A radio series that came about thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has featured above Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs in the Observer newspaper’s list of the top ten radio programmes of 2009.

AHRC-funded Professor Amanda Vickery’s Radio 4 series ‘A History of Private Life’,  which aired  for six weeks during autumn 2009, sought to unlock the front door of the Englishman's castle and peer into the privacies and intimacies of life at home over the last 400 years, from the 1600’s to the mid-20th Century.

The Observer article, which was published on Sunday 13 December, featured ‘A History of Private Life’ at number 2 in its list of the best radio shows of 2009, second only to the seminal moment in broadcasting history when Terry Wogan left Radio 2.

‘A History of Private Life’ was funded by an AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship. It brought together over 20 years of academic research into families, culture, and women’s history, with radio programme production experts - Loftus Productions, making the research accessible to millions of listeners.

Professor Vickery says, “A History of Private Life vividly recreated for audience the real texture and fabric of life at home - from bed bugs to new goods, fashions and rituals, from the performances of the drawing room to the secrets of the dressing room, from the comforts of the domestic fireside to the horrors of domestic violence, from home making to home breaking.”

Reviews of the series hailed the freshness of the material (‘forbidden glimpses behind the arras of history’), the elegance of the production, and the wit and warmth of Vickery’s script and voice.

Radio 4 controller, Mark Damazer concludes, “It was a real boon for Radio 4 to broadcast a big history series with so much original research. Amanda Vickery’s work was one of the highlights of the Radio 4 year. It was both distinctive and important.”

Ends

Notes to the editor

AHRC Media contact Emi Spinner, Communications Officer, 0117 9876 770

1.) About the Arts and Humanities Research Council- Each year the AHRC provides approximately £102 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,350 postgraduate awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. Arts and humanities researchers constitute over a quarter of all research-active staff in the higher education sector. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.

2.) 1. Terry Wogan leaving Radio 2
2. A History of Private Life (R4) Amanda Vickery reveals the fascinating in the ordinary.
3. Sun Radio Like it or not, it's the future.
4. Desert Island Discs (R4) Morrissey, Baaba Maal, Barry Blooming Manilow.
5. Russell Brand and Noel Gallagher (Talksport) One-off show on football.
6. Reith Lecture: Michael Sandel (R4) Finally, a Reith worth listening to.
7. Lauren Laverne (6Music) Replacing George Lamb with ease and charm.
8. Adam and Joe (6Music) Making Jonathan Ross look establishment.
9. The Proms (R3) Democratic, open-minded, cheap to go, wonderful to hear.
10. Paul O'Grady (R2) As though he's always been there

Amanda Vickery is the author of The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale, 1998) which won the Wolfson, the Whitfield and the Longman History today prize, editor of Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 2001) and Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America (Yale, 2006) which was another product of the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior.  Her latest book is Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale, 2009). 
Amanda reviews for The Guardian and Radio 4’s ‘Saturday Review’.  She wrote and presented ‘The Trouble with Love’, and ‘In Pursuit of Pleasure’ for BBC2, as well as several history series for radio 3 and 4, including ‘Just Looking’, a history of shopping,   ‘Another Time Another Place’, on historical novels,  and 'Never Go Back', a series about Northern women novelists.

3.) More information on the AHRC for the Study of the Domestic Interior (2001-6) is availalbe from their website