Speechification

Developing speechification’s Christmas theme, here’s one of four 15-minute docs about Christmas preparations. This one was recorded on a famous goose farm in Worcestershire. It’s an unpretentious programme but you couldn’t find a better snapshot of Britain right now: food, class, labour, rural economics, immigration… It’s all here (and the farm’s matriarch sounds exactly like a posh French & Saunders character). Here’s an MP3 (and here’s an earlier episode - about a nativity play - that’ll make you cry: MP3).

Here’s another terrific RTE documentary. This one’s about emigration but not about the drastic, once-in-a-lifetime emigration of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this doc we hear the voices of men and women driven from County Mayo in the decades after the second world war by rural poverty to pick potatoes in Scotland and Northern England, usually for months on end and in pretty grim conditions. It’s another beautifully made programme, too: quiet and reflective. The voices do all the work.

Here’s the MP3 and here’s the RTE Documentary on One podcast. There seems to be a disagreement between the programme’s web page - which links to two programmes and gives them different names - and the podcast. Maybe someone from RTE will read this and clarify for us.

What a story. Every year at around this time hundreds of young men - mostly from Britain and Australia - travel to the American wheat belt (the big, flat bit in the middle) to drive those house-sized combine harvesters and those train-length grain trucks and, basically, bring in the harvest.

Point of information: this particular adventure is not suitable for your mid-life crisis. Only under-30s need apply. Damn (MP3).

The pic - taken in Montana - is by goatopolis