Speechification

I’ll admit that by the end of his 58-year Sunday morning reign I was thoroughly bored of Alistair Cooke, droning on as he had for all of my remembered years plus about another twenty. Reading his unending bloody series of bloody letters, all from bloody America (did he never go anywhere else?). Now, though, revived for one week only, four years after his death (and all that nastiness with the stolen body), I hear something quite different—and it’s a real joy. It’s his language, of course: so courtly but also relaxed, effortless. He was an extraordinary communicator.

The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, has picked five letters, each from a different US election campaign, going all the way back to 1948. Here’s number two, which is about an incident in Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign at the height of the Vietnam War. The other programmes are here. but you’ll have to get a move on: the clock is ticking and they’ll be replaced by next week’s Book of the Week… er… next week.

This is why I pay my licence fee (that and the threat of a prison sentence). How can you argue with this kind of really deep expertise and impeccable production quality? It’s like diving into a big warm bath of knowledge or sitting down to a four course dinner of insight (need some better imagery here…). But you should listen anyway. It’s full of interesting historical facts and quite a lot of Debussy’s music. And it’s fascinating to learn just how radical and scary his music was back before the first world war—now that it’s to be heard mainly on TV commercials and movie soundtracks (MP3).

A really vivid and exciting half-hour about the journey of Togo and Arsenal footballer Emmanuel Adebayor to Ghana and Togo. He’s 24 but so mature and comfortable with his fame and the quite awesome responsibility that goes with it. A remarkable man (MP3).

An experiment. Listen to the MP3 and, at the beginning, you’ll hear me, reading aloud the kind of words you might have read here. A lot of Speechification users don’t read our blog entries at all, you see. They just listen to the podcast. Adding an introduction to the MP3 means they can’t escape! It’s a bit of a pain to record the intro (adding about twenty minutes of fiddling around in Garageband in my case) but it might be fun to do. What do you think? MP3.

I’ve missed most of this Radio 2 series by Paul Morley about new musical genres but I reckon this one must be the best episode because it’s about Glitch, which is a genre that I reckon must be right up his street. The show sounds like an episode of Radio Lab—very self-conscious and playful and lots of entertaining bleeps and whistles. Morley and his regular producer Paul Kobrak have fun in the edit and lots of the off-mic laughter and mucking about have been left in to good effect. Brilliant (MP3).

I think The Forum is the best programme on the World Service at the moment. A weekly grown-up debate with brainy guests, in this case musicians Amit Chowdhury, social entrepreneur Mdidi Muenelli and psychologist Stephen Pinker (spellings a bit uncertain there, I can’t find anything about the show on the site—the archive is a couple of weeks out of date). It’s like a kind of topical In Our Time. This one (MP3), which went out on 15 June, is presented by scientist (and baroness) Susan Greenfield. While you’re at it, check out the latest edition, which features Mark Mazower, historian of the Nazis, Jan Zalasiewicz, Geologist and Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov. The show’s very complete archive is here.

Saddest and truest radio programme this week. Soldiers’ letters, meant to be read only in the event of their death in action. A small tribute to the resilience and humanity of those left behind and to the courage (and humour) of those who died (MP3).

A particularly good Moral Maze from a stage at The Cheltenham Science Festival (which sounds like a riot). Rancorous and funny by turns. And Melanie Phillips is always a laugh isn’t she? Had me shouting and grumbling at the radio throughout (MP3).

This gripping, forensic analysis of near history in post-invasion Iraq went out a few weeks ago without a Real stream, which I remember being really annoyed about. Magically, though, it just showed up in the Radio 4 Choice podcast so here it is. It’s a marvelous example of what the BBC’s news and current affairs resources can achieve, especially when in the hands of a reporter like brilliant and brave Paul Wood. Highly recommended (5 stars, 3 Speechification thumbs). Here’s the MP3 and here’s the /programmes page.

Here’s another lovely series of Radio 3’s The Essay. In this one we learn from four archaeologists that the discipline extends further than you may have expected. To the surface of the moon (or at least the parts of it affected by human visitors), for instance. Also to Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland where Republican hunger strikers died, a wood by a B-road near Sheffield where 19th and 20th Century graffiti artists carved their names on the trees and the fields in Essex where some radio masts once stood. Really fascinating, surprising stuff. Here’s episode one (MP3), which is the one about the moon. You can hear the other three here for the next few days (the fourth episode’s Real stream jumps and skips a bit, beware).