Speechification

Tim Bodett's small town stories could easily slip into folksiness, but that's not the root of his writing. As he writes on his website: "I'm not a more decent person because of rural life, but I act more decently than I probably would if I didn’t have to see these people again." BBC7 is broadcasting his series of Alaskan Christmas stories, Christmastime at the End of the Road, and their gentle, Keillor-esque drollery seems like a pretty good expression of the season to me. [MP3]

P.S. How do you like them Christmas decorations? The animated gif throwdown starts here.

Stumbled across this strange, intense little play on BBC7 the other evening. It got under my skin, and stayed there. First broadcast, I think, back in 2000, it was written and directed by Don Taylor, who I'll be looking out for in future repeats, and stars John Wood, Julian Glover and Prunella Scales [MP3].

My ten year-old son's latest reason for refusing to get out of bed before eight O'Clock on a school day is a brilliant twelve-part story by Malorie Blackman on BBC7. It's a nicely told plucky-adolescent-saves-the-world thriller called Hacker and it's got computers in it but not in an annoying way.

I enjoyed using the theft of £7M by hackers in the story to help me scale the US bank bail-out for the boy: "you know those hackers stole £7M? Well, George Bush wants to give the banks a huge amount of money too, but it's not 7 million or 70 million or 700 million or even 7 billion or 70 billion but 700 billion dollars!"

Here's episode one and you can hear the other eleven episodes here on BBC7's excellent Big Toe Books page until 5 October. It's well worth bookmarking this page if you have kids: there are always at least half-a-dozen stories to listen to here. Highlights at the moment include Fiddlesticks by Alan Fraser and The Lost Boys' Appreciation Society by Alan Gibbons.

Not, I'll grant, important radio. Not ground-breaking. Just a performer you'll know well, pushing beyond the boundaries of his career so far and... well... singing Leonard Cohen. Brave stuff—with many good gags and a kind of melancholy, which I suppose is borrowed from Cohen's words. Lovely (MP3).

A creepy bedtime story for you: the first episode of Richard Matheson's classic post-Apocalyptic Vampire tale I Am Legend [MP3] from BBC7. Forget the recent Will Smith remake, or even Charlton Heston's Omega Man - this is the real thing. If I was on Watchification I'd have been adding all the British B-Movie stuff BBC4 has been featuring, but you'll have to be satisfied with this classic pulp instead. You can catch the rest of the episodes here.

I was very excited to hear - on Radio 4 -that the weekend past was going to be a Paul Scofield tribute weekend over on Radio 7. BBC Radio 7, graveyard of the forgotten sitcom and the deservedly banished panel game, might actually be worth listening to.

Paul Scofield was one of our greatest Shakespearean actors until his death in March, noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, and most famous for his generation-defining Lear, and his Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons. Personally, my favourite role of his is the droll, slightly camp narrator of Patrick Keillor's peerless London, and its follow-up Robinson In Space.

Unfortunately, this tribute turned out to be simple rebroadcasts of just three plays, which are all a bit long for Speechification, but if you have an hour and a half to spare, this is a heads-up that they're all available on Listen Again for the next week:

• Anton in Eastbourne, Peter Tinniswood's last play, written as a tribute to Scofield and his great love of Chekhov (Listen Again).
• Macbeth, with Peggy Ashcroft (Listen Again).
• Dionysus, with Diana Rigg and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Listen Again).

In our house we are exceptionordinarily fond of Lauren Child and especially of Clarice Bean, her resourceful and funny character for 8-12 year-olds. I've read all three of the Clarice Bean novels to my older two kids and we really definitely can't wait for her to write another one (although we suspect that her absolutely mega-blockbuster picture book brand Charlie & Lola is probably taking up all her time right now).

BBC7 just ran an excellent reading (by Elisha Mansuroglo) of Clarice Bean Spells Trouble in the early morning Big Toe Books slot (I keep meaning to put the show on while we're having our breakfast. I wonder if a nice story might suppress the breakfast-time shouting and violence). So here, in a departure from our usual programmes with blokes talking about caves or electro music, is part one. There are seven parts all together and you can listen to them all on the Big Toe page until 23 April.

Ivor Cutler inhabits my dreams. As a kid I often drifted off to sleep to the muffled sound of Cutler in the next room (he wasn't actually in the next room but my Dad's old tape recorder was). I'm not going to waste any more energy describing an almost perfectly strange and beautiful artist like Cutler. He just was. This is the first in a six-part series that went out in 1990 - a collaboration with his long-time partner Phyllis King. BBC7 ran it again this morning in the early hours but I can't tell if they're going to run the other five (you figure it out). MP3.