Speechification

Here’s a quick one to celebrate a sequence of the kind of stuff that got us started with speechification in the first place. I sometimes feel a bit apologetic linking to Radio 4 stuff because it’s never exactly what you’d call hard hitting or envelope stretching but, really, while I’m getting stories as engaging and informative as these I’m quite happy.

So, to begin with, (especially if you’re foreign) I really want you to spool through this half hour segment of the Today Programme (to about 13:00) for a real ethnographic treat: Lady Mountbatten and Reg Baker comparing notes on their childhood experience of war (Real stream).

Straight after Today, Jonathan Freedland’s The Long View is about prison reform (Real stream, MP3) and then right after that, there’s a really lovely programme called Inheritance about Byron’s gondolier (Real stream, MP3).

And the shaggy geezer is the Gondolier himself, Giovanni Falcieri, in an amazing portrait from The Bodleian Library which is mentioned in the show.

This entry was posted by by Steve Bowbrick on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 7:12 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.