Speechification

It seems to be my job to bring you the heartbreaking stuff round here (I think I’d like to switch to the cheery shift). This is an excellent programme about the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, in which 167 men lost their lives twenty years ago. What’s fascinating is that the most affecting stories are not those of the survivors or the bereaved but those of the secondary characters: the hospital chaplain, the helicopter pilot… The measured contribution of the oil company’s PR—whose job was to tell the media what was going on out in the North Sea that night—is somehow more moving for its detachment (MP3).

This show went out as part of the Radio 4 Choice podcast, which is definitely worth signing up for. I was also interested to read that Radio 3’s contribution to the programmes marking the anniversary of Piper Alpha was a ‘real-time drama‘ set on that terrible night that went out on 6 July but I missed it and, obviously, it’s now been replaced by the following week’s drama so it’s gone for good. Do drop me a line if you saved a copy. It would be great to feature it here.

There is plenty of video relating to Piper Alpha at bbc.co.uk too: a news piece from 1988, interviews with survivors and widows, and a piece about the anniversary,

A mini-post featuring something from Charles Wheeler’s archive: three-and-a-half minutes recorded on the fourth of April 1968, the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination (MP3).

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).

Here’s a particularly egregious example of the wastefulness of the BBC’s programme archiving policy. Heather Couper’s marvelous Cosmic Quest is a thirty-part series about the history of astronomy that’s been going out over the last six weeks on Radio 4: a top dollar resource for enthusiasts, educators and the generally curious. The first twenty-five episodes of the series have been thrown away already and you’re going to have to get your skates on if you want to hear the last five because they too will have been overwritten by the end of this week.

I know this is more a sin of omission than of commission—that’s just the way the automated archiving set-up works. I also know that there’ll be some rights issues here (I imagine Couper herself has plans for further exploitation of the series and BBC Wordwide probably has an option to repackage the shows) but I believe that it’s essentially a kind of public service vandalism to commission such powerful stuff and not to create a permanent home for it online where licence fee-payers, schools, parents and the rest can get at it.

The optimal location for a content asset like this, created using public funds for use by the British public, is in a public place like the BBC’s web site. Any other use of this asset will, inevitably, under-utilise it (even if thousands can be persuaded to buy it on CD or in book form) and the BBC’s purpose here ought to be to make the best possible use of it by sharing it as widely as possible.

So, enough with the whinging. Here’s the final episode, about the search for extraterrestrial life. You can listen to an omnibus edition of the last week’s shows here for the time being and, I notice, the whole series seems to be knocking around the torrentsphere in chunks of various sizes if you’re that way inclined.

Terrific one-hour feature from Radio 3’s Sunday Feature slot about the history of religious tolerance, its roots in Holland and in John Locke’s luminous ‘Letters Concerning Toleration‘ (well worth a read, by the way). There’s a large minibus- or a small coach-load of grade-A scholarship on show here: very topical too. And, while we’re talking about Locke, here’s an In Our Time from February about John Locke and the Social Contract. (/programmes, MP3).

I’ll admit that by the end of his 58-year Sunday morning reign I was thoroughly bored of Alistair Cooke, droning on as he had for all of my remembered years plus about another twenty. Reading his unending bloody series of bloody letters, all from bloody America (did he never go anywhere else?). Now, though, revived for one week only, four years after his death (and all that nastiness with the stolen body), I hear something quite different—and it’s a real joy. It’s his language, of course: so courtly but also relaxed, effortless. He was an extraordinary communicator.

The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, has picked five letters, each from a different US election campaign, going all the way back to 1948. Here’s number two, which is about an incident in Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign at the height of the Vietnam War. The other programmes are here. but you’ll have to get a move on: the clock is ticking and they’ll be replaced by next week’s Book of the Week… er… next week.

This is why I pay my licence fee (that and the threat of a prison sentence). How can you argue with this kind of really deep expertise and impeccable production quality? It’s like diving into a big warm bath of knowledge or sitting down to a four course dinner of insight (need some better imagery here…). But you should listen anyway. It’s full of interesting historical facts and quite a lot of Debussy’s music. And it’s fascinating to learn just how radical and scary his music was back before the first world war—now that it’s to be heard mainly on TV commercials and movie soundtracks (MP3).

Here’s a gorgeous, dreamy doc from RTE. It’s about a teacher of Irish dance born in Britain and returning to the bottom left-hand corner of Ireland to pursue his passion, but you really don’t need to know that. You could easily listen without knowing a thing about the subject matter. You could tune out and enjoy the layered mix of voice and music , memory and emotion—it’s like ambient music. Or you could pay attention and enjoy the story of Timmy “The Brit” McCarthy, Irish dancer.

I’m linking to RTE’s MP3 because the Irish aren’t encumbered by a Trust and a bunch of service definitions that require them to delete their MP3s after a week. Let’s hope they don’t change their minds.

This gripping, forensic analysis of near history in post-invasion Iraq went out a few weeks ago without a Real stream, which I remember being really annoyed about. Magically, though, it just showed up in the Radio 4 Choice podcast so here it is. It’s a marvelous example of what the BBC’s news and current affairs resources can achieve, especially when in the hands of a reporter like brilliant and brave Paul Wood. Highly recommended (5 stars, 3 Speechification thumbs). Here’s the MP3 and here’s the /programmes page.

Here’s another lovely series of Radio 3’s The Essay. In this one we learn from four archaeologists that the discipline extends further than you may have expected. To the surface of the moon (or at least the parts of it affected by human visitors), for instance. Also to Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland where Republican hunger strikers died, a wood by a B-road near Sheffield where 19th and 20th Century graffiti artists carved their names on the trees and the fields in Essex where some radio masts once stood. Really fascinating, surprising stuff. Here’s episode one (MP3), which is the one about the moon. You can hear the other three here for the next few days (the fourth episode’s Real stream jumps and skips a bit, beware).