Speechification

You'll dash through this - fifteen minutes of classical radio documentary values delivered at speed. Entirely satisfying (and very exciting). Good music too.

Lovely pics and a transcript of the gripping, deadpan radio transmissions that form the basis of the programme here.

The first programme in the latest Global Perspectives series, an annual collaboration between the World Service and eight other broadcasters, this year taking 'islands' as its theme. And once again, it's very good. [MP3]

Alert Bay - My Life So Far was created from recordings gathered by five young people from Alert Bay, a remote island off the west coast of Canada. The young people, aged 11 to 17, were trained by two producers from the Canadian Broadcating Corporation. The producers lent them recording equipment and gave them a simple task: 'Tell us about where you live. Tell us about your life.'

If you're wondering where Alert Bay is, it's here and there are more pictures here and a website here.

Canadian radio. We sometimes do Canadian radio. Here's a lovely soundscape about Toronto, from CBC's And The Winner Is... podcast, which features Canadian shows that have won radio awards around the world. I'm linking to the MP3 on the CBC site so if it's gone away by the time you click to listen, let me know. Here's what they say on the CBC web site:

Toronto is the city the rest of Canada loves to hate. It's the largest city in the country. It's a financial hub and it is, to some, the centre of the universe. But what is Toronto really like? This week on And the Winner Is... we'll hear an award-winning portrait of the invisible Toronto - from the sounds of the city, to the stories overheard on the subway, to the tales told by the people who live there.

As far as I can tell, this version is a 35-minute edit of the one hour original, presumably trimmed to fit an on-air slot. Pity we couldn't hear the full length version online though...

Misha Glenny's new book McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers has been recieving excellent notices all over town, and the World Service have snapped him up for a four-part series charting the explosive growth of international crime following the end of the Cold War and other conflicts. He estimates that industrious crooks account for a fairly staggering 20% of the world's GDP.

In the first programme [MP3] Glenny travels to British Columbia to meet the Canadian weed growers who use science (and Blackberries) to get their product over their border to a wealthy, heavily toking, but increasingly annoyed US. Access is key here, and as a former and much-honoured reporter in the former Yugoslavia (him, not me), I look forward to seeing who he's cosied up to next week, reporting on cigarette smuggling in the Balkans.

This really marvelous show sent me off into a kind of radio nerd reverie. It's an Archive Hour programme by British experimental radio legend Piers Plowright about Canadian piano legend Glenn Gould and his strange and fascinating radio career. One of my most treasured CDs is a three disc set featuring three of Gould's CBC docs: The Idea of North, The Latecomers and The Quiet in The Land. On the show you'll hear clips from these and lots of other shows, including his notorious meditation on Petula Clark. Yes, Petula Clark. Also lots of quirky, brilliant Gould (was he autistic? I think so) and some good anecdotes (like the one about the carphone). Need I say more? No (MP3).

The CD set, which is called The Solitude Trilogy, is very expensive at amazon but I notice there are a few second-hand copies listed too and also another cheaper CD of clips from his other docs that I haven't heard. UPDATE: and another 5-CD set which appears to be definitive.

And while I'm linking, here's a lovely Plowright interview about 'the innovative feature' from The University of Pennsylvania's Ubu web site.