Saddest and truest radio programme this week. Soldiers’ letters, meant to be read only in the event of their death in action. A small tribute to the resilience and humanity of those left behind and to the courage (and humour) of those who died (MP3).
Humph was Shadow Controller of Radio 4. He was secretly in charge of the whole thing. You can’t understate his importance to the network. Only in the next weeks and months will we understand what we’ve lost. Humphrey Lyttelton was an accidental comic genius who, over the decades, came to set the station’s comedic tone: which was somewhere between withering senior common room irony and joyful, anarchic surrealism—and all without writing a single word.
While Clue was moving to the centre of the British radio comedy universe, becoming its timeless and unassailable mascot, Humph was modestly assuming the top spot himself. Shows came and went, comedians came and went. None could touch Humph who was, after all, a bloody trumpeter. We’ve lost our Controller of Beautifully Timed Sarcasm and our Controller of Barely Permissible Innuendo. Worse than that, I think we’re going to find we’ve lost our comedy anchor.
Here, to remember him by, is an edition of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue from 1998. It was recorded in Windsor (MP3).
I’m a little late with this, but things pertaining to Sir Arthur C. Clarke tend to have a timeless quality. Just after his recent death, ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live show re-broadcast an interview with Clarke from 2001. It’s a gentle listen, as host Philip Adams carefully and respectfully coaxes memories out of Clarke - on such matters as working with Stanley Kubrick, science and religion, marriage, writing, pondering death and satellites, and so on. We also discover that 2001 is one of the Pope’s favourite movies. All of this quietly and humbly revealed in Clarke’s warm Somerset burr, still detectable over a crackly line from Sri Lanka to Sydney.
Late Night Live: Arthur C. Clarke [mp3]
My wife put me onto this one: really special speech radio from Ray Kershaw, reportage veteran. Somehow I missed the first two episodes of this series, called In Living Memory, billed as a ‘contemporary history series’. This one’s a quiet and mournful piece about the awful deaths of six young potholers in Mossdale Caverns on a rainy night in the Yorkshire Dales in 1967 (MP3).
Partly because of speechification, and partly for work reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how radio might, and should, change. One of the great and exciting possibilities it seems to me is for radio to show more of its working, to let you peek behind the scenes a little. iPM is doing that very well, and Pods and Blogs (and presumably the presence of Chris Vallance doing both programmes is not a coincidence) but I also have to say hats-off to WNYC’s RadioLab for what they’re doing with their podcast.
They’re not on air at the moment, they’re working on series 4, but they’re still podcasting; letting you hear some of what would seem to be raw material for the shows they’ve got coming up. Interviews, features etc. They’re not finished and polished with the same Piers Plowright meets Art Of Noise sonic intensity of their regular shows but they’re still great little listens, and they maintain your relationship with the show while they’re off air. This tiny little feature on what composer David Lang did when asked to write music for a morgue is a perfect, and touching example. MP3 here.
It doesn’t matter how much you think you know about Jack “Dr Death” Kervorkian, the man’s still full of surprises - and not least because his ‘vocation’ asks us all sorts of tough questions: about the limits of humanity, about being human in general. Late in this interview Fergal Keane asks the Doctor: “are you an arid rationalist?” and Kervorkian says: “sometimes I’m not so rational.” (MP3).
Today (by which I mean ‘yesterday’ because I forgot to click ’save’ last night), in Britain, is Remembrance Sunday. The day we remember the ‘glorious dead’ of all the wars since 1914. It’s a complicated and emotional day for me (more so, I find, since my Dad died back in March). It’s a day when I feel like an especially pudgy and pointless middle-aged man while we remember the braver and less pointless men who died in defense of something I take for granted and winge about in approximately equal measure.
I observed today’s two-minute silence standing next to a rugby pitch where my nine year-old was busy training. The boys - girls too - lined up quietly against the low sun while the awful and inspiring stories of those other young men crowded in and made some of us cry.
My Dad (an undemonstrative man who did his national service just after WWII) would listen to the service from the Cenotaph on the radio, weeping every year on this day. This, in fact, is how I learnt that men could cry. He was crying for the men he knew and loved and for the brave men he didn’t know.
Here’s a small and lovely programme that’s full of memory and emotion, about the memorial and crematorium for Indian soldiers who fought and died for Britain. It’s on the South Downs above Brighton and sounds like a lovely place (MP3).
The pic shows Lt. Hardit Singh Malik, a Sikh airman during World War One. I got it from Sikh Heritage in Britain.
A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it. We point to the bits we like, the bits you might have missed, the bits that someone might have sneakily recorded. Other speech radio from around the world will no doubt find its way here too.
Of course, one day this might turn into something else, maybe a new way of curating speech radio, or maybe it won’t.
Your hosts on this not very wild ride are Steve Bowbrick, Russell Davies, Dan Hill, Bobbie Johnson, Roo Reynolds and James Bridle. Drop us a line with your thoughts, unless you wish to complain about continuity announcers and their accents.
You might also enjoy the square-eyed sister site, Watchification.
Things tagged with 'speechification'
