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Radio Review: The Iron Curtain and the power of ink on paper

The Island of Brilliant podcast takes children's books seriously
The Island of Brilliant podcast takes children's books seriously The Island of Brilliant podcast takes children's books seriously

Start the Week: Life Behind the Iron Curtain BBC Radio 4

The Island of Brilliant podcast

Film footage found in a cupboard in a BBC office paints a picture of the old Soviet Union.

You can watch a series of documentary films but first dip your toe into the water with Start The Week: Life Behind the Iron Curtain.

Here are stories of women in a queue for food in Moscow arguing because the potatoes have run out – from potatoes, it turns into an argument about the communist regime.

The talk turned to the power of smell… that particular perfume you could smell at the opera... Red Moscow was everywhere.

Hear how people in east Germany fell in love with western washing powders… the perfume was so much stronger. You don’t need the smell to clean your clothes, but it spelled luxury.

The tang of a certain disinfectant summons up former East Germany because it was used in all public places.

Start the Week brought together two leading historians and a film maker to paint a complex and nuanced portrait of life in Russia and in former East Germany under the old regime.

It’s much more complex than queues, corruption, the KGB or the Stasi.

And if you grew up then, your personal memories are many and varied - giving rise to the term “ostaglia” – a fondness for the old days.

A Trabant – the dinky car from that era – can fetch up to €10,000 nowadays.

People are creating bars and pubs that look like they did back in the day.

It’s about East Germans trying to reclaim their past and their identity.

If your appetite is whetted for more, then there is plenty.

Thousands of hours of BBC footage of those tumultuous years in Russia form the basis for Adam Curtis’s television series Russia 1985-1999.

It records the lives of Russians at every level in society as their world collapsed around them.

Meanwhile for book lovers, The Island of Brilliant is a podcast on children’s books.

Coming from a small town in the 1970s where even the swings were locked up on Sundays, writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s assertion that boredom is the compost of creativity struck a chord.

We read because there was nothing much to do.

What he and illustrator Nadia Shireen offer is a chance to take children’s books seriously as an art form – this is for book lovers everywhere.