Why Stuff Matters: Objects, Power and the Past ...... on the wireless today

I am a great fan of Radio 4's Start the Week which is one of those talking programmes the BBC excels at and this one was no exception.

Two  Pentax K1000's, 1978

The sleeve notes perfectly set the scene with, "What can the things we create, keep and bury tell us about who we are? 

On Radio 4's weekly discussion programme, Adam Rutherford explores material culture – the power of objects you can touch – and how they connect us to the past.

Classicist Mary Beard discusses her book Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, arguing that everyday remnants of antiquity, from bread to paint pots abandoned at Pompeii, still matter. And that Ancient Greece and Rome continue to shape how we see our own world.

Theatre director Greg Doran set himself the task of tracking down the surviving copies of Shakespeare’s First folio, after the death of his husband the actor Antony Sher. He recounts his worldwide quest in Walking Shadow: Love, Loss and Shakespeare, which also reveals the importance of the enduring physical presence of Shakespeare’s work.

Nokia 3310, 2000

Dr Sophia Adams, curator at the British Museum, discusses the extraordinary Melsonby Hoard, the largest collection of Iron Age metalwork ever found in Britain, and what its burnt and buried objects reveal about power, ritual and life before the Roman conquest. The exhibition, Chariots, Treasure and Power: Secrets of the Melsonby Hoard, will go on display at the Yorkshire Museum, York from 15th May 2026.

The Ronson Veraflame, 1957

Producer: Katy Hickman

Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez"

And not wanting to delve too far into the past I chose some objects that mean a lot to me.  

They include my old Pentax K1000 cameras from the age of smelly photography. They were a constant companion from 1978 and performed and survived in the searing heat of summers in Greece, the clammy heat of an August Paris as well as heaps of venues from Manchester, London and plenty of other places.  

To these I have added my own first Nokia 3310 and a Ronson Veraflame which mum used all the time and I thought was the tops of stylish fashion in 1960.

Location; BBC Radio 4

Pictures; my old Pentax K1000's, 1978, my own first Nokia 3310, 20000, a Ronson Veraflame, 1957

*Why Stuff Matters: Objects, Power and the Past, Start of the Week, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002v9nv