Speechification

Two football posts in 24 hours? What's going on?

Radio producers are a big source of recommendations for Speechification. I'm posting a couple of programmes from one such recommendation, received this week, for which we are very grateful. First, here's a quite thrilling World Service essay by David Goldblatt about the eternal strife between Milan's football leviathans: AC Milan and Inter Milan. Serie A is evidently an exhilarating and frightening place (MP3). There's a lot of additional information on the programme's World Service web page and here are the nine other football-themed programmes we've published at Speechification since 2007.

Picture of an AC Milan strip by Tomaž Štolfa. Used under licence.

The excellent and excellently told story of the Makana Football Association, the league founded by political prisoners on Robben Island during Apartheid South Africa. The league's first president started with its constitution, and went on to draft that of the modern nation. [MP3]

Professor Anthony King's series on grudge matches and the political importance of sport, More Than A Game, is a real treat. He's previously covered the 1938 fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, a disaster for Nazi propaganda, and the 1956 "Blood in the Water" water polo match between Hungary and the USSR - both spellbinding accounts, and if anyone managed to grab them, please let us know.

This week he looks at the four-day "Football War" of 1959 between Honduras and El Salvador, a tragic tale which ever way you look at it, but possibly the most forceful example going of sport as an extension of national pride and passion. [MP3]

Judging by the line-up of podcasts on my phone now, many of the fears the national broadcasters had a few years ago seem to have been pretty valid. It's a mix of 'speech radio'-like material from publishers, small specialised broadcasters or international competitors, with barely any from BBC Radio 4 or ABC Radio National, the national broadcasters most closely aligned with the terrain I've recently called home.

I'm now able to listen to audio closely related to my work interests drawn from all over Anglophone countries - that's a few hours a week. And then a range of generally good smart public radio, such as from New York's WNYC (Studio 360 and Radio Lab) and WFMU's Mudd Up!). Inside Europe from Deutsche Welle is always good, when I manage get to it.

But interestingly, it's increasingly dominated by speech radio offerings from what were previously print publishers. The Monocle Weekly, The Guardian, with its Football Weekly - funny, acerbic, international in focus (despite the inevitable gravitational pull of the Premier League). The Economist, after inauspicious beginnings a couple of years ago, are now really investing — and it's paying off, with a well-produced and consistently interesting range of audio, video and slideshow based shows.

And here, The New Yorker. They're really going to town on their podcasts now too. Their monthly fiction podcast, featured here, is particularly good. With an extraordinary archive to draw from, they get writers to pick a story from the mag and read it out, then have a conversation about it. That's it. But it's great. Well-produced, well-hosted, but most of all, great characters and great stories. Makes great radio-not-radio.

And interestingly, I feel more likely to buy the print magazine again now. I'd picked it up from time to time over the years, always enjoyed it, but it was a peculiarly empty pleasure - I never got through all the articles, and it's oddly vicarious to be browsing the listings for last week's gigs at the Lincoln Center, Tonic or MoMA. Now, though, I'm developing a new relationship with it. Indicates how podcasting can extend a brand, but also draw new readers back to the magazine.

I could've picked any I've enjoyed recently, such as David Bezmozgis reading Sergei Dovlatov’s “The Colonel Says I Love You”, which is just great, or Roger Angell reading the late John Updike’s “Playing with Dynamite.”, or Joyce Carol Oates reading Eudora Welty etc. etc. But I've gone for Jonathan Franzen reading a couple of humorous short stories. Both are roughly from the '80s, neither show their age.

Veronica Geng (which is a great name, as Franzen explains) delivers a funny, yet rather arch piece, an entire Raymond Chandler-parody based on a challenge - that nobody actually issued as a challenge - of combining the words 'Reagan' and 'read Proust' in the same sentence as frequently as possible. Yet the second story, Ian Frazier's piece 'Coyote vs. ACME', is rather more wonderful, being a law-suit issued by Mr Coyote against the ACME company. Beautifully done, slyly undercutting the emerging culture of personal litigation its utter absurdity at first seems to rob the colour and vitality from the masterful original works, yet ultimately builds to a loving and artful tribute, triggering numerous flashbacks of Wile E Coyote's quotidian yet relentless glorious failures. Both pieces are 'extreme writing' as the title implies, even essentially avant-garde in form as Franzen illuminates, yet both are as smart, sophisticated and accessible as New York City itself.

There are still a couple of ABC Radio National podcasts in the mix, and while broadcast speech radio is probably still doing fine, it's going to be increasingly tough for them - and the BBC - to be going toe to toe with the likes of The Economist, The New Yorker, The Guardian etc. week after week, as well as new players and international competitors, and not really being able to move onto their terrain at all. It's great for us, the listener, but they must be thinking they live in interesting times.

Extreme Writing, The New Yorker [mp3]

A perfect little programme from Hardeep Singh Kohli featuring Camus, Nabokov and Bob Wilson. And drawing a compelling parallel between drummers and goalkeepers. Also reminds us of the best football song ever: "Nayim, From The Halfway Line". MP3 here.

A really vivid and exciting half-hour about the journey of Togo and Arsenal footballer Emmanuel Adebayor to Ghana and Togo. He's 24 but so mature and comfortable with his fame and the quite awesome responsibility that goes with it. A remarkable man (MP3).

It's all gone quiet over here hasn't it? Maybe all the speechification contributers are glued to Euro2008. Probably. Well this'll be right up their street. Danny Robins investigates the Clericus Cup, a football tournament for Catholic priests, particularly interesting in the wake of recent Italian football tragedies and scandals. And their trouncing by the Dutch this week. MP3 here.

The whole set of Am I Normal? programmes is well worth a listen. There's one on Social Phobia, another on Dyslexia,  a third on Maths and another on Sleep. That's the one that I thought would resonate most with our listeners (though Social Phobia is a contender too) so that's the one I've stuck on the podcast by linking  to an MP3 here.  All the shows are there to be listened to though, and there's a nice bunch of links too.  Excellent work. And you've got to listen  right to the end of this show, to hear a sports reporter fall asleep live on air, while reading out some football scores. Brilliant.

In a week when the return of the messiah to Newcastle United has thankfully shifted the spotlight from off-field events at my team Liverpool, what better time to assess the 'Geordie Nation'? And who better to explain it than Sid Waddell? And how better to explain it than to put him on Australia's ABC Radio National and get him to try to explain to Australians, in the form of The Sports Factor's gently bemused host, Mick O'Regan?

Sid Waddell is something of a legend in his field, and his chosen field is darts commentary. A real eccentric, hearing him articulate the attraction of both darts and Geordies is quite something. It gives some sense of what Waddell's commentary is like - though we could've done with a few more recordings - and you can hear his Cambridge education occasionally surfacing amidst the maelstrom of a professional game of darts, such as in the now classic sequence:

"When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer ...

Eric Bristow is only 27."

And all this delivered with a fabulously rich Geordie accent (which he claims to soften for the benefit of listening Australians.) He also repeatedly tries to claim some deep spiritual connection between the Geordies and the Australians. He nearly gets away with it, but not really. Martin Kellner from The Guardian also phones in to explain the phenomenon that is Sid, and darts.

Nil points for Waddell's terrible rendition of 'When the boat comes in' at the end, but top marks otherwise.

The Sports Factor: Darts: Verbal and regular (mp3)

Is African football any good? How much does a Ghanaian Premiership player earn? Will a team from the continent ever win the World Cup? The World Service is going large on the Africa Cup of Nations that kicks off in Ghana this weekend. Here's 8:14 of the kind of stuff only the World Service can do: wide-ranging, authoritative commentary on stuff that happens in foreign places. (MP3).