Speechification

Radio 4 has a set of prejudices left over from the Reith days. Not bad prejudices, admirable actually, but not mainstream. A set of priorities that gives Radio 4 its character. Sport’s not that important, books and religion are, and Christianity is still part of the fabric of weekly life. Personally I find some of the religious stuff a bit irritating, the sappiness of Thought For The Day is always the final straw that gets Today turned off in my bathroom. But, anyway, anyway, what I’m building up to saying is that this week’s Analysis represents the best of these prejudices. It’s thoughtful, intelligent radio that examines religion as a human, social, cultural phenomenon, not just to be accepted but to be thought about. It looks at religion through the lens of science, not to determine its ‘truth’ or otherwise, but to see how what we can learn about it, to think about why we’re drawn to it. Radio 4 has a bias towards examination. I like that. Thanks to Matt. MP3 here.

Analysis comes from the brainy end of the network, where orthodoxies are put to the test by clever academics and writers. This is the kind of journalism you find in places like The Economist or at the high end of the Sunday Papers. Self-confident, iconoclastic, open-minded: like the faculty common room at a good university (I can’t confirm this since I didn’t go to a good university).

Analysis has found room for many of the UK’s more interesting commentators over the years and they’re not always from the Beeb’s liberal heartland: free traders and market evengelists are much in evidence, for instance - I think there must be a secret tunnel between the Analysis offices and The Economist’s in St James’s.

We’ve covered Analysis here before (and I’ve often linked to it from my own blog). Hugh Levinson, an editor at Analysis, has written to tell us the new series is on and that they’ve made some changes. There’s a podcast now (hurrah!) and the programme’s pages have been expanded to include more useful background. The show’s tone appears to have changed too. The first show in the new series (MP3) is about storytelling in politics and presenter Frances Stonor Saunders is light-hearted, practically chirpy. Very good stuff.

It went like this: Matt Jones got a bit excited about the unprecedented collision of Welsh language politics and groovy Catalan network-sociologist Manuel Castells on Analysis. Russell and I noted that the edition he was going on about had been overwritten and whinged a bit about the absence of a proper Analysis archive. I suggested it would be fun to read out a transcript of the show for the speechification podcast.

So I beetled off to find the transcript (a feature of Analysis since before there were podcasts - or web sites for that matter) and found that… there isn’t one. I wrote to the Analysis people wondering where it was and got an apologetic email from (award-winning) series editor Hugh Levinson. Hugh said that the transcripts had been cancelled because they were too expensive but offered me an MP3 of the show.

Bingo, I thought. I told Hugh it was for Speechification and he wrote back with some nice words about Speechification and an MP3. So, with a short delay (and a very BBC bottleneck) I bring you a really fascinating edition of Analysis about the passions and contradictions of indiginous language politics presented by Welshman Mukul Devichand (and featuring cheeky Catalan Manuel Castells) (MP3).