Joan Armatrading loves choirs. She's made a nice series of five programmes about her favourites. This one's about a group in Scunthorpe that recruits young singers from the age of three and it'll probably make you cry (MP3).
I'm already enjoying the Beeb's 250th anniversary Blake-a-thon (is that how you spell 'Blake-a-thon'?). There's stuff on all the networks. The best so far has been this half hour on Radio 4 in which Jenny Uglow asserts Blake's radicalism. She's worried that these days everyone thinks he was either a sentimental English patriot (mostly because of 'Jerusalem') or a fruitcake (mostly because of the angels in the trees and the mad engravings).
Tom Paulin, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd are on hand to back her up, the historical context is fascinating and there's obviously plenty of marvelous poetry from the old fruitcake (sorry). MP3.
bookmarks by: delicious.comSpeechification is a celebration of speech radio from around the (English-speaking) world. It's maintained (intermittently, it has to be said) by a scattered band of listeners most of whom live in Britain, which explains the preponderance of programmes from Radio 4, the nation's number 1 speech network.
We record or link to programmes and wrap the whole lot up in a podcast, which is probably the best way to absorb this stuff.
Of course, one day this might turn into something else, maybe a new way of curating speech radio. Or maybe it won’t.
Your hosts on this not very wild ride are Steve Bowbrick, Russell Davies, Dan Hill, Bobbie Johnson and James Bridle. Drop us a line with your thoughts, unless you wish to complain about continuity announcers and their accents.
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