Producer, Eleanor McDowall Nina Garthwaite, the founder of the public listening phenomenon 'In the Dark', presents a showcase for delightful and adventurous short documentaries.

In the first edition of Short Cuts, she delves into tales of misadventure - starting with a chance encounter on a train where a couple's absorption in the crossword disguises a possible hidden romance. And encompassing the writer Joe Dunthorne's reminiscences of his misspent gap year selling door to door in Australia.

From the charged atmosphere on the London underground to distorted visions on the top of a mountain - Nina navigates tales of love, loss and wild abandonment.

Charing Crossword

Intimacy and Distance
Resonance FM
Prods Ed Baxter and Chris Weaver

A Corner Seat in a Smoker Facing the Engine
robinthefog.com
Prod Robin Warren

Joe Dunthorne

Tunnel Visions
Prod Pejk Malinovski

Donna

A Cold Freezin’ Night for Doomed Lovers
Third Coast Festival - Short Doc Winner
thirdcoastfestival.org
Prod Andrea Silenzi

Press

"...there are ways to lead audiences to new content, beyond the familiar draws of news and music, sport and drama. Short Cuts (Radio 4, Tuesday) is a new weekly dip into the world of radio features, with excerpts from documentaries, real life moments of "found sound" and what we might loosely term art radio. It's immensely cheering to see this given a mid-afternoon slot on the network, where it can introduce new listeners to an often marginalised strand of audio. It would be even more cheering for it to extend beyond this month.

The four programmes, produced by Eleanor McDowall and presented by Nina Garthwaite, are a stylish, quirky, friendly sampler of this type of radio, with each themed half-hour containing heartwarming moments to make you smile, but also slivers of thrilling oddness.

[...]It's a rich aural kaleidoscope, dotted with extraordinary and ordinary moments of being relayed in simple and more complex ways. A bit like life, then."

Elisabeth Mahoney, The Guardian, 20.01.12

"Short Cuts (Tuesdays) has been buried in the afternoon schedule and I missed the first programme but was lucky enough to hear a snippet from it on Pick of the Week and was hooked. [It] made me stop what I was doing to listen because of the quality of the production (by Eleanor McDowall). It was offbeat, yet acoustically sharp, and sent me back to iPlayer to hear the other items, lights dimmed, attention switched on."

Kate Chisholm, The Spectator, 21.01.12

Charing Crossword featured on Radio 4's 'Pick of the Week'