Radio music payments talks resume

8 January 2013 Last updated at 09:10 GMT Output on Radio Cymru is cut by two hours while the royalties dispute goes on More talks are planned later on the royalties dispute involving Radio Cymru and Eos, which represents musicians.

The BBC Welsh-language station lost the right to play around 30,000 songs on New Year's Day and has been forced to cut its airtime by two hours a day.

It failed to reach an agreement over demands for increased royalty payments.

The BBC Trust, which is independent of the corporation's management, has urged a settlement, saying it was in nobody's interest for the dispute to continue.

Classical music and hymns have replaced rock and pop on BBC Radio Cymru for the past week.

Eos says it wants a "fair price for Welsh music".

The musicians broke away from the Performing Right Society (PRS) to join the new agency, claiming they were being short-changed for their work.

BBC Wales has said it hopes there will be a solution and an agreement soon.

Radio Cymru reaches about 142,000 listeners a week, or 6% of the adult population of Wales, according to the latest Rajar audience survey.

Talks are expected to resume in Bangor, Gwynedd.

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Pupils compete in learning poetry

8 January 2013 Last updated at 04:58 ET By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey: Pupils are being encouraged to memorise verse An online anthology representing eight centuries of poetry in English has been published - to be used as part of a National Poetry Competition for secondary school pupils.

The competition invites teenagers in England to memorise and recite poems from the anthology.

It wants to rekindle the idea of pupils learning poetry by heart.

Education Secretary Michael Gove praised the "richness and diversity" of the competition's poetry collection.

The anthology, selected by former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion and poet Jean Sprackland, runs from the medieval Gawain poet through to Jacob Sam-La Rose, born in 1976 and described on the website as a "cultural architect".

Making the cut

Such anthologies are always examined for who is included and who is left behind.

WB Yeats, among the poets included in the anthology, performing his work at the BBC in 1937

And this official competition selection takes in literary giants such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley and Hardy.

Among the post-1914 poets, it includes the likes of Yeats, Eliot, Lowell, Auden, Betjeman, Thomas and Heaney.

There are notable numbers of women in the collection. Philip Sidney doesn't make it, but his sister Mary Sidney Herbert is included. There is no AE Housman but there is Anna Wickham.

Among the 18th Century writers, there is no Oliver Goldsmith but Joanna Baillie gets a place.

The four younger poets included - under the age of 40 - are Vahni Capildeo, Choman Hardi, Jacob Polley and Jacob Sam-La Rose.

The competition for 14 to 18-year-olds, with funding from the Department for Education, wants to bring back the custom of pupils memorising and reciting poems.

It also wants to use such public reading of poetry as a way of building teenagers' self-confidence.

Pupils will be judged on how accurately they remember poems and how well they perform them to an audience.

Dylan Thomas broadcasting his poems in 1948

There will be regional rounds before a national final in April.

The anthology, published at the beginning of the new school term, was chosen for work that could be read aloud, said Sir Andrew.

"We preferred poems that make a powerful impact when they are heard aloud - not because they are theatrical, but because they dramatise experiences that surprise us into a new apprehension of ourselves and our capacity for imagining, thinking and marvelling."

Mr Gove said the project would ensure that more children would be captivated by great poetry and it would help "pass our cultural legacy on to the next generation".

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Actresses lead Bafta rising stars

7 January 2013 Last updated at 13:57 GMT Juno Temple explained why she was shocked but honoured to receive the nod.

Four out of five of the nominees for Bafta's EE Rising Star award, announced on Monday, are female after an all-male shortlist last year.

Juno Temple, Andrea Riseborough, Elizabeth Olsen, Alicia Vikander and Life of Pi actor Suraj Sharma have been tipped as the future stars of cinema.

Previous winners include James McAvoy, Kristen Stewart and Tom Hardy.

It is the only accolade voted for by the public and will be announced at the ceremony on 10 February.

The judging panel, which included Pippa Harris, deputy chair of Bafta's film committee, director Kevin Macdonald, actor Benedict Cumberbatch and film critic Mark Kermode, selected the final five from hundreds of submissions made by film industry figures.

Jury chairman Harris said they had "a very tough job" making their selections.

British actress Juno Temple, 23, who attended the nominations launch at Bafta headquarters in London, said: "I'm so honoured to be up there with this extraordinary young talent - people I'm inspired by and people whose films I go and see."

Temple's breakthrough role was in Notes on a Scandal (2006), alongside Cate Blanchett, and her other film appearances include Atonement (2007), The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and she appeared most recently with Matthew McConaughey in dark comedy Killer Joe.

Temple said she had heard of the Rising Star award previously in her career, but never imagined she would be a nominee.

"It's about people looking at your body of work and congratulating what you've done. That's cool, because I've definitely made some choices that people are either going to love or hate. But I like that, it keeps people on their toes."

Temple's forthcoming movies include fantasy film Horns, in which she has been working with Daniel Radcliffe, and Disney film Maleficent, with Angelina Jolie.

Elizabeth Olsen studied at Tisch School of the Arts before she took Sundance by storm in 2011 starring in acclaimed films Martha Marcy May Marlene and Silent House.

The 23-year-old stars in the forthcoming Spike Lee remake of Oldboy, opposite Samuel L Jackson and Josh Brolin, and said: "Being considered for this award is a huge honour.

"So many actors whom I admire have been recognised in this category and I'm very thankful to Bafta and the jury for selecting me."

Life of Pi star Suraj Sharma is the only male on this year's shortlist

Riseborough, 31, who has had roles in Shadow Dancer, Never Let Me Go, Brighton Rock and Happy Go Lucky, recently finished filming with Tom Cruise in sci-fi thriller Oblivion, set for release in April.

Speaking about her nomination she said: "Bafta nurtures new talent throughout the international film community so I am so very grateful to be given this fantastic opportunity."

Meanwhile Swedish-born actress Alicia Vikander, 24, who trained with the Royal Swedish Ballet for nine years, made her big-screen debut in Pure by Lisa Langseth.

She has had major roles opposite Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina and period drama A Royal Affair with Mads Mikkelsen.

This year's only male on the shortlist, Suraj Sharma, got his break when he was picked from 3,000 hopefuls to star in Ang Lee's epic adaptation of the novel Life of Pi.

The 19-year-old had no acting experience prior to the role and was living with his parents in the suburbs of South Delhi.

However, film critic Kermode insisted the Rising Star award was not strictly for newcomers.

"You can be someone who has a track record," he told the BBC.

"It's trying to pick people on the cusp of stardom and I do think that all of the nominees are in that position - whether it's Suraj Sharma who's literally arrived at that moment, or Andrea Riseborough who's got a very solid career already."

Last year, Kidulthood star Adam Deacon won the award, beating Chris Hemsworth, Chris O'Dowd, Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston.

Voting is now open until 8 February at ee.co.uk/bafta.

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Mantel 'excited' by adaptations of her novels

7 January 2013 Last updated at 11:48 GMT By Sinead Garvan Entertainment reporter, BBC News Hilary Mantel's novels have won numerous prizes Hilary Mantel has told the BBC she is "excited" by the forthcoming stage and TV adaptations of her award-winning novels.

Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies both won the Man Booker Prize, with the latter picking up the Costa novel prize last week.

Tony award-nominated writer Mike Poulton, who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company many times, is writing the stage adaptation.

The BBC announced last year that Bafta award-winning screen writer Peter Straughan was working on the TV version, which is expected to be shown in six-parts on BBC Two.

Mantel is currently writing the third instalment in the historical trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, titled The Mirror and The Light.

The stage production is actually two plays, this is what we are hoping to do. One play of Wolf Hall and it will be followed the next evening by Bring Up The Bodies so you have got a mini-cycle there.

The TV adaptation is six hours, so that's a very different pace at which to tell the story. Peter Straughan is still writing it and he is now getting along very fast so we should have a first draft of all the episodes very soon.

I think you have to accept that when your story goes into a different medium, it needs to be told in a radically different way. You have to shake up all the elements of it and watch them come down again.

I am trying to help out but not be a control freak. I don't want to bulldoze the whole project and be seen to be nudging elbows. I am there for people to talk to if I can help out.

I do believe it is possible to produce a version for either stage or TV which is accurate as far as the history goes but is also dramatically strong. I don't see any contradiction between those two aims and because we have excellent people working on both projects, I think that's something we can pull off.

Screenwriter Peter Straughan won a Bafta for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Well it is too soon to say what it will be in total but I am reading the scripts as they evolve.

To me, it is more exciting particularly to have a stage version because I love the theatre. I suppose one of the things I regret is that I've never tried writing a stage play.

I am very glad someone else is putting in those hours, applying their experience, their craftsmanship and - if it does eventually come to the stage - that, to me, perhaps after winning all these glorious prizes, will be absolutely the best thing that could happen for my books.

I have had little time to write since the publication of Bring Up The Bodies last May. It's coming along at the pace of one good idea a day, some of those ideas are very big, some of those are very small and some of them will turn out to be not such good ideas. Considering how little time I have had, I am quite happy with the way it is going.

What I am not prepared to do is predict when it will be ready. Fiction is so surprising, you never know what a book will do. I am really prepared for anything. Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies are very different books and I expect this one will be again.

I do want above all things to be working on my new book because I have a feeling that it has surprises for me. There are things about it I don't know and I am curious to find them out, I want to know what I will write.

I'm not thinking about how this book can match up to its predecessors, I am not letting the whole prize thing get to me in that sense because it is starting again.

Every day for a writer should feel like that, so when you come down to sit at your desk, you are not remembering the prizes or the reviews or the critics, you are just trying to solve the problems in front of you.

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PG Wodehouse and his French connection

8 January 2013 Last updated at 01:19 GMT By Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris Author PG Wodehouse was born in England and died in the US, but in between he lived for several years in France, a country that looms large in some of his most colourful creations.

It is true what they say in the blurb - there honestly is no better antidote to anguish, ennui or general world-weariness than to flick through a few pages of the Master.

I speak from experience. PG Wodehouse has coaxed me out from many a dark place - and now I have become intrigued by a hitherto unexplored sidelight on the life and oeuvre. Really, someone should take it up as an academic thesis - Wodehouse and the French.

Plum - as he was known - began living in France in 1934. He chose Le Touquet, on the north coast, because it was a fashionable resort with golf, casino and a beach for the dogs.

He had visited the country many times before of course, and French places and characters were already featuring regularly in the books.

Cannes, the playground of toffs par excellence, was a favourite. In the story Noblesse Oblige for example, Drones Club member Freddie Widgeon is invited to be the judge in a sea-front "pretty mother-and-baby" competition.

Continue reading the main story Insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers from around the worldBroadcast on Radio 4 and BBC World ServiceHe accedes, understanding that his reward will be a much-needed 500 franc note. Too late does he realise that the 500 francs is what he - an evidently copiously-endowed English milord - is supposed to supply to the winning mother-and-baby. And of course noblesse oblige - so he does.

Cannes also provides the setting for what buffs regard as one of the most perfect opening Wodehouse paragraphs, this from The Luck of the Bodkins:

"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique... there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French."

PG Wodehouse always said his own French was rudimentary. But his unfailingly brilliant ear - combined, one supposes, with a solid grounding from school - meant that his renderings on the page were always perfectly hilarious.

Continue reading the main story Born in 1881, GuildfordEducated at Dulwich CollegeSpends two years with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, before becoming a full-time writerWrites 93 books in a career lasting 73 years - novels, short stories and musical comediesIn France from 1934-40Spends later life in the USKnighted in 1975, aged 93Nowhere is this truer than in depictions of his most famous French character, that gift of God to the gastric juices, the temperamental chef Anatole.

In Right Ho, Jeeves, Anatole is described as a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, which turns up or droops down depending on mood.

With his "Sylphides a la creme d'ecrevisses" or his "Nonnettes de poulet Agnes Sorel", Anatole alone is capable of soothing the chronic indigestion of Tom Travers - businessman husband of Bertie Wooster's favourite aunt Dahlia - and there is much intriguing by various malefactors who try to steal Anatole for their own kitchens.

Anatole's English is fluent but mixed. To add to his inevitable Frenchisms, he also once worked for an American family in Nice, where he studied under their chauffeur, one of the Maloneys of Brooklyn, we are told, and this gives a certain rough colour.

But when fully aroused he reverts to French:

"Words like "marmiton de Domange", "pignouf", "hurluberlu" and "roustisseur" were fluttering from him like bats out of a barn. Lost on me of course [this is Bertie Wooster writing in the first person] because I am still more or less in the "esker-vous-avez" stage. I regretted this, for they sounded good."

Those words do exist, by the way.

Bertie Wooster and Jeeves were brought to life by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry

Then there is Nicolas Jules St Xavier Auguste, Marquis de Maufringneuse et Valerie-Moberanne, lead rogue in the book French Leave who has a job in a ministry as "employe attache a l'expedition du troisieme bureau" (in other words - clerk).

Or the picturesque Brittany town of St Rocque, site of Chateau Blissac, where in one delicious scene in Hot Water two characters, neither of whom can speak French, are both pretending to be French, and so have to improvise a French-sounding conversation in front of other guests in order to preserve their false credentials.

Wodehouse wrote up until his death aged 93

Poor old Plum's time in France did not end happily. In 1940 he was detained at his home Low Water in Le Touquet by the advancing German army.

Sent to an internment camp, he was released the next year when he turned 60, but he then made his famously ill-judged broadcasts, intended as light-hearted diversions for American fans but of great propaganda value to the Nazis.

Wodehouse came to live in Paris and it was at the Hotel Bristol - down the road from where I write this in the BBC office - that at the Liberation in 1944 he was found and questioned by the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then working for MI6.

Wodehouse was detained by the French for a while but he was never charged and in 1947 he left for the United States.

I know he must have loved it in France. They are a minor theme of course, but in his hands, France and the French radiate optimism, gaiety, sheer fun.

Now as ever, now more than ever, balm for the soul.

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Roberts for The Normal Heart film

7 January 2013 Last updated at 13:45 GMT Roberts will feature in the upcoming film August: Osage County, based on Tracy Letts' play Julia Roberts is to star in a new HBO screen adaptation of the Tony award-winning stage show The Normal Heart.

Glee creator Ryan Murphy is directing the film, which is set for broadcast on the US cable channel in 2014.

The Oscar-winning actress will play the paraplegic physician, Dr Emma Brookner, who treats patients in 1980s New York during the early Aids epidemic.

"We couldn't be more thrilled to bring this important film to HBO," said the network's Michael Lombardo.

The film version has been adapted by Larry Kramer, who wrote the play and was an early advocate for Aids prevention and care.

The story is seen through the eyes of Ned Weeks, a gay Jewish-American writer, activist and founder of a prominent HIV advocacy group.

The role will be played by Mark Ruffalo, whose recent credits include a lead role as Bruce Banner in Marvel's The Avengers and Shutter Island. He was Academy Award-nominated for best supporting actor in The Kids Are All Right in 2010.

White Collar star Matt Bomer will play Felix Turner, a reporter who becomes Ned's lover.

"Ryan has assembled an extraordinary cast to bring Larry Kramer's landmark theatrical achievement to the screen for the first time," added Lombardo, in his role as HBO president of programming.

The Normal Heart was premiered on stage in 1985 in New York and revived on Broadway in 2011, when it garnered the Tony for best revival.

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Ted Hughes widow to write memoirs

7 January 2013 Last updated at 12:12 GMT Ted Hughes was Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998 The widow of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes is to write a memoir about her 28-year marriage to the controversial figure.

Carol Hughes told Cornwall's Western Morning News that she wanted to record her memories "while I have full recall, and no false memory".

The pair married after the suicides of Hughes's first wife, American poet Sylvia Plath, and the woman he left her for, Assia Wevill.

Hughes died of cancer in 1998.

"I had a wonderful 28 years with Ted and I hope to record them for posterity," said Hughes, now in her early 60s, adding that she commended her late husband for not making a judgement on the tragedies he experienced, as many biographers have done.

"The people who write about Ted were not flies on the wall, even if they write as though they were," she said.

"Nobody really knows what goes on between two people."

Hughes was speaking from the home the couple shared in north Devon, in support of a new memoir by her late husband's brother, Gerald, called Ted and I.

The former nurse added that Hughes had "a very happy and full life" despite the tragedy that dogged him.

Born in Yorkshire, Hughes became the British Poet Laureate in 1984 until his death in 1998, aged 68. He had two children with Plath.

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