring, trunk to tail, holding onto each other, scared to let go and be separated from the herd. But the elephant trainer cracks his whip calling one to the center and perform a special trick. Lets call this elephant Charlie. Charlie is a good…
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It’s Only Going to Get Worse
And so the wars effects spread, across continents, each one oozing out to the other, Europe, The Middle East, and beyond. When the American President isn’t pouting that he has not been invited to China, he is busy plotting what he is going to do with Gaza when it finally becomes available.
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August in LA
We connect with the friends that we can. There are friends too sick to visit, there are friends who have put their homes back together after the Palasades fires, and friends who are only just beginning. These are the precious moments.
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Dining Out
“Can I ask you?” Of course, “We have a two-year old at home and apart from Paddington Bear what else could I bring her?” Ah, now I was on home, Granny ground and launched into the thrills of “Ant and Bee,” showing her the books on her phone. And even as I explained: “They are different, but...
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Dress to Impress
Some of the doctors followed in this film are still alive and working. Some are not. Almost all have been imprisoned, tortured and lost family members.
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Feet in the Fridge
When asked, the honor guards gathers to perform Nightingale Tribute services for nurses. Like in the military, it consists of the Final Call to Duty. The Nightingale Lamp is lit in the nurse's honor and when a triangle is rung the nurse’s name is called out three times as a request to report to...
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Old Reads and New Writing
This is a quiet room, saved now for big occasions with family or friends but in this solitary time I take it for my own. The stillness calls me and I welcome it putting my pen to the page bringing immediate and long-past memories together, taking time to talk to the page.
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All Those Books
Libraries carry the past forward to the present and into the future. The knowledge and truth stored safely from the Library of Alexandria through to the likes of Wikipedia and The Internet Archive, and all libraries, are the creations of our minds and those looking to control the narratives of...
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Half a Life-time Ago
As the lights came up the audience of some film makers, film buffs. and children settling in for the Q and A. A young girl who had participated in the fun children’s hour hosted before the film asked Walter “Is Oz real?” and he answered, “Well that is the question isn’t it?”
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Hove Actually.
But supper has to be quick, we are on location with a gig after all and we walk our way from the restaurant to Horatio's Bar and ‘The Space’ on Brighton Palace Pier. Dusk has arrived and day trippers were leaving the pier as film buffs are arriving, bustling in, ordering a drink or two and…
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Sibylline Press and some Sibyls
It’s the writers, it’s the publishers, and it’s the bookstore owners that come together to give us the books we read. Over the years publishers and publishing, both in big and small houses, has grown and changed how a book gets into our hands and our hearts. It is not often that one gets to sit...
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It’s the Trees
Even here in this quiet corner of London we feel it, the head-shaking from our neighbors, the decisions not to visit America - the US president is on every newscast in this country and around most of the world and that is possibly a Very Important Thing for him.
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Bees are Buzzing
Even in the worst of times, which for so many people in the world this is, the spring sunshine is bringing warmth and a moment of peace within the despair of their lives.
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The Limit
The forests and parks are the American Jewels, beloved by peoples of all parties, persuasions, income levels, rural and city dwellers alike. And they - we the people - are coming together, supporting where we can the rangers and Park personal dismissed out of hand by the playboys in Washington.
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Harvesting History
We are older and need to tidy up our lives. We are not cleaning out the cupboards and barn stalls as we should be, instead have been writing of our work, our lives and worlds together and apart. There are family stories to repeat, cinematic history and community evolution to record.
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Morning Moments
Lady Pechell was older than the young mothers making do with their ration books, trading eggs and butter from small holdings for gin from goodness knows where. On shopping days during the week they came to Mrs Max’s Café, to be together for an hour. To commiserate about all and everything, trying...
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Wolf Moon
Then I look particularly at the women who - like our late Queen - know the subtle messages of the clothes they wear and the actions they take. Michelle Obama is absent. Hillary Clinton standing beside her very trim husband is wearing a Peace on Earth broach.
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Mourning and Marmalade
As I make my marmalade, I remember my mother making hers and the rows and rows of jars put away in the larder. I am thinking again of my friends in England. We are older now and knocked about by the snow and winter weather. The silent whiteness will only be beautiful if they can be safe walking…
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666 Days and Counting
Our town, Bolinas - there, said it out-loud - has been without its post office for 666 days and counting. And we are counting, and marking it down, writing letters, going to meetings, in public and in private and hustling, trying to right this wrong. This town, and others around the country like...
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It’s All Theater
We sit down early watching the theater fill until someone tries to get everyone to their seats as ‘the show is about to start’ but it is tricky when the past Speaker of the House is now busy speaking in the isles.
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Storm Bert
It was in 1953 that the World Meteorological Organization in the US began giving women’s names to storms and hurricanes. It wasn’t until 1978 that they began to accept that many of the gods of the sea and winds were male and also lose their temper. In 2014 the UK Met office began to do the same.…
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A Week Ago
While politics plays out on the world stage England continues to play out a mix of lorry-like thievery and home-grown purity. The world famous cheese market of Neal’s Yard Dairy was cleanly relieved of 22 tons of cheese in 950 wheels of cheddar valued at £300,000. While the police seriously...
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I ain’t’ done nothink
But suddenly there are quick soft running footsteps, and a child’s voice shouting “I ain't’ done nothink.” More running footsteps, a longer stride and a uniformed youth catches up with the child, who is clutching a brown paper shopping bag and still yelling. “Let me go, I ain't’ done nothing.”...
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One Memory Leads to Another
But the Green Memorial Hospital is in the Northern province of Jaffna, a strong Tamil district and during out time the war was still active..... Everyone was very polite but clear, explaining as gently as they could that the troubles precluded them sending anyone with us to Jaffna and certainly…
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Green is for Grenfell
The daily Parliamentary schedule allows that after the morning’s Prime Minister’s questions there is a pause for those who have meetings to attend - to leave. On the morning when the report was to be presented the choking exodus of members of parliament was sobering to those who remained seated…
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August Bank Holiday W/E
St. Thomas’s Hospital was first dedicated to serving the poor, the destitute and homeless and though it has become a world renowned teaching hospital it has remained open ever since. It is seeming and appropriate that the wall that cradles the hospital close to the Thames and faces the Houses of...
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Remembering the First Time
Edna arrived at the radio station in a fuss. Her plane has been delayed and her luggage was lost. She was as tiny and Irish as I was tall and English but quickly I saw that we were both nervous. Edna upset at the loss of her luggage and the fact that her silver pendant had rubbed a stain on her...
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The Waiting is Over
But how will it play out in greater America? Is America really ready to put all of its prejudices aside? Kamala Harris is: a woman, a caramel-colored woman of mixed race with a Jewish husband, a lawyer, and from California. Now there will be endless discussions - but maybe it is a time to think,...
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Behind Closed Doors
A small grilled window sits facing the square where - at night time - a mother could - between 1660 and 1875 - raise the grill and lay her new-born babe on the rota where friars, on their night-time shift, sat waiting for a delivery, not as midwives for a wanted child, but as caretakers receiving...
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Monday Nights at the Movies with Mark
Mark is deft in drawing out the information he wants from his guests and dropping in, like sweet strawberries, clips from the films they are talking about, for after all it is film that Mark and his audience are here for. But like all good hosts he also turns the questions a little more inward…
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Somber June
The grey sky is pouting - there is no sun - just a half-hearted threat of rain. The London season is muted; the Chelsea Flower Show and Royal Ascot Race week do not shine as brightly in splashing colour across the weekly magazines.
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Seeing Red
Finally, after Teresa May 2018 appointment of Brian Langstaff his report has landed in Parliament and is damming. Langstaff was not the protecting Safe Pair of Hands that May’s government had hoped. Hearing the testaments of patients and their families, seeing the look on the faces of politicans...
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Eleanor Coppola
In 2008 Eleanor Coppola published her book ‘Notes on a Life’. It did well, though was received with mixed reviews; some people were curious about the life of a Coppola, others about art and relationships, while others understood that a woman’s world is that – a woman’s world – and the challenges...
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The Sky is Crying
The student protests with Pro-Palestinian sympathies about the bombing of Gaza are growing around the world, each country’s universities going about their demonstrations in their own cultural way. On the campuses here in England because so far there are no overt clashes between the students, the...
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Fading Flags
The weariness that is shown by the torn Ukrainian flags is but a reflection of the faces of both the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. Satellite pictures of Russian graveyards show their expansion and a rough estimate is over 50,000 Russian and 31,000 Ukrainian troops killed from this war so far....
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Serving Safety
Andrés’s stride across the world stage is large like the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is also untrained in the school of politics. Andrés schooling in the kitchen as Zelenskyy’s on the stage has given both men the skills of hustle, the art of seduction, both slicing and seasoning...
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March Winds
The farm calls for focus and sends the world of wars further into the outskirts of my mind. Though the horrors that are occurring all the time - everywhere - still return to my consciousness when I try to rest from the chores that face me here.
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The Guilds
But this last weekend I had to mange it - Hollywood - because it is ‘that time of year again’. Oscar was coming. But there is foreplay in the form of the British BAFTA awards appearing in London a month beforehand, like a butler announcing ‘Dinner is served.’ And then in Los Angeles the weekend...
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Navalny
This single death takes over my consciousness as I think I can imagine it - while the multiple slaughters are that are occurring in Gaza and on the West Bank leaves me sifting through pictures of rubble, hospitals and carnage, not really knowing who or what I am looking at, or for. Navalny’s…
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Remembering Oscar
Looking back on that year, and the politics that were uppermost in so many minds, it is hard to accept where we are now. Everything seems more - nothing seems less - and it is frighting for all of those paying attention. Vanessa, and others who have hit that 80 year date, still struggle and...
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January – The New Year
- but it is with the stories that hold the slimmest degrees of separation that I carry. We have friends who are housing Israeli refugees in Paris; another young woman who fled Russia now lives with her mother as refugees in Tel Aviv; a Palestinian artist who has been silent since reaching out in...
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A Dog’s Dinner
It is the first time we have seen such an acknowledgment from a festival and it seems fitting that it should occur here where the emphasis has always been on the heavy lifting that it takes to be a cinematographer and to make movies. The yellow-vested stage hands arrive carrying three sofas and…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Letter from A. Broad have?
Letter from A. Broad currently has 200 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Letter from A. Broad about?
Letter from A. Broad starts with a picture and a pang of the heart. From there it must beat into life, be penned as a letter and finally produced into a radio broadcast.
How often does Letter from A. Broad release new episodes?
Letter from A. Broad publishes regularly with 200 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Letter from A. Broad?
You can listen to Letter from A. Broad on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Letter from A. Broad?
Letter from A. Broad is created and hosted by Muriel Murch.
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