Speechification

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.

Ooh, lovely. A ten-part history of the FBI from Tom Mangold - in bite-size fifteen-minute chunks. Not currently available as a podcast - which is a real pity. Wouldn’t it be nice to listen to a new episode each morning on the way to work? Terrific stuff, anyway, with lots of interesting contributors, Mangold’s authoritative tone and plenty of that terrific pre-war archive stuff about the red peril. Here’s episode one, which is about the early days, obviously. The other episodes should show up here, as they go out.

Another one from the archive. I’m going to attach a warning here. If you’re a parent (or just a bit sentimental - or, like me, both) you might want to skip this one. Kids miss their mums and dads when they’re away - even when they’re ‘away’ at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

Here’s a programme from June 2005 about a scheme that encourages incarcerated parents to record stories for their kids at home. Even parents who can’t read can join in: storytellers help them to come up with their own stories for the tapes. Sometimes they sing. It’s heartbreaking, really. And thought-provoking (what do we do to a family when we take a parent away and lock her or him up?). MP3.

One of the things we decided to do with this new version of speechification is try to give the programme makers more props than we’ve done before - and more than the BBC often does. ie we thought we’d try and mention the names of the people who actually made the things. Such was my intention in posting this splendid documentary about Peter Falk’s Columbo, its debt to Crime And Punishment and its illustrious band of creators. And it really is worth listening to.

But I can tell you very little about who made it. The programme page tells us Mark Billingham presented it and “contributors include star Peter Falk, creator William Link, writer Steven Bochco, director Jonathan Demme and guest star villain Robert Vaughn” but that’s about it. The Radio 4 page says the same stuff. And if you google Mark Billingham and the programme name you get this great page with lots of info and links relating to the programme. The producer, Peter McHugh, gets a credit at the end of the audio, and it you google him and “Radio 4″ you find the BBC Press Office page, which says the same stuff, but longer. And if you dive deeper into the search results you discover he’s made a bunch of other fine programmes. Some of which I think we’ve stuck up on here.

But you also begin to wonder if he’s the same Peter McHugh who’s the programming director of GMTV. Does that make sense? Could he be. And you don’t hear about any production company involvement or anything else. So you’re a bit mystified.

Anyway, don’t worry about it. Just listen to 30 minutes of damn fine radio and we’ll get on the case to try and work out who made all these things, and maybe try and give those people some credit for their work. Because we reckon it would be nice one day if you could filter your audio that way, rather than just by the order it comes out of your radio. (MP3)