Speechification

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).

Lose yourself in this - half an hour spent in a Marrakesh square called Djemaa el Fna. And no ordinary square: a 'masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity', according to UNESCO. Wonderful radio (MP3 - length: 28:28).

More info on the Radio 3 programme page. Picture, taken with a Lomo toy camera, by Molemaster. Used under licence.

Toby Amies, authentic crate digger, presented this. And Tamsin Hughes produced it. It's what Archive on 4 is for. Recent history bottled. Lovely (MP3 - length: 56:57).

Picture by Joshua. Used under licence.

This is a brilliant programme but boy, does it make me feel old. It's 20 years since Fight The Power? Jazzie B is presenting on Radio 4? This is history, education and nostalgia all at once. Radio 4 continues to grow up. John Humphrys was a hero to most but he never meant **** to me. MP3 here.

Something that can quite accurately be described as 'a bloody good idea' from one James Bridle, of this parish. James is using Audioboo to publish a short daily reading from the books he loves - this one a poem called 'New York' by Federico Garciá Lorca. The whole curation idea, boiled down into something useful and inspiring. Listen on the web page, subscribe to the podcast, follow Mattins on Twitter (MP3 - length: 03:02).

Another Speechification exclusive (you won't hear this anywhere else). Steve Shepherd (the man who made the Lenny Bruce programme we published here in April), produced this portrait of divine eccentric Moondog for Radio 3 (MP3). The narrator is again Charles Shaar Murray.

Steve sent me these words about the making of the programme:

Moondog was another of my heroes/obsessions, a legendary NYC street performer and driven outsider who made some of the strangest records on the planet. Charles Shaar Murray shared my fascination with him and when I managed to sell the idea to R3 he jumped at the chance of presenting. The budget for these 30min jazzfile docs was very low so it was basically an illustrated talk but we managed to find two people who had actually experienced Moondog on the streets of New York: Charles knew musician Patti Palladin from way back and I was friendly with composer John Zorn. I think their eye witness statements bring this piece alive alongside the incredible Moondog interview I found buried in the BBC archive. The hardest thing to source when we were making the show was the Moondog / Julie Andrews collaboration. It's since been reissued but at the time it seemed as if someone had invented it just to give me something to search for. We eventually tracked down a copy via a Julie Andrews completist in Holland - the things we do for radio! Hope you enjoy Moondog - spread the word about him and if you're going buy some of his music get the early stuff.

(The video uses numbers from Flickr to illustrate a Moondog piece called 'Fog On The Hudson (425 West 57th Street)'. I found it on YouTube).

Another jewel from the archive. Patrick Wright, author of countless articles and six books (including the excellent Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine) made this documentary about the uncomfortable collision of art and war in the early twentieth century. In particular, it's about a British society portrait painter called Solomon J Solomon and his innovations in camouflage. It was produced in August 2002 by John Goudie, who now, among other things, produces Radio 4's Front Row.

Wright has a brilliant web site with enough clever words on it to keep you going for weeks - including these about our hero Solomon.

The picture shows HMS Furious in about 1918, painted in what is still called 'dazzle camouflage,' another innovation of the period. It's from the Wikimedia Commons (MP3).

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]