Speechification

Yes. It's a documentary about ivy. So you'll learn more than you've been planning to learn about ivy lately. But it's also a gorgeous trip through the soundworld of mid-Wales. Put your headphones on: sheep, birdsong, all the intimate and incidental sounds of a walk in the Autumn countryside. Also the relaxed, unconscious, almost hypnotic ease of a seasoned broadcaster - Lionel Kellaway. Musical and quite intoxicating (MP3).

This programme - with all the other Radio 4 nature programmes - is available to listen to permanently on the web site (no seven-day expiry here). There's also an excellent, year-round podcast. I mentioned this one on my Listen with Bowbrick Twitter feed the other day too.

The picture is green/red ivy by Alex Pears and it's used under licence.

Atlantic Public Media curates a weekly podcast of nature programmes from all around North American public radio - a pretty rich source, it turns out. Here's a lovely short feature from the 1980s about snakes, produced by Public Radio veteran Jay Allison.

Wouldn't it be great to add the BBC's radio nature programmes to the mix? I wonder if anyone's thought about that. Especially since most of them are already available in perpetuity online. Here's the MP3 and here's how to support Atlantic Public Media.

The picture, Southern Copperhead, is by Reader Walker. Used under licence.

The Curious Ear is Ronan Kelly's feature strand for RTE Radio 1 in Ireland. Kelly wins awards all over the place for this stuff. It's always playful, often very moving (maybe sometimes a bit too arch). This one's lovely. It's about the people you'll find under the stands at Dublin's legendary GAA venue Croke Park while there's a game on (some of them praying).

The Curious Ear goes out in the Doc on 1 slot on RTE Radio 1 and there's an excellent podcast. Here's the programme's web page and the MP3.

You'll dash through this - fifteen minutes of classical radio documentary values delivered at speed. Entirely satisfying (and very exciting). Good music too.

Lovely pics and a transcript of the gripping, deadpan radio transmissions that form the basis of the programme here.

I'm in awe. I honestly don't know how they do it. They chortle and hesitate and miss cues and improvise - and then they back up and do it again. They run two interviews at the same time, questions from one interleaved with answers from the other. They use the ragged ends of recordings as if they were prime content. They leave the stumbles and dropped mics in and talk over the good stuff. They play with sound quality, record the credits over the phone, play in random music, watch movies on-air. And learned contributors join in - they relax and laugh and argue like kids. And the result is wonderful, inspiring science programming - only you'd be forgiven for not noticing. You might think it was just hilarious, clever speech radio. This one's about parasites. It's brilliant (MP3).

Radiolab is made by WNYC. The podcast is here.

The picture is by Jeremy Sternberg. It's used under licence.

This is factual radio that'll make you giggle out loud with pleasure. So assured, so clever, so wise. And Jad Abenrad and Robert Krulwich do this practically every week (MP3).

And you might want to give some money to WNYC to help pay for the production of this stuff - since they don't have an inflation-protected licence fee to depend on.

A really lovely Sunday Feature in which poets Paul Farley and Kate Royal retrace the journey taken in Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings and an equally lovely Archive Hour (also presented by Paul Farley) about the discovery of a box of lost tapes of Larkin reading his own verse. Adding up to a slice of melancholy beauty the like of which you will not hear anywhere else this week. True.

Over the last couple of years, Radio 7 has been re-running the excellent Centurions series of half-hour features about important artists and works of art from the last century, including this one, about Jorge Luis Borges' Fictions (MP3). AS Byatt and Alberto Manguel are the principle voices. In a more recent programme Peter White went on a pilgrimage to Argentina to see the Buenos Aires of his hero Borges and, while he was there, learnt about the project to make the great man's work available in Braille (MP3).

Only the Centurions programme will appear in the podcast but if you're listening on S3FM you'll hear both.

Picture from the Wikimedia Commons. Used under licence.

If you're interested in work or life or mixing the two in the way most are obliged to these days, you'll like this. One of Radio 3's almost-always excellent five-part series of The Essay, this one presented by Professor Hugh Cunningham. It's about the 'work-life balance' but Cunningham doesn't waste any time explaining how contingent the phrase is and how recently it is that we were concerned more with 'leisure' than wih 'life'. This is episode one of five.

Wow. This is special. On the face of it nothing remarkable here: another classical-model doc about the turbulent birth of the Irish Republic. But it's a thing of beauty: a layered masterpiece that builds and builds: real radio craft from Peter Woods, an RTE staff producer since 1995. There's real tension and lots of quietly recorded sadness and bitterness. A reminder too that the horror that unfolded in country lanes and back streets all over Ireland in the first decades of the Twentieth Century still haunts many, especially the old men of West Cork. Sobering and moving stuff.

The MP3's here and on the programme web page you'll find some more audio and pics of the area and of the annual ceremony remembering the Kilmichael ambush. More pics of the ambush site here.

Picture by Conor O'Neill (CC).