Speechification

At the end of June, Radio 4 broadcast an amazing episode of Peter White's No Triumph No Tragedy. White interviewed historian Tony Judt in his New York home. The programme was universally praised - it was a very moving account of the late stages of Motor Neurone Disease (Lou Gehrig's in the US). How late we could only have guessed but on 6 August Judt died in New York.

So here's the programme (MP3 - length: 41:38) and a couple of episodes of Radio 3's Night Waves in which he also appears - one from before his diagnosis in 2008 (discussing his book of essays Reappraisals) and one from after (discussing his final book, Ill Fares The Land).

Judt wrote regularly for the NYRB over many years - most recently a series of very moving and direct sketches from his life. All of his NYRB stuff is here (some of it behind a paywall, but not this lovely one about the food his mother cooked in the fifties). He was interviewed for NPR's Fresh Air in March. Here's a good obit from The Telegraph.

Dennis Marks on the surprising survival of Ottoman Europe. Another Sunday Feature, this one from Sony Gold winning Brook Lapping. Pure pleasure (MP3 - length: 42:36).

Picture by Dieter Z. Used under licence.

Jem, Beatles nut, recommended this one. Clever John Harris on John Lennon. Nice (MP3 - length: 27:37).

Picture by gw1. Used under licence.

When I was 12 or 13 my dad came home from one of his twice-a-year Territorial Army jaunts to Germany with a lovely Sanyo transistor radio and I fell in love with it (I wish I could find a picture of it). It had shortwave and that was the start of the whole radio thing for me. I huddled in bed, listening to all of those impossibly distant, impossibly exotic foreign voices. The voices I remember best were the two newsreaders on Radio Tirana (one male, one female) who would keep me up to date with the production of oranges and tractors and diesel trains in Albania.

Their English was so perfect, so squeaky-clean ivy league American, and what they read out so prosaic, that I wondered, even then, how they'd been persuaded to read the news for nutty Hoxha.

But it was gripping all the same, I always listened right through, until the station switched to a French transmission. I wrote to Radio Tirana at the address provided ("Radio Tirana, Albania") and my dad, who collected stamps and knew about these things, told me it'd never get there because Albania was the only country on the planet that wasn't a member of the Universal Postal Union. But it did get there and they wrote back: a huge, rough brown envelope full of posters and books of aphorisms by Hoxha and Lenin (and Chairman Mao too, I seem to remember) and a fantastically crudely-printed card with the shortwave frequencies on it and something called a QSL card (like the one shown). Treasure.

And all that was a very self-indulgent way of introducing part one of David Hendy's terrific 5-part series of essays about radio - this one, called The Ethereal Mind, about its pre-history and his own discovery of its joys (also via Albania). Radio 4 nuts will be familiar with Hendy's excellent history, Life On Air: A History of Radio Four. Here's the MP3 - length: 4:16.

Thanks to Jasmund for permission to use the picture (lots more here).

Two football posts in 24 hours? What's going on?

Radio producers are a big source of recommendations for Speechification. I'm posting a couple of programmes from one such recommendation, received this week, for which we are very grateful. First, here's a quite thrilling World Service essay by David Goldblatt about the eternal strife between Milan's football leviathans: AC Milan and Inter Milan. Serie A is evidently an exhilarating and frightening place (MP3). There's a lot of additional information on the programme's World Service web page and here are the nine other football-themed programmes we've published at Speechification since 2007.

Picture of an AC Milan strip by Tomaž Štolfa. Used under licence.

Archive on 4 spends a good hour digging into the history of racial conflict in the East End of the 1970s. Bangladeshi community groups, right-wing thugs, Rock Against Racism. As ever with the Archive, it's the interviews that bring the period to life. [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]

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]