Sunday Morning for Sunday 16 July 2023

8:10 Emanuel Kalafatelis: New Zealanders feeling the pinch 

We know that New Zealanders continue to feel the pain of the cost of living crisis. Back in March Research NZ polled on this, and now it has run the numbers again. 

Joining us is Research NZ managing partner Emanuel Kalafatelis. 

8:20 Roxanne Prichard: When sleep eludes you 

We’ve all experienced those nights at one time or another, when sleep just won’t come. Lying awake worrying about things we often have no control over that can doubtless best wait until the light of day. 

Dr Roxanne Prichard is a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the Center for College Sleep, University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Her research has found that after midnight our minds are less equipped to problem-solve and more prone to find problems. 

Roxanne takes us through the science that will help calm our mind and body. 

8:40 Professor Robin Dunbar: Conversation are better with four 

If three’s a crowd, it seems four is the ideal when it comes to conversation.  

Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford has spent decades studying how humans socialise. 

He is known for “Dunbar’s number”, a reference to his theory that most of us are only able to sustain about 150 social connections, but his work has also explored how people act in smaller groups.  

He has found that when it comes to having an enjoyable chat, four is the sweet spot, in fact in groups of five or more, the chances of laughter plummets. 

9:10 Mediawatch 

Mediawatch looks at reports of a ‘mortgage bomb’ that could blow up the economy. 

Also -  new moves to make Google and Facebook pay the media for the news they distribute - and who is the country’s longest-lasting columnist 

9:30 Calling Home: KJ Gilmour in Grantown-on-Spey, Scotland 

RNZ Nights listeners may have heard Marc Leishman talking to this year’s World Porridge Making Champion on Tuesday. Turns out one of the competition judges is a New Zealander. 

KJ Gilmour is an award-winning chef from Temuka who now lives and works in Grantown-On Spey in the Cairngorms, Scotland. 

10:10 Fay Clark: Do animals feel joy? 

We've spoken before on Sunday morning about cats, dogs and cows, and how they reveal their affection for us. Research is making great strides in analysing animals we're familiar with and ascertaining their emotional states. That, of course, will allow us to improve their lives. Even if we then eat some of them.  

Dr Fay Clark runs the Comparative Challenge Lab at the University of Bristol. Her research is concerned with the mental processes and mental health of animals. Her training is in zoology, biological anthropology, and psychology, and in her lab, in zoos and in the wild she constructs challenges for animals to see how they respond. 

10:30 Arthur Edwards: 45 Years as a Royal Photographer 

Arthur Edwards MBE is now 82 years of age. He has been a photographer of the royal family for longer than anyone else, certainly in a mainstream media capacity and has worked all that time for The Sun newspaper.  

Arthur’s was behind the lens for many of the photos that come to our minds when summoning up the big images – the formal poses of the Queen and the Duke, Prince Charles through the years, and Diana, that photo of her holding kindergarten children, the first ever taken of her before she was thrust into the limelight. And of course, Diana with her own children, and many in her unguarded moments of fun; latterly William and Kate of course, Harry & Meghan... thousands and thousands of photographs: at Sandringham, Buckingham Palace, Ascot, the ski slopes, the polo fields and wherever he could find a royal personage doing something that looked a bit interesting.  

Over 45 years he’s become part of the royal furniture, although his non-threatening relationship with them all didn’t begin amiably. His close relationship with the king was for a long time fraught.  

Arthur Edwards has published a book that’s full of photos, as you’d expect. It’s called BEHIND THE CROWN – MY LIFE PHOTOGRAPHING THE ROYAL FAMILY.  

10:50 Joanne Watson: Scone Etiquette 

King Charles' former butler Grant Harold has revealed the proper way to drink tea, if you want affect a regal manner.  

When you stir your tea with a spoon, if that’s necessary, you shouldn’t move the spoon crudely around the cup clockwise or widdershins. What you do is use a “very gentle back and forward motion.”  

A circular motion risks spillage and noise. 

Another major revelation from Grant is that scones should not be cut in half. You may employ the Cornish method, with the cream on top, or the Devonshire way, with jam on top, but you must never employ any method of laceration or piercing probe into the middle of the scone itself. 

Joanne Watson The Old Town Hall Tea Room in Urenui until October last year and she’s a bit of a scone aficionado. 

11:00 Sarah McMullan: We should watch films in the cinema 

The big movies of the year, Barbie, Oppenheimer, Mission Impossible are out now (or soon) and the BBC has teamed up with the Open University in the UK to advocate seeing these films in the cinema. 

The essential argument is that we are social creatures and it’s far better for us to be with other people even if they are loudly scraping popcorn out of a box. It is good for the body and the soul.  

Sarah McMullan is familiar to the RNZ audience. She watches a lot of films and writes about some of them. 

11:20 Simon Schama: A history of vaccination 

Simon Schama is a pre-eminent historian and the author of The Power of Art, Landscape and Memory and Citizens, the story of the French Revolution. He’s a Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University and is a well-recognised face on television from his many series like Civilisation and The History of Now. 

 Well now he’s written Foreign Bodies - Pandemics, Vaccines & The Health of Nations. Foreign Bodies is on the face it the stories of the bacteriologists and epidemiologists and other scientists who developed vaccines and saved the lives of millions, often in the face of considerable opposition and prejudice. But it merges that history with the now of Covid and the fear of what is coming next.