Speechification

On Radio 3 they’re having a sort of Summer season of short essays from 100 clever and/or important people. It’s all part of a real festival called Free Thinking that takes place in Liverpool at the end of October. In her contribution Marina Warner talks about the commodification of art and concludes (in two minutes flat) that the visual arts are less commodified than writing. Clever and persuasive. The other essays are all here. Contributors include: Phil Redmond, Stuart Maconie, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Germaine Greer and quite a lot of very interesting people I’ve never heard of (MP3).

Worth noting too that Radio 3 will most likely chuck the whole lot away once the festival is finished since that seems to be standard practice with the station’s speech output: especially scandalous behaviour when you consider that this cerebral stuff must have a residual value of close to zero. Write to your MP or something.

Robert Krulwich is the older, funnier one from WNYC’s Radio Lab, a show we’ve featured here quite often. He’s also NPR’s science specialist and makes terrific science inserts for shows like Weekend Edition and Morning Edition. We don’t make science programmes like this in Britain. It’s clever and funny and formally bold: Krulwich builds a short piece about neuroscience and the integrity of the self around Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: a nicely arranged collision of science and art. The MP3 is here, there’s a programme archive here and a podcast here.

Here’s a lovely Radio 3 programme by American satirist Joe Queenan that does a simple and special thing: it draws our attention to the strangeness and difficulty of our language and of the concepts we use it to describe. I thought I knew what cunning was but I pretty quickly learnt that it’s a fantastically tricky and contingent word, woven into the history of human misconduct in a really subtle way: Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini says in the programme that “cunning is a pathology of intelligence”. Good stuff (MP3).

Flashing through the lanes of West Cork the other night, probably a bit too fast, on the way from Bantry to Baltimore in the dusk, I heard this beautiful programme of archive voices and music. It’s a real gem: quiet and a bit old-fashioned. Ian Lee, an RTE traditional music stalwart, has made a six part series based on the field recordings of the various folklorists and collectors who tramped around the place during the Twentieth Century.

This one’s about the recordings of Alan Lomax, legendary Library of Congress archivist. There’s nothing like it on British radio. I suppose it’s a kind of throwback—and you’ll really have to concentrate: some of the voices are impenetrable. But it’s wonderful. Here’s the MP3 and the other programmes in the series are all here.

A very good 45-minute feature about the prosecution and incarceration of modernist legend (and ‘A’ Level English fixture) Ezra Pound. He made over 400 broadcasts on Italian radio during the Second World War and narrowly escaped a conviction for treason on his capture and return to the USA. He wasn’t sent to prison but to serve twelve years in a psychiatric hospital, after which he returned to his adopted Italy. Fascinating and bewildering. Grand and infuriating. (MP3). Here’s a 1958 interview with the poet from BBC4’s interview archive.

In quiet corners of the BBC remarkable things happen. Here’s an example from Radio 3. It’s a play, written by Stephen Phelps (a veteran of investigative TV) about the Piper Alpha disaster that tells the story of the critical ninety minutes from the first failure to the final explosion, in real time, twenty years after the disaster—to the second. As an experiment I think it’s a total success. Tense, moving and terrifying: high octane stuff, structured like a movie. It’s genuinely spine-tingling and left me thinking about it for a long time after it had finished (MP3).

And thanks to the people who offered copies of the programme from their archives in response to my appeal.

It seems to be my job to bring you the heartbreaking stuff round here (I think I’d like to switch to the cheery shift). This is an excellent programme about the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, in which 167 men lost their lives twenty years ago. What’s fascinating is that the most affecting stories are not those of the survivors or the bereaved but those of the secondary characters: the hospital chaplain, the helicopter pilot… The measured contribution of the oil company’s PR—whose job was to tell the media what was going on out in the North Sea that night—is somehow more moving for its detachment (MP3).

This show went out as part of the Radio 4 Choice podcast, which is definitely worth signing up for. I was also interested to read that Radio 3’s contribution to the programmes marking the anniversary of Piper Alpha was a ‘real-time drama‘ set on that terrible night that went out on 6 July but I missed it and, obviously, it’s now been replaced by the following week’s drama so it’s gone for good. Do drop me a line if you saved a copy. It would be great to feature it here.

There is plenty of video relating to Piper Alpha at bbc.co.uk too: a news piece from 1988, interviews with survivors and widows, and a piece about the anniversary,

This is great—and a real find. I’ve never heard Radio Cafe before. I learn that it’s a daily magazine show on BBC Radio Scotland, in this case presented by Janice Forsyth. Forsyth interviews Lou Reed, perhaps the world’s most prickly interviewee, and the show exposes a lot of process (the booking of taxis, some entertaining studio awkwardness and Forsyth’s nervous inner dialogue) to illustrate the difficulty of pinning the legend down. A little gem (/programmes, MP3).

A mini-post featuring something from Charles Wheeler’s archive: three-and-a-half minutes recorded on the fourth of April 1968, the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination (MP3).

Blimey, it’s still there! Reader (listener?) Daniel Weir found the Real stream for the Jarvis Cocker show, although it ought strictly to have gone away by now, so I rushed off and hijacked it. Here it is. And it is absolutely excellent.