Speechification

I'm in awe. I honestly don't know how they do it. They chortle and hesitate and miss cues and improvise - and then they back up and do it again. They run two interviews at the same time, questions from one interleaved with answers from the other. They use the ragged ends of recordings as if they were prime content. They leave the stumbles and dropped mics in and talk over the good stuff. They play with sound quality, record the credits over the phone, play in random music, watch movies on-air. And learned contributors join in - they relax and laugh and argue like kids. And the result is wonderful, inspiring science programming - only you'd be forgiven for not noticing. You might think it was just hilarious, clever speech radio. This one's about parasites. It's brilliant (MP3).

Radiolab is made by WNYC. The podcast is here.

The picture is by Jeremy Sternberg. It's used under licence.

This entry was posted by by Steve Bowbrick on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 11:10 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.