Speechification

This is just lovely. It’s got the stuff you want from radio feature-making: something you didn’t know, an unexpected insight, evidence that people you thought you knew all about aren’t what you thought they were. It’s about soldiers and birdwatching: specifically birdwatching done in warzones, birdsong on battlefields. Twitchers in uniform—and in peril of death. Moving and enlightening (web page, MP3). (Here comes the clunky link). And while we’re talking about sound (we were talking about sound weren’t we?), you should get over to the WNYC web site and listen to this really gorgeous show (there’s a link to the MP3 on the page) from the Radiolab team (from the end of 2007) about the way they work with sound to tell stories. Clever and humane communication.

The paralysing gravity of this programme’s subject matter creeps up on you. By the end of the programme—when we hear the launch sequence for a submarine nuclear weapon just as it would have been heard in the event of a real launch—I found myself choking back tears. Tears, I suppose, of relief that the bloody thing never happened.

I’m using the past tense because the programme’s about the grim intensity of cold war readiness and the men (they’re all men) who would have been required to press the button if everything had gone pear-shaped. I have to say that I’m glad it was all over while I was still a young man: I think the older me would have been crying all the time…

Not that it couldn’t happen now in the blink of an eye, of course: the submarines and the aeroplanes are still ready to go. I think you’ll find yourself admiring these men, though, as I did. Their calm and their seriousness and their real understanding of the gravity of their hideous obligations is, to say the least, reassuring. Absolutely nothing gung-ho here.

Here’s the MP3, here’s the programme’s web page. and here’s an excellent slideshow made using audio from the programme, contemporary images and photographs from the government bunker featured in the programme (pic from the slideshow).

Get lost in this marvelous 45 minutes of classical radio documentary-making from Newfoundlander Chris Brookes, brought to you via RTE’s Documentary on One slot which I’m always going on about here because it’s one of the few places you can hear this kind of quiet, meditative documentary feature every week. Subscribe to the podcast for lots more like this, most of it made by RTE in Ireland (like this one about the 1995 All Ireland Hurling champions) but some (like this one adapted from a Finnish original about Amos Oz) brought from all over the world. Here’s the MP3, here’s the programme’s page at the RTE web site and here are some other RTE shows we’ve featured here.

Last Christmas post for me I think. Adam Hart-Davis exploring the inventions that make Christmas work (not flying reindeer, though. Still a mystery). A special edition of his Eureka Years show. Lovely (MP3).

Three things you could do if you were feeling charitable (and not just broke or depressed) here on the wrong side of Christmas:

You could give some money to Chicago Public Radio, the station that makes This American Life. We’ve featured the show four or five times here but never included it in the podcast because public radio in the States is funded almost entirely from donations so nicking it would feel wrong. They’re already laying people off in response to the recession (so is NPR) so they could evidently do with the help. Make a donation here.

You could support Radio 4’s annual Christmas appeal which, for the last 82 years, has been for the work of St-Martin-in-the-Fields with homeless and needy people in London and all over the country. Make a donation here.

You could pass a few dollars in Jimmy Wales’ direction, if you think Wikipedia’s important. I can’t count the number of links I’ve made to Wikipedia from Speechification. Imperfect it may be but it’s becoming the backbone of the emerging ‘semantic web‘ and a lot of people, including the BBC, have begun to use it as a ‘controlled vocabulary‘ for other organised content. We evidently can’t live without it. Make a donation here.

In Iceland they have thirteen Santas—and some of them are quite naughty, even frightening. 22 lovely minutes from the World Service Boxing Day morning (also available as part of The World Service’s excellent documentaries podcast, I think). More info on the programme page.

And James, I’ll see your ridiculous baubles and raise you a magnificent animated Santa’s sleigh!

Kick-starting Christmas Week at Speechification, from a series about Christmas preparations that went out on Radio 4 last year, a lovely fifteen minutes from John Guest, the Severn Valley Railway’s Santa. How can you go wrong? MP3.

(and what do you think of the Christmas decorations?)

Adventures in Poetry is up to its ninth series: that’s 36 episodes of lovely, accessible, informative radio—the kind of stuff that could be really useful in a school or a college or in the ipod of a poetry nut or anywhere really.

One of these episodes is currently available for you to listen to online (plus this one, I guess). Where are all the others? Where’s the nicely-organised library of episodes? Nowhere, that’s where: and by this I mean “in storage, on tapes, on a shelf or a hard disk somewhere in the BBC. Effectively lost to us all. And that is heartbreaking and a bit stupid (if you ask me).

I’ve been waiting for this one to come round again. Two funny old men: Alan Coren and Christopher Matthew, comic writers of the clever post-war generation that made my parents laugh in places like Punch and Private Eye and then on the radio and TV—and then later made me laugh in turn.

Lovely programme: gentle, clever and quite moving, not least because Coren died since we last heard it (Radio 4 repeated the series as part of a tribute). In this episode he and Matthew use their Freedom Passes to go off on a day trip to Southend, which is only about twenty miles by sea from Margate, which came up in the last post. I think that’s what you call a link (MP3).

Alan Dein is the man behind Don’t Hang Up, a Speechification favourite. A couple of years ago, for a particularly dark episode of the show, he called a payphone on the seafront in Margate (listen to the original programme here). He found himself speaking to an amazing 14 year-old girl called Hannah whose life sounded like it was already spiraling into chaos and sadness.

In this spellbinding episode of his social observation series Lives in a Landscape, he’s made contact with Hannah and the resulting interview is haunting and also full of a kind of anxious hope for Hannah, who is now 16. I don’t like to gush but the trailer for this show, in which I learnt that Dein had found Hannah and her grandmother who looks after her—was enough to give me goosebumps. This is what I pay my licence fee for. Here’s the MP3.