Speechification

An unusual pleasure: curating a curator. And not just any curator. Here's a programme by Sara Paul - a student piece she made while at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine (which sounds like a fantastically cool place). And the curator is Ronan Kelly, producer of the marvellous Flux and Curious Ear on RTE Radio 1.

And he picked this because he was reminded of it by an Irish news story back in July, which is the kind of semi-random motivation that just wouldn't work on the BBC (but ought to!). Ronan also brought to my attention the excellent Saltcast podcast - which packages work by Salt students. And his own RTE podcast is one of my favourites (now rolled up with the Doc on One podcast). MP3 (8:21).

Picture, Blackfoot Diner, by Mark Heard. Used under licence.

Another Speechification exclusive (you won't hear this anywhere else). Steve Shepherd (the man who made the Lenny Bruce programme we published here in April), produced this portrait of divine eccentric Moondog for Radio 3 (MP3). The narrator is again Charles Shaar Murray.

Steve sent me these words about the making of the programme:

Moondog was another of my heroes/obsessions, a legendary NYC street performer and driven outsider who made some of the strangest records on the planet. Charles Shaar Murray shared my fascination with him and when I managed to sell the idea to R3 he jumped at the chance of presenting. The budget for these 30min jazzfile docs was very low so it was basically an illustrated talk but we managed to find two people who had actually experienced Moondog on the streets of New York: Charles knew musician Patti Palladin from way back and I was friendly with composer John Zorn. I think their eye witness statements bring this piece alive alongside the incredible Moondog interview I found buried in the BBC archive. The hardest thing to source when we were making the show was the Moondog / Julie Andrews collaboration. It's since been reissued but at the time it seemed as if someone had invented it just to give me something to search for. We eventually tracked down a copy via a Julie Andrews completist in Holland - the things we do for radio! Hope you enjoy Moondog - spread the word about him and if you're going buy some of his music get the early stuff.

(The video uses numbers from Flickr to illustrate a Moondog piece called 'Fog On The Hudson (425 West 57th Street)'. I found it on YouTube).

Another jewel from the archive. Patrick Wright, author of countless articles and six books (including the excellent Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine) made this documentary about the uncomfortable collision of art and war in the early twentieth century. In particular, it's about a British society portrait painter called Solomon J Solomon and his innovations in camouflage. It was produced in August 2002 by John Goudie, who now, among other things, produces Radio 4's Front Row.

Wright has a brilliant web site with enough clever words on it to keep you going for weeks - including these about our hero Solomon.

The picture shows HMS Furious in about 1918, painted in what is still called 'dazzle camouflage,' another innovation of the period. It's from the Wikimedia Commons (MP3).

If you've heard Glenn Gould's 'The Idea of North', part of a trilogy of gorgeous programmes he made for CBC in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the themes of this lovely doc (also made for CBC) will be familiar (MP3). And it's got a familiar, melancholy tone too - must be something to do with the atmosphere up there in the high Arctic. There's a harder edge, though, because of the unavoidable evidence for rising temperatures. Subscribe to the excellent Nature Stories podcast, from PRX, for more like this from other North American public radio stations.

And I'm using Chris Wodskou's Arctic programme as an excuse to embed the Gould video, in which he talks about the layered sound of his radio docs and plays some music 'n' stuff. I've never seen it before and it's mindblowing. There's a short excerpt from The Idea of North, which will get you going, on the CBC Archives web site and you can buy it to download from Amazon. Do.

Atlantic Public Media curates a weekly podcast of nature programmes from all around North American public radio - a pretty rich source, it turns out. Here's a lovely short feature from the 1980s about snakes, produced by Public Radio veteran Jay Allison.

Wouldn't it be great to add the BBC's radio nature programmes to the mix? I wonder if anyone's thought about that. Especially since most of them are already available in perpetuity online. Here's the MP3 and here's how to support Atlantic Public Media.

The picture, Southern Copperhead, is by Reader Walker. Used under licence.

The Curious Ear is Ronan Kelly's feature strand for RTE Radio 1 in Ireland. Kelly wins awards all over the place for this stuff. It's always playful, often very moving (maybe sometimes a bit too arch). This one's lovely. It's about the people you'll find under the stands at Dublin's legendary GAA venue Croke Park while there's a game on (some of them praying).

The Curious Ear goes out in the Doc on 1 slot on RTE Radio 1 and there's an excellent podcast. Here's the programme's web page and the MP3.

Hugh Sykes visits Madley Communications Centre, near Hereford, the site of the world's largest earth satellite station (you can see it on Google Maps). Madley reaches out over the Atlantic and even to the Indian Ocean to communicate with geostationary satellites, providing the vital link in the transmission of raw news - and has played a crucial role in a number of world events. [MP3]

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.

It's always worth having a dig around on the BBC World Service site. There are some excellent documentaries there, and they tend not to expire. So I can just point to their MP3 here. This is a show from August 2008 about Medina Wasl - a large scale recreation of a set of Middle Eastern villages, built by the US military in California, for practising fighting and peace-keeping amongst civilian populations.

Peter White is one of my favourite Radio 4 presenters. I find myself listening to In Touch on a regular basis, because he's always interesting and informative and, well, friendly, even when discussing issues of minority interest. He pops up elsewhere on a regular basis - I heard him recently explaining on another programme that blind people don't get jokes about horses with long faces - and it's always good to hear his voice. Here he is talking (to all of us) about Louis Braille, and the story behind his invention. As an added bonus, lots of great French accents. [MP3]

I should also say that this doc is taken from my latest exciting discovery, the World Service's awesome Documentary Archive podcast, which contains hundreds of 20 minute docs, which apparently don't go unavailable after a week. Go grab that RSS.