Speechification

Here’s a reminder of the richness and surprise that’s on offer all over the BBC’s radio output. Watchification contributor Jem Stone told me I ought to nip over to Radio 2’s web site and listen to Jarvis Cocker’s programme about Sheffield, which he said was excellent. But I was too late, by about half an hour. So I poked around a bit and came across this really marvelous one-hour feature—presented by one-time guest Joan Rivers—about The Ed Sullivan show, on the occasion of its Sixtieth birthday. Perfection (MP3).

This show’s a bit like when you’re a kid and your friend’s parents are Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or something and you’re dying to get a look at the inside of their house to see if they have an altar or interesting dietary habits and then they turn out to be just like your own Mum and Dad (only no Christmas presents—which is just inhuman). It’s about The Socialist Workers Party and it got me grumbling and groaning round the house (”Bloody Trots”) a few weeks ago.

I never attained the heights of political awareness that my SWP mates did. But that didn’t stop them bugging me for years (and selling me their infernal, braindead newspaper in my own front room). So I wasn’t very positively disposed towards this 15-minute doc (part one of two) about the party. But the members and loyalists interviewed are less nutty and self-righteous than I remember and they provide some interesting insight into the ways of Britain’s largest kooky political tribe (but none at all into their actual politics, which is a pity—maybe that was in part two). MP3.

The shows originally went out as part of Sunday evening’s excellent Westminster Hour and they have a good archive so you can listen to both shows again here.

Over at RTE Ronan Kelly has got a bit of an NPR thing going on. He’s making documentaries that have that disarming, dreamy feel that I expect from the best output of American public radio stations like Chicago Public Radio and WNYC. Here’s a really excellent show that went out around Paddy’s Day in March about being Irish. Not being Irish in the hard-hitting sociological-analytical kind of way but being Irish in the allusive, poetic kind of way. This is open-ended, discursive radio that rarely arrives at a conclusion. Stories don’t resolve neatly, segments are loosely-linked, themes approximate.

Some people really don’t like this. They find it lazy and purposeless and want something tougher and better organised. Sometimes I agree but that’s mostly because it’s such a difficult technique to get right. It would be very easy to make something slack and undemanding from this material. I’d like to hear more like it in Britain, though. I’d like to hear what would happen if some of Britain’s factual radio talent was let off the hook a bit and allowed to play. With the occasional exception on Radio 3, though, the BBC’s really too uptight to create such loosely-structured radio here. I think Feedback would be swamped if Mark Damazer routinely ran shows like Kelly’s (or like This American Life or Radio Lab, for that matter). Pity.

Anyway, this show is full of good stories. In one segment some really good material comes from the simple device of phoning people up who happen to be called ‘Patrick Day’. A treat (MP3).

I just noticed that the You and Yours transcripts seem to have stopped being produced some time in early October. Perhaps Steve’s discovery about transcriptions for Analysis being cancelled applies more universally across the BBC. If so, that’s a shame.

If the BBC are not going to provide transcripts, maybe the internets can. We could always start running the MP3s through a transcription service like CastingWords, though since this one show would have cost $130, $78 or $39, depending on whether we wanted a 1 day, 6 day or one month(ish) service, I’d like to find another way.

Maybe there’s a space for a volunteer army of transcribers? Perhaps Speechification should host a wiki and anyone who wants to can help out. Maybe you don’t care about transcriptions. What do you think, gentle reader/listener?