Exams past and present
Scenes from Student Life RADIO scheduled for Monday 18 April The subjects studied may have changed down the years, but it seems there are recurring themes in the student experience – and not just booze and bad behaviour. That’s the message of a new weekday series fronted by recent history MA student Ellie Cawthorne – who also happens to be BBC History Magazine’s new web assistant.
The series sees Cawthorne travelling around the UK, comparing the experiences of students current and past. We’re shown the annual Oxford Town v Gown boxing match through the prism of a tavern dispute, the St Scholastica Day riot of 1355. And looking at the pressures of being a student, the series finds parallels between the writings of Abraham de la Pryme, a 17th-century diarist whose friend was driven to suicide by his workload, and the complaints of a 21st-century blogger.
In other episodes, Cawthorne also celebrates Royal Holloway, the first women-only college; charts the experiences of Manchester history students during the First World War; and learns that students have long struggled to fund their lifestyles – even Lord Byron, as an 1806 college wine bill proves. in deniable talks in which both sides were hugely suspicious of each other.
It was a task that demanded huge moral courage. Accordingly, in Steven Spielberg’s masterful thriller based on the incident, Tom Hanks plays Donovan with a kind of everyman determination that recalls Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Balancing this is Mark Rylance, who won an Academy Award for his performance as Abel, a softly spoken and enigmatic figure. The duo anchor a picture that’s oldfashioned in all the best ways – by which we mean beautifully crafted, evocative in its conjuring up of the 1960s and agonisingly tense.