BBC Radio 3

An impressionistic feature on the notion of paradise - lost, sought and found.

"Look closer, said the programme ... knitting past to present, visions to realities, opening wide the mind's eye once more to the elusive horizon of human perfectibility." - Daily Telegraph 3.6.08

First broadcast 24th May 2008
Produced by Katie Burningham and Alan Hall

A Map Of Paradise

Blake Morrison presents an edition of the Radio 3 Sunday Feature that considers the life and work of poet, journalist and screenwriter James Agee - Pullitzer Prize winning author of A Death in the Family, collaborator with photographer Walker Evans on the seminal study of sharecroppers during the Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and script writer on The African Queen and Night of the Hunter.

With Agee's son Joel, Hugh Davis of the University of Tennessee, biographer Dwight Garner, Steve Cotham of the East Tennessee Historical Society, Caroline Blinder of Goldsmiths College, Knoxville artist RB Morris, Phil and Jed Burroughs (relatives of the 'Gudgers' in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) and rare archive of Agee himself.

First broadcast 16th September 2007 BBC Radio 3
Presented by Blake Morrison
Produced by Alan Hall

An American Legend: James Agee

Chaos and Creation examines why it is that mankind feels compelled to find explanations for the origins of 'life, the universe and everything', whether through myth, reason or faith.

Contributors include cosmologists Mark Hindmarsh and Kathy Romer, the classicist and Christian minister Teresa Morgan, the politician Phil Willis, the mythologist Sian Hawthorne and an evangelical physicist, Karl Giberson. Their reflections upon the value of seeking an explanation for creation and their challenging of whose purposes it serves are set within an analysis by Sharon Choa of Joseph Haydn's musical depiction of chaos and creation in Die Schöpfung's The Creation.

...this was a glittering, multi-textured feature about myths and concepts of origin, full of boggling questions ("What's the origin of the origin of the origin?") and clever people with minds that twinkle like the brightest stars." - The Guardian, 08 June 2009

First Broadcast 7th June 2009 BBC Radio 3
Produced by Alan Hall

Chaos And Creation

Danish poet and radio producer Pejk Malinovski devises a sequence from people's real dreams about Osama Bin Laden to reveal the impact on the collective unconscious of the 'war on terror'.

First broadcast 24th November 2007 BBC Radio 3
Produced by Pejk Malinovski

Dreaming Of Osama

In 2007 sound artist John Wynne was artist-in-residence for one year at Harefield Hospital in Middlesex, one of the world's leading centres for heart and lung transplantation. He worked with patients to capture their experiences, recording the sonic environment of the hospital itself and, with the help of medical techinicians, recorded devices such as VADs (Ventricular Assist Devices) both internally and externally.

John Wynne uses these recordings as compositional elements, revealing a world in which aural objects shift and surprise and where the listener is invited to explore deep within sound itself. 

First broadcast 21st June 2008 BBC Radio 3
Produced by John Wynne

Hearts Lungs And Minds

For a poet and playwright whose virtuosic way with words continues to dominate all of English literature four centuries on, there's an extraordinary and often overlooked potency also in his silences, stillness and quietness.

On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, Laura Barton listens closely to the spaces between the Bard's words and explores the acoustic qualities of the circumstances in which they were performed. She talks with the actor Niamh Cusack, who's played Desdemona and Juliet in large theatres and, most recently, Paulina in The Winter's Tale at the intimate Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Acoustician Byron Harrison imagines the soundworld inhabited by actors on the Elizabethan stage and unpicks the science of theatre design. Shakespeare scholar Lesel Dawson reads the plays for moments of silent wonder, resistance, horror and narrative tension and Steven Connor considers how the celebrated wordsmith communicates 'beyond words' - looking with ears, hearing with eyes.

Produced by Alan Hall
First broadcast 1st May 2016, BBC Radio 3

Still Will

We make documentaries and audio art for radio, podcasts and public spaces.

At the heart of what we do is a belief in the imaginative possibilities of radio. Sounds that can reconfigure the world around you, move you through inner landscapes, sink into your dreams.

We are an intentionally small company that considers carefully the creative, social and political aspects of the work we put out into the world.

Falling Tree has two full-time Directors – Eleanor McDowall and Alan Hall – and we work with freelancers across our projects, including the core Short Cuts production team of Alia Cassam, Axel Kacoutié and Andrea Rangecroft.

We are one of the founding signatories of the Equality in Audio pact. 

You can listen to hundreds of our documentaries in the free, online Falling Tree archive.

Still Will

Falling Tree Productions