Drones over Moscow

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

1:16Hello, it's the podcast of Broadcasting House from Sunday the 20th of September. We spoke about Russia and a drone attack by Ukraine, and also about the British royal family. Spencer and Windsor, a tale of two houses. The history is long and the royal family would have mostly counted the family Spencer as political allies, if at not times friends. And that's not the case now. In the war of words, which Charles do you believe? A friend of the king will join us live in the studio. After all the doom and gloom, we hear a positive take on A.I. Guess how old this farmer is who's made a new workflow app.

2:00We've got some really positive feedback. A few farmers have called it game changing and saving them multiple hours of paperwork a week. And yeah, so it's like quite surreal. He's 16. AI may be the future, but does the female robot voice you'll hear get Tony Blackburn's jokes? I've never got into playing snooker. I can't stand long queues. It's very much a groan-worthy pun rather than a laugh-out-loud joke. A 96-year-old listener recites a poem committed to memory and with the morning news lines to learn from Julie Etchingham, John Sargent and Poppy Coburn. One of them was on Strictly. In this hour, we have Tony Blackburn and Ed Sheeran in different items and we meet our listeners who are 16 and 96.

2:50Russia claims to have shot down hundreds of Ukrainian drones in what officials called a massive overnight attack, perhaps the largest ever mounted by Ukraine. At least two people have been killed and six injured, according to the governor of the Moscow region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a video on X of fire rising out of an oil refinery in Moscow's suburbs.

3:17Steve Rosenberg is the BBC's Russia editor. Steve, welcome back to BH. Good morning Paddy, good to be with you. What's the picture from Moscow? Well, I can't confirm any of these figures, but let me share with you what the Russians are saying. So we have figures from the defense ministry, which says that more than 1 ,100 drones, Ukrainian drones, were intercepted and destroyed over Russia overnight. The Moscow mayor has the figure of more than 1 ,600 drones repelled. That's since yesterday. And he said that around 450 were on their way to the Russian capital. He did admit that the Moscow oil refinery, which is one of the biggest oil refineries in Russia, was hit.

4:06It's not the first time that this has happened. We don't know the extent of the damage there. But the mayor, Sergei Serbianin, did call this mass Ukrainian drone attack unprecedented. And he claimed that it was an attempt to disrupt the Russian parliamentary election. Are you on your way to a polling station? we will be after this yes we're going to we're going to head out and go to a polling station but i think we it's important to say that people are not holding their breath here regarding the result you know keep in mind that elections in russia are heavily controlled tightly controlled by the kremlin and so the the party of power here united russia the party that vladimir putin supports is expected to be the largest party in the next parliament and experience shows that all the other parties that get into the Duma, the State Duma, the Parliament, end up supporting the Kremlin's main initiatives and the war on Ukraine.

5:06So no surprises expected here. Is there a grim mood? There are long queues for fuel. To be bombed, albeit by drone, in Moscow is an historic memory for Russians. I think there's certainly growing anxiety. People here in Moscow, you talk to them on the streets, you talk to people in their homes, and there is a sense of anxiety. People don't know what's coming next. You mentioned the petrol queues. We're now seeing another wave of petrol queues in Moscow. The authorities are trying to control that, but it's not easy for them. And there is a growing, I think, desire here on the part of the population for an end to this war.

5:54I mean, when you speak to Russians, people say, we hope this ends soon. We want peace. Some people see peace as peace on Russia's terms. But many people say, we just want there to be negotiations and for all of this to end. Because Russians increasingly are feeling the effects, feeling the consequences of four and a half years of Russia's war in Ukraine. Steve Rosenberg, BBC's Russia editor, friend of BH. Thank you very much for bringing you that news overnight, in part because that is said, as you'll have heard from Steve, to be the largest assault by Ukraine on Russia of this war. Earl Spencer is peddling Diana's memory and twisting his crested carving knives.

6:41So friends of the King have told the Sunday Times. It's not a title known for its love of the monarchy. so it's a signal of the dire state of relations between Charles and Charles. Diana's brother's book is published on Tuesday and has been serialised in the Daily Mail with allegations that the king, when Prince of Wales, seemed giddily elated over her death and said we'd forget her soon enough. There was, says the Earl of Row, over allowing William and Harry to walk in the funeral procession in 1997 with their uncle against the palace plans. There's more this morning, as we heard from Jane, with the release of more of his interview with Laura Koonsberg.

7:21Charles Spencer said Harry and Meghan's treatment at the hands of the media has echoes of what happened to Diana. I'm not here to speak for Harry and Meghan, but for anyone who's being destroyed in this way daily, it must be such a cancerous influence in their life. I saw it with Diana. I saw Diana. I mentioned it in the eulogy, her tears of despair. She was really brought low by all that criticism. And, yeah, I suppose it's a pity when I see echoes of that now. Ed Owens is a royal historian and author of After Elizabeth and the Family Firm. He told me of the history between the Spencers and the Windsors and the royal houses which preceded them.

8:04The history is long and reaches right back to the start of the 16th century when the Spencers joined the elite landowning class. They have been at Althorpe House since 1508. The king ennobled the family, the first John Spencer, about a century later at the start of the 17th century. And ever since then, the royal family would have mostly counted the family Spencer as political allies, if at not times friends. There were, of course, differences in terms of the politics of the royals and the Spencers. The Spencers were a very progressive family. They were part of the Whig faction in Parliament. When it came to parliamentary reform and the ascendancy of parliamentary power over crown power, the Spencers would have been great champions of that, putting them at odds with the monarchy.

8:55Now, any rivalry from history would have been eclipsed by what happened at the funeral of Diana in 1997. Absolutely. And the great intervention from current Earl Spencer, which would have really frustrated, I think, the British royal family was the eulogy that he made at the funeral of Diana. On behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you are steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned. And then, of course, that led to the moment when the public outside started to applaud, which was then picked up by the mourners within.

9:45Let's have a listen.

9:57And of course this led to what commentators called Britain's Diana moment. Does it seem to you that Earl Spencer is reviving this Diana moment in the moment of the monarch's current travails? avails. Yes, in many ways, Earl Spencer's current intervention is very consistent with what he put across in that very powerful eulogy, which I would recommend going back to and listening to in its entirety, in that he was deeply critical both of the British media, and also pointedly excoriating of the behaviour of the monarchy back in 1997. So in many ways, he is, yes, he's reviving that narrative, but very consistent with what he said back in 1997 too.

10:38Ed Owens, the historian. Dame Julia Cleverden has been a trusted aide and friend of the King for the past 40 years, holding senior roles in his philanthropic endeavours, including special advisor to the Prince's Charities. Dame Julia, welcome to our programme. Thank you for having me. When you hear that 1997 archive, does it seem very recent to you? Well, it seems a very long way away, and yet at the heart of it was the death of a mother of her sons. And for me, very personally, my husband had died a fortnight before Princess Diana on holiday in Greece with our two children who were 11 and 15, so the same ages as the young sons were of Princess Diana.

11:34So in a way, it's an extraordinary parallel, completely different. How was the king to you in your grief? Oh, unbelievable. I mean, I came through the door from Greece with the little girls in a state of hysteria and my mother said, I've had the Prince of Wales on the phone three times, he wants to talk to you at once. He could not have been more supportive, loving, concerned about the children and interested and really, really of an incredible emotional support to me. Do you believe Charles Spencer? Well, it's not the language or the behaviours of a man I've known for 40 years. So no. I, to say that the Prince of Wales was elated and somehow took any pleasure, he was as if a ten-ton truck had fallen on him.

12:36So you don't believe Charles Spencer? I don't think that that could have been the language that the now king would have used. What is the impact on the monarch of his brother, Andrew, his son, Harry, and now his former brother-in-law reigning on the reign? Well, I think one thing that I have known about the Prince of Wales and now the king is that for 50 years he has been an apprentice in the world of being a king and he has enormous inner strengths and reserves, both of his faith but also of experience in my... Which he needs now more than ever. Well, you would have thought that after so much hard work and dedication to the causes that Britain cares about, that this period of time would have enabled him to really bring all those skills and strengths to bear.

13:46And I think they are. Sorry to interrupt there. Other friends are out in the Sunday Times saying that Charles Spencer's peddling Diana and also he's twisting his crested carving knives. Are the King's friends rallying round? I think those of us who have seen what happened in that time and his absolute dedication and determination to do everything he could. I remember he rang me on his way to Paris to collect the Princess of Wales body and said oh Julia that's all single parents now he's done his absolute damnedest to support those young men and they have in their own ways done incredibly important and great things thank you very much for coming in I bet you never thought uh you would be meeting our listeners in this way at this time it's taken everyone by surprise but thank you yes but I think the thing to hold on to is that the man that the king is is continually looking forward onto the issues which matter not backwards to 30 years okay thank you very much indeed um and the full interview with laura koonsberg will be broadcast on bbc one at 6 30 and available today from four o 'clock on bbc iplayer there have been some doom laden predictions for artificial intelligence and we're going to meet a teenager who credits it with turning his life around at half past.

15:18But first we wanted to test the limits of AI by telling it some of the infamous jokes of Tony Blackburn. If AI is so clever, can it get the radio legend's famous wordplay and dad gags? What a week I've had. Andy Burnham very kindly gave me the keys to the city of Manchester. I didn't even know it was locked. Here's how AI rated that. i'd give it 7.5 slash 10 it's a classic misdirection joke the i didn't know it was locked punchline is a very old joke structure that's been used with keys to the city for decades so it doesn't feel especially original if the audience has heard similar one-liners before they'll see the punchline coming well we have got more believe me we've got plenty uh before 10 can ai get tony blackburn Adam Hayes is our listener and sent us an email at 4.40 in the morning, Sunday morning in Brixton, serenaded by a Jay, who is still singing now after about an hour.

16:59Now, hello, can I speak? Am I allowed to speak? Thank you. Jane, is this a J? Because you know BH identifying birds has not gone well. I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea. I think it's beautiful, but I have no idea. What we're saying on the record is it's a beautiful bird. Adam Hayes is our listener who's claiming it's a J. So if you've got a problem, we have to contact Adam Hayes. Listeners have been celebrating the power of memorising lines to tackle brain conditions. The former MP Jonathan Ashworth appeared here last week to explain that he's learning poetry to recover from a stroke. He asked for your suggestions and has been bombarded, and so have we.

17:39Thank you for sending them to us. We've sent them all on. Our listener, Peter Williams, who's now 96, is one of those listeners. He swears by absorbing rhymes to fend off the dementia which claimed his beloved wife, Christine. In fact, at her suggestion, he started going into care homes and hospices to recite poems. Poetry, like music, is a very good weapon to try and deal with the attack of dementia. And memorizing may help. More important to my mind is actually speaking the poem out loud. Just as some treatments of dementia, they're singing and singing as you walk, getting rhythm and a heartbeat and pulse and so on altogether.

18:25And if you speak poetry, then you pick up the pulse of it, like the rhythm of music, and somehow that seems to line up with your own heartbeat and breathing, and all that helps the mental condition. When you went into hospices reading poetry, did you think that it was twice blessed, it was good for you and good for the people who heard it? well it was good for me in so far as one thing that a poetry speaker wants as an amateur is an audience and just like you do i suppose yes all night all nine million of please please please so so yes you want an audit and what did it what effect did reading poetry to people in a hospice at the end of life care what effect did it have on them peter on them well if I to be modest one doesn't know what goes on inside a person's mind one extraordinary experience I had in a care home about 15 miles from here where one of the listeners was a very old lady who was in a wheelchair and virtually paralyzed and she hadn't said or made any kind of sounds for ages and ages and I read a poem and suddenly the nurses by her were amazed.

19:58She was trying to speak and they thought she was trying to speak a poem that she'd probably known as a girl and I did find somehow that people reacted as if perhaps something was being released inside their minds or something that they could relate to it's an inspiring and a humbling experience i can tell you it's very moving hearing you tell us about it so who do you like who's who's your go-to poet when you need a bit of a boost well at the moment i'm reading james elroy flecker who did what all young romantic poets should die he died when he was young so his love poems are rather sad and they don't require his love maybe but I keep coming back to Thomas Hardy really and I've found a very short one which I could regale with if you have the time and the patience So Peter, you're 96, you're reading on Radio 4, well you're reciting from memory, tell us the name of the poem and then off you go The poem is Proud Songsters by Thomas Hardy and it deals really with the mystery of existence of life, but where it comes from.

21:20The thrushes sing as the sun is going and the finches whistle in ones and pairs and as it gets dark, loud nightingales in bushes pipe as they can when April wears, as if all time were theirs. These are brand new birds of twelve months growing That a year ago or less than twain No finches were, nor nightingales, nor thrushes But only particles of grain And earth and air and rain Peter, thank you so much You were doing that from memory, you weren't cheating Yes, yeah. I'm glad that you gave me a few seconds of silence afterwards because poetry like music, it emerges from silence and it goes back into silence.

22:18And silence is in poems as important as the words themselves sometimes. With thanks to Peter. And it's a curious coincidence, his poem evoking the names of birds, because all over the country listeners are saying we have misidentified a bird again. at 10 past 5 today on Radio 4 in The Verb Ian McMillan looks at poems to help us brave the elements

23:05with ease. You know it, and fans ready to add John Deere certified pre-owned equipment and more options to their lineup can shop at machinefinder.com Booyah! John Deere is putting in work and putting up highlights. Oh man, look at those passes. Tillage, planting, harvesting. Three years in, and these pre-owned machines are still at the top of their game. We're talking reliability, performance, and long-term potential. And get this, these veteran machines can pick up the latest precision tech with ease. You know it, and fans ready to add John Deere certified pre-owned equipment and more options to their lineup can shop at machinefinder.com.

23:44Booyah!

23:49Yes, it's the first time we've heard Ed Sheeran speak this week on the issue. We heard in the news that there was quite a moment at the concert in Philadelphia, so we thought you might want to hear some of it. I have tried in my career not to be a political commentator of any kind because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics.

24:15But this is a humanitarian issue and I cannot hide how I feel about it anymore. What happened in Israel and the No Music Festival on October 7th was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain. What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate. My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians lives, of children's lives. And the systemic injustice we are seeing unfold in the West Bank cannot be overlooked. I am already speaking to people across the spectrum to work out how to make a contribution that helps victims of these terrible times and listening and learning, because I do not know enough.

25:02I do not know enough, says Ed Sheeran. There is a big debate, of course, about whether singers should sing up for issues or actors should be activists. We haven't got an item on that. This came overnight. It's too late for the papers, but we will definitely be talking about this for a long time, I'm quite sure. Thousands of school leavers are using artificial intelligence to set up their own businesses in a trend that's taken industry leaders by surprise. Technology bosses are themselves worried over a science fiction future of AI with increased threats to humans. We wanted clues on how its youngest users rate AI.

25:38Ben O 'Connor is 16 from County Down and set up a company which once would have relied entirely on complex coding skills. He's the founder of FarmFlow, with 1 ,200 users using his app to streamline the way they farm animals and grow crops. He told me about his family's life in Northern Ireland. So it's a family farm. Dad and brother are on it full time. We have about 400 dairy stock on the farm and then a few beef as well. As soon as they come home from school, they normally go out to the farm. So what does FarmFlow do? Yeah, so it's a farm management app that aims to address the people issues on farms.

26:19So it's sort of workforce management and tracks hours and a bit of health and safety as well. It's relocation tracking. And also on the feeding the livestock side, you take stock of what the stock needs to eat. Yeah, so it uses machine learning for a dairy farm, for example. and predict how efficient their feed rations are. For your members, I know there's 1 ,200, have they reported making savings of time and money or finding a new, more efficient way to go about farming? Yeah, so we've got some really positive feedback. A few farmers have called it game changing and it's saving them multiple hours of paperwork a week.

27:01And the average farmer in the UK is doing 65 hours a week of manual labour. and then on top of that all their extra admin as well so it's definitely cutting down some of that. So you know a lot about farming but did you know much about coding and how did you build a web app? Yeah so I didn't have a clue really about coding or tech so I started using tools like Glovable and Codex as well to start building it and the more complicated stuff my cousin helped out as well. When you look at it can you believe that you're the brain behind it? Yeah so it's like quite surreal. I never thought if you told me last year there'd be you in an AI platform.

27:40I never thought. You did, I believe, had plans to switch to marketing, but now you're a sort of farmer with an app attached. So has it changed your life a bit, this AI? Yeah, it's like completely. I thought I was supposed to do a marketing apprenticeship, but I was trying to scale FarmFlow and seeing how far I can get it. Just going to go into it full time. And what were you using AI for before FarmFlow? I use ChatGBT a lot last year. ChatGBT's top 1 % of users, so 18 ,500 messages. So I use it a lot. So it knows a lot about you. There's been a lot of worries and concerns about AI coming for us.

28:19Do you share the fears about AI going wrong? Sort of not really. like for someone who uses a lot of ai platforms uh i see like it does it does definitely hallucinate and does always need sort of like a pinch of salt because things problems do go wrong with it but i think like as long as there's humans on the one side of it uh it's not as scary as people say because it's like i even know in the agricultural industry it's not really replacing jobs it's making people more skilled. And is it making you any money? Yeah, yeah. Like, we only sort of fully launched in August and we're starting to become sort of more commercial as we go into partnerships with retailers.

29:03Are you on LinkedIn? Yeah. And so is that bringing you any attention? Yeah, like, my LinkedIn, I was looking the other day, I went from 1 ,000 profile views last year to sitting at 160 ,000 this year. Well, thanks to Ben. That's Farm Flow if you seek it online. Janine Chamberlain is country manager at LinkedIn, where she told us more and more people have been giving themselves the job title of founder, just like Ben, and she reacted to his story. First of all, isn't it impressive that somebody at the age of 16 can build something from scratch, which I think is really a sort of advantage that young people, but not just young people, have right now with the advance of AI, and that he has built something to support his own family that actually turns out to be incredibly useful for others.

30:01So I'm not surprised that people are wanting to learn from him on LinkedIn and therefore are following what he is getting up to. Can we learn from you? Does use of the word founder tell us how the economy is changing by looking at how people describe themselves on LinkedIn? Yes. Founder, as a job title, has increased significantly what we can see on LinkedIn. It's actually up 70 % year on year. We can also see that whilst hiring overall is slow and has slowed down quite a lot if you compare it to pre-pandemic, but hiring at small companies is actually up. So what we are seeing is people are going at it alone.

30:45They can because they can get the technology through AI, so they can get a lot more done by themselves. And of course, in a slow jobs market, it's one of the ways that you can take control over your career. One of the things that the youngest listeners complain about is they put in an application and nobody replies and they're making many, many, multiple applications. Can you tell us from your data what is happening with applications per role? So I think there's two things happening, right? On the one hand, you have job seekers who are applying, they're not hearing back, they're getting frustrated.

31:19And in response to that, they're going to submit more and more and more applications. On the flip side of that, you have employers who are absolutely looking to bring people into their organizations, or may it be slower than what it was before. And they are inundated with applications. And so sifting through all of those applications obviously takes a lot of time. And that's leading to either no or very slow responses to these applications. So you have this kind of perfect storm where it's actually really challenging on both sides. In general, with all the warnings that have been about AI, it looks like AI could take humans' jobs.