Training | 2010.08.23
Andy Kershaw to return to Radio 3
After more than two years off airwaves, presenter to host world music series in tie-in with BBC1 show Human Planet
Andy Kershaw is making his return to Radio 3 this autumn with a major new world music series that ties in with BBC1 show Human Planet.
After more than two years off the airwaves, following well-documented personal problems, in Music Planet Kershaw will take listeners on a journey around the world in what Radio 3 calls its "most significant and ambitious world music project ever".
During the series Kershaw and fellow presenter Lucy Duran will visit the same destinations as BBC1\'s Human Planet, a new landmark anthropological series celebrating man\'s remarkable ingenuity and success as a species.
Music Planet will record music from destinations including Switzerland, Peru, Madagascar, Kenya, Greenland and Mali, through to the Solomon Islands and Papa New Guinea. The series will also visit the frozen communities of the arctic winter and Amazonian villagers who have never met Europeans.
Highlights will include the sounds of the Bat People of Papa New Guinea, the voices of the shamans of Mongolia and Greenland\'s "katajjaq", a vocal contest between two women with songs that involve throat singing and imitating animal cries. Music Planet and Human Planet will air this autumn on Radio 3 and BBC1.
Kershaw said: "I am thrilled to be back on Radio 3 working again with a team of bright, imaginative, enthusiastic, people who also happen to be dear friends.
"Nowhere on earth is safe again from my attentions. So far we have – literally – hacked through mountain jungles to bring Music Planet listeners extraordinary music from some of the world\'s most isolated locations. And I cheerily risked incineration at a rocket festival in Thailand to take our Radio 3 audience into the fiery thick of the action.
"I have been even to Switzerland, the last country in which I expected to find myself. And, if listeners thought that yodelling was valuable only as a device to evict stragglers at the end of a party, or as a surefire way to secure an international novelty hit in 1956, the music we recorded in the Alps will – like so much to be heard in Music Planet – shatter such preconceptions and, simultaneously, delight and exhilarate."
Producer James Parkin added: "What makes Music Planet so exciting for me is that one minute you\'re listening to Cambodian hip-hop, and the next, Swiss yodelling recorded in the Alps. And this is the music that people are making right now, all over the world, recorded especially for Radio 3."
One of Kershaw\'s most famous broadcasts was his 1988 journey up the River Niger to Niafunke in Mali, where he went in search of the blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure.
Kershaw has not worked for the BBC since 2007 because of upheavals in his personal life. His separation from his partner of 17 years, the restaurateur Juliette Banner, led to a restraining order. He has since given up alcohol and declared himself "reborn".
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