Speechification

Radio 4 broadcasts 13,000 programmes per year so maybe it's inevitable that some programmes and formats seem hidden or under-promoted. From Fact to Fiction is the kind of thing that would be in the Sunday papers or on the front of the Radio Times if it was on the TV. But it's on the radio so there's a reasonable chance you've never heard of it.

The premise is simple: a weekly short drama about a story from the news - the whole thing necessarily put together in a few days. It's usually a short play - about the BA strike or 'Binge Britain' or demonised teens - but this one's a monologue. Writer/comic AL Kennedy riffs on the Gulf oil spill in a surprising and moving way. MP3 - 14:08.

The picture is from one of BP's mesmerising live video streams from the sea bottom (which are still on-air, by the way, as of this writing, unlike From Fact to Fiction, which will be back later this year).

"I was born in this City. I was going to school in this city, I went to University in Kabul, I consider myself a Kabuli girl. I love Kabul."

A heartbreaking 23:25 presented and produced by Meena Baktash, a journalist in the BBC World Service's Afghanistan Pashto and Dari Service. Her story conveys the awful, inconsolable melancholy of her home city in the years since the "golden decade" of the 1970s.

The programme is one of an excellent series of five "...made by BBC producers across the organisation's language services - from Pashto and Dari, Sinhala, Uzbek, Spanish American to Persian." You can download them all from the World Service web site. It was also selected for the World Service's Documentary Archive podcast, which is a treasure in its own right.

The photograph is from the programme's web page and shows Meena as a child. There are more pictures in this audio slideshow and here's the MP3 (23:25).

This dark stuff from Nick van der Kolk's Love + Radio podcast sent a shiver down my spine (and oddly reminded me of some other dark stuff from ages ago - by Throbbing Gristle). Love + Radio is edgy, third-coast speech radio. Speech radio where every episode comes with a playlist (and the kind of playlist you can't duplicate on Spotify because it's too hip). The podcast is a jewel. MP3 (17:24).

Picture, Nothing to See, by Fanboy30. Used under licence.

An unusual pleasure: curating a curator. And not just any curator. Here's a programme by Sara Paul - a student piece she made while at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine (which sounds like a fantastically cool place). And the curator is Ronan Kelly, producer of the marvellous Flux and Curious Ear on RTE Radio 1.

And he picked this because he was reminded of it by an Irish news story back in July, which is the kind of semi-random motivation that just wouldn't work on the BBC (but ought to!). Ronan also brought to my attention the excellent Saltcast podcast - which packages work by Salt students. And his own RTE podcast is one of my favourites (now rolled up with the Doc on One podcast). MP3 (8:21).

Picture, Blackfoot Diner, by Mark Heard. Used under licence.

At the end of June, Radio 4 broadcast an amazing episode of Peter White's No Triumph No Tragedy. White interviewed historian Tony Judt in his New York home. The programme was universally praised - it was a very moving account of the late stages of Motor Neurone Disease (Lou Gehrig's in the US). How late we could only have guessed but on 6 August Judt died in New York.

So here's the programme (MP3 - length: 41:38) and a couple of episodes of Radio 3's Night Waves in which he also appears - one from before his diagnosis in 2008 (discussing his book of essays Reappraisals) and one from after (discussing his final book, Ill Fares The Land).

Judt wrote regularly for the NYRB over many years - most recently a series of very moving and direct sketches from his life. All of his NYRB stuff is here (some of it behind a paywall, but not this lovely one about the food his mother cooked in the fifties). He was interviewed for NPR's Fresh Air in March. Here's a good obit from The Telegraph.

Dennis Marks on the surprising survival of Ottoman Europe. Another Sunday Feature, this one from Sony Gold winning Brook Lapping. Pure pleasure (MP3 - length: 42:36).

Picture by Dieter Z. Used under licence.

Jem, Beatles nut, recommended this one. Clever John Harris on John Lennon. Nice (MP3 - length: 27:37).

Picture by gw1. Used under licence.

Are there stories about the holocaust we have yet to hear? It appears so. Here's a complicated moral fable about the only tree allowed to grow at Buchenwald - a true story. Beautifully told and predictably difficult to listen to in parts. MP3 - length: 43:38.

Picture of the remains of Goethe's Oak by Lars K Jensen. Used under licence.

When I was 12 or 13 my dad came home from one of his twice-a-year Territorial Army jaunts to Germany with a lovely Sanyo transistor radio and I fell in love with it (I wish I could find a picture of it). It had shortwave and that was the start of the whole radio thing for me. I huddled in bed, listening to all of those impossibly distant, impossibly exotic foreign voices. The voices I remember best were the two newsreaders on Radio Tirana (one male, one female) who would keep me up to date with the production of oranges and tractors and diesel trains in Albania.

Their English was so perfect, so squeaky-clean ivy league American, and what they read out so prosaic, that I wondered, even then, how they'd been persuaded to read the news for nutty Hoxha.

But it was gripping all the same, I always listened right through, until the station switched to a French transmission. I wrote to Radio Tirana at the address provided ("Radio Tirana, Albania") and my dad, who collected stamps and knew about these things, told me it'd never get there because Albania was the only country on the planet that wasn't a member of the Universal Postal Union. But it did get there and they wrote back: a huge, rough brown envelope full of posters and books of aphorisms by Hoxha and Lenin (and Chairman Mao too, I seem to remember) and a fantastically crudely-printed card with the shortwave frequencies on it and something called a QSL card (like the one shown). Treasure.

And all that was a very self-indulgent way of introducing part one of David Hendy's terrific 5-part series of essays about radio - this one, called The Ethereal Mind, about its pre-history and his own discovery of its joys (also via Albania). Radio 4 nuts will be familiar with Hendy's excellent history, Life On Air: A History of Radio Four. Here's the MP3 - length: 4:16.

Thanks to Jasmund for permission to use the picture (lots more here).

Another Between the Ears, from March. Suggested by musician David Bramwell, who presents the programme (lovely music throughout by his Oddfellows Casino). An upper lip treat (MP3 - length: 28:28).