Speechification

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.

Radio 4 has a set of prejudices left over from the Reith days. Not bad prejudices, admirable actually, but not mainstream. A set of priorities that gives Radio 4 its character. Sport’s not that important, books and religion are, and Christianity is still part of the fabric of weekly life. Personally I find some of the religious stuff a bit irritating, the sappiness of Thought For The Day is always the final straw that gets Today turned off in my bathroom. But, anyway, anyway, what I’m building up to saying is that this week’s Analysis represents the best of these prejudices. It’s thoughtful, intelligent radio that examines religion as a human, social, cultural phenomenon, not just to be accepted but to be thought about. It looks at religion through the lens of science, not to determine its ‘truth’ or otherwise, but to see how what we can learn about it, to think about why we’re drawn to it. Radio 4 has a bias towards examination. I like that. Thanks to Matt. MP3 here.