Speechification

Elliot Moore, loyal listener, reminds me about the enigmatic and spooky Numbers Stations and this terrific programme (MP3) from 2006 presented by Simon Fanshawe all about them. I’ve got a four-CD set of meticulously recorded and annotated Numbers Stations somewhere—compiled by short-wave geeks and spook-watchers The Conet Project.

There’s something profoundly unsettling about the persistence into the digital age of these cold war holdovers: radio stations that broadcast nothing but impenetrable coded messages which we have to assume (Governments won’t even acknowledge they exist) are intended for proper, old-fashioned spies. Elliot says you can get the Conet recordings here and the sleeve notes here, released under an open licence, which is nice.

I recommend that you download them and listen to them back-to-back in a darkened room with nothing but a bottle of Polish Vodka and a cyanide capsule for company. Elliot also provides links to expert Simon Mason’s web site on the topic and to another numbers stations web site whose August log shows that the stations are still very much alive. The Lincolnshire Poacher, by the way, is the name given to one of the broadcasts (presumably originating in Great Britain) by the spook watchers because it uses the folk tune of that name as a call sign.

Here’s an orgy of high-end medical sound for you: gurgles and pings, clicks and whirrs. A mesmerising programme recorded at Harefield heart hospital by sound artist John Wynne. The quiet voices of patients offset the clinical cacophany with their stories. The show went out in Radio 3’s Between the Ears slot in June and was accompanied by photographs taken by Tim Wainwright, including the one on the left (MP3).

On Radio 3 they’re having a sort of Summer season of short essays from 100 clever and/or important people. It’s all part of a real festival called Free Thinking that takes place in Liverpool at the end of October. In her contribution Marina Warner talks about the commodification of art and concludes (in two minutes flat) that the visual arts are less commodified than writing. Clever and persuasive. The other essays are all here. Contributors include: Phil Redmond, Stuart Maconie, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Germaine Greer and quite a lot of very interesting people I’ve never heard of (MP3).

Worth noting too that Radio 3 will most likely chuck the whole lot away once the festival is finished since that seems to be standard practice with the station’s speech output: especially scandalous behaviour when you consider that this cerebral stuff must have a residual value of close to zero. Write to your MP or something.

Here’s a lovely Radio 3 programme by American satirist Joe Queenan that does a simple and special thing: it draws our attention to the strangeness and difficulty of our language and of the concepts we use it to describe. I thought I knew what cunning was but I pretty quickly learnt that it’s a fantastically tricky and contingent word, woven into the history of human misconduct in a really subtle way: Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini says in the programme that “cunning is a pathology of intelligence”. Good stuff (MP3).

Hot air balloons! Duchesses! Reeedeeeeculous French accents! What more could you want? They’re building the blogosphere up there, you know. [MP3]

I’d never come across Something Understood before, probably because it’s broadcast at 6am and 11.30pm on Sundays, but it seems like rather a good idea, despite its new-agey premise. Every week, “the programme examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry”. This week: aging. Lovely stuff. [MP3]

A Radio 4 staple, Word of Mouth delves into two of my favourite subjects: taboo words and aphasia (MP3). Both illuminate the inner workings of the mind, the first by overuse, the latter by exclusion. There’s also a stack of malapropisms even I hadn’t heard, and the excruciatingly awful Dr Word. Sorry about that. Words good though, when unbound by snobbery.

A very good 45-minute feature about the prosecution and incarceration of modernist legend (and ‘A’ Level English fixture) Ezra Pound. He made over 400 broadcasts on Italian radio during the Second World War and narrowly escaped a conviction for treason on his capture and return to the USA. He wasn’t sent to prison but to serve twelve years in a psychiatric hospital, after which he returned to his adopted Italy. Fascinating and bewildering. Grand and infuriating. (MP3). Here’s a 1958 interview with the poet from BBC4’s interview archive.

In quiet corners of the BBC remarkable things happen. Here’s an example from Radio 3. It’s a play, written by Stephen Phelps (a veteran of investigative TV) about the Piper Alpha disaster that tells the story of the critical ninety minutes from the first failure to the final explosion, in real time, twenty years after the disaster—to the second. As an experiment I think it’s a total success. Tense, moving and terrifying: high octane stuff, structured like a movie. It’s genuinely spine-tingling and left me thinking about it for a long time after it had finished (MP3).

And thanks to the people who offered copies of the programme from their archives in response to my appeal.

It seems to be my job to bring you the heartbreaking stuff round here (I think I’d like to switch to the cheery shift). This is an excellent programme about the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, in which 167 men lost their lives twenty years ago. What’s fascinating is that the most affecting stories are not those of the survivors or the bereaved but those of the secondary characters: the hospital chaplain, the helicopter pilot… The measured contribution of the oil company’s PR—whose job was to tell the media what was going on out in the North Sea that night—is somehow more moving for its detachment (MP3).

This show went out as part of the Radio 4 Choice podcast, which is definitely worth signing up for. I was also interested to read that Radio 3’s contribution to the programmes marking the anniversary of Piper Alpha was a ‘real-time drama‘ set on that terrible night that went out on 6 July but I missed it and, obviously, it’s now been replaced by the following week’s drama so it’s gone for good. Do drop me a line if you saved a copy. It would be great to feature it here.

There is plenty of video relating to Piper Alpha at bbc.co.uk too: a news piece from 1988, interviews with survivors and widows, and a piece about the anniversary,