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]
An excellent and engrossing discussion between Night Waves presenter Philip Dodd and historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash, ranging across Communist Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Orwell, Greene, the soixante-retards, the USA and the Bush administration, and England's place in Europe.
I feel sort of blessed that this level of intellectual discussion is available free to air, just coming out of my radio when I switch it on... [MP3]
Wow. This is special. On the face of it nothing remarkable here: another classical-model doc about the turbulent birth of the Irish Republic. But it's a thing of beauty: a layered masterpiece that builds and builds: real radio craft from Peter Woods, an RTE staff producer since 1995. There's real tension and lots of quietly recorded sadness and bitterness. A reminder too that the horror that unfolded in country lanes and back streets all over Ireland in the first decades of the Twentieth Century still haunts many, especially the old men of West Cork. Sobering and moving stuff.
The MP3's here and on the programme web page you'll find some more audio and pics of the area and of the annual ceremony remembering the Kilmichael ambush. More pics of the ambush site here.
Picture by Conor O'Neill (CC).
Writer Simon Garfield tells the tale of StoryCorps, the project created in the US in 2003 by radio producer David Isay which has seen thousands of ordinary Americans enter Storybooths to record their responses to the simple question, 'Tell me about your life'.
Simon compares StoryCorps with traditional oral history and asks if, that now we all possess the means to record our lives, those recordings are still of value and worth keeping.
Well, yes, they are. Lots of good stuff on popular oral (aural?) history in the UK too. Enjoy.
[MP3]
Something from Radio 3 in mid-2007: Mark Kermode in the Charlie Chaplin archives, uncovering the filmmaker's connections to celebrity (he invented the whole thing) and modernism (he inspired pretty much everybody, especially the Dadaists). MP3.
The paralysing gravity of this programme's subject matter creeps up on you. By the end of the programme—when we hear the launch sequence for a submarine nuclear weapon just as it would have been heard in the event of a real launch—I found myself choking back tears. Tears, I suppose, of relief that the bloody thing never happened.
I'm using the past tense because the programme's about the grim intensity of cold war readiness and the men (they're all men) who would have been required to press the button if everything had gone pear-shaped. I have to say that I'm glad it was all over while I was still a young man: I think the older me would have been crying all the time...
Not that it couldn't happen now in the blink of an eye, of course: the submarines and the aeroplanes are still ready to go. I think you'll find yourself admiring these men, though, as I did. Their calm and their seriousness and their real understanding of the gravity of their hideous obligations is, to say the least, reassuring. Absolutely nothing gung-ho here.
Here's the MP3, here's the programme's web page. and here's an excellent slideshow made using audio from the programme, contemporary images and photographs from the government bunker featured in the programme (pic from the slideshow).
Continuing my attempt to disorientate the Northern hemisphere - or at least its Speechification listeners - with tales of dry, distant lands, here's another fine ABC Radio National doco. This one follows in the footsteps of W.O Hodgkinson, who led the last government funded expedition into Australia's Simpson Desert in 1876, attempting to find the source of 'Pituri', a valuable native narcotic. Tracing the journals of Victorian explorers is a well-worn format, but almost always fascinating. This one no exception, and pitched in front of an evocative soundscape.
Last Christmas post for me I think. Adam Hart-Davis exploring the inventions that make Christmas work (not flying reindeer, though. Still a mystery). A special edition of his Eureka Years show. Lovely (MP3).
In Iceland they have thirteen Santas—and some of them are quite naughty, even frightening. 22 lovely minutes from the World Service Boxing Day morning (also available as part of The World Service's excellent documentaries podcast, I think). More info on the programme page.
And James, I'll see your ridiculous baubles and raise you a magnificent animated Santa's sleigh!
Adventures in Poetry is up to its ninth series: that's 36 episodes of lovely, accessible, informative radio—the kind of stuff that could be really useful in a school or a college or in the ipod of a poetry nut or anywhere really.
One of these episodes is currently available for you to listen to online (plus this one, I guess). Where are all the others? Where's the nicely-organised library of episodes? Nowhere, that's where: and by this I mean "in storage, on tapes, on a shelf or a hard disk somewhere in the BBC. Effectively lost to us all. And that is heartbreaking and a bit stupid (if you ask me).
bookmarks by: delicious.comA 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 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.
Huffduffer audio: ’speechification’ Delicious bookmarks: ’speechification’
