Peter Curran (presenter)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter Curran | |
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 Curran in 2025 | |
| Born | |
| Occupations | Radio/Podcast host, writer, documentary producer, narrator. |
Peter Curran is a writer, documentary maker, producer, actor, and radio and podcast presenter. He grew up in Belfast as the eldest of six children. Before entering broadcasting, he worked on funfairs in the United States and later moved to London, where he played drums in various bands and worked as a site carpenter and office fitter for five years. In 1992, he retrained as a BBC reporter.
Curran co-created Bunk Bed with Patrick Marber, a long-running podcast and radio programme for BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4. The series features late-night conversations recorded in beds and in the darkness, incorporating archive audio and guests appearances on a pull-out mattress. Guests have included Cate Blanchett, Harry Shearer, Jane Horrocks, Kathy Burke, and Andi Oliver. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2014,[1] Bunk Bed began its eleventh series in February 2025.
He is a regular presenter of Pick of the Week on BBC Radio 4.[2] He produced and directed the 2022 audio drama Love Pants, which examines the turbulent and abusive relationship between singer Ian Dury and actor Jane Horrocks. The program draws on Horrocks' diaries and Dury's letters and features original music by Mick Gallagher.[3][4]
In 2012, Curran co-founded audiobook publisher Talking Music. The company acquired the rights to Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian McDonald and subsequently published audiobooks on artists and movements including Eminem, Jimi Hendrix, Acid house, The Coasters, The Beatles, Glam rock, Adele, and The Clash. These works were written and read by authors such as Charles Shaar Murray, Jane Bussmann, and Barney Hoskyns.
Curran's journalism on contemporary Irish history includes the BBC television essays Maiden City Voyage, described as a social and cultural audit of Derry during its tenure as UK City of Culture, and Slack Sabbath, which explores changes in religious observance since 1970's. For BBC Radio 4, his work includes Collecting the Troubles At The Ulster Museum, contributions to the One To One series, and the 2022 program The Past Is a Foreign Country.[5]
For the UK's World War One commemoration program 14–18 NOW, Curran was commissioned to explore the experience of communities in Ireland's future border regions before and after the First World War. The Art of Border Living, produced in collaboration with the Verbal Arts Centre, comprised live events at the Belfast Film Festival and Dublin, the BBC documentary Stories From The Home Front, and a series of podcasts featuring commissioned short stories by authors including Kamila Shamsie, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, and Paul McVeigh.
Curran wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary examining John Hersey's 1946 Hiroshima article for The New Yorker.[6] This was followed by a rebroadcast of the BBC's 1948 transmission of the article in its entirety, which had been among the first broadcasts to describe in detail the human consequences of atomic bomb radiation.[7]
He has reported from South Africa, India and the USA for From Our Own Correspondent.[8] In Spirit of the Midnight Sun, Curran explored the effects of climate change on nomadic Sámi reindeer herders in Finnmark and on the coastal Sámi community of Varangerfjord in northern Norway.
