Speechification

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).

Peace in the Balkans has brought many benefits: cheap Adriatic package holidays, several completely new countries to visit (and with them a splendid bloom of Eurovision weirdness) but for some the benefits are more substantial. Like the freedom to return home after a decade in exile. Veteran Balkan reporter Nick Thorpe travels to newly-independent Kosovo with returning refugee Fehmi Islami who’s spent the last ten years in Britain. This is emotional stuff and tells an important story about human endurance and love for home and people (MP3).

Catherine Bott, Radio 3’s early music guru, presents a programme about Chopin’s pianos, part of the station’s ‘Chopin Experience‘ from last weekend. Fascinating social and economic history plus loads of music. For the next five or six days you can listen to all the shows in the season here. Here’s an MP3 of the show.

At the end of the Seventies John Cooper Clarke lived in a little house opposite the front gates of my Secondary school in not-very-glamorous-but-not- very-gritty-either Stevenage, which is a new town at the wrong end of Hertfordshire. His presence there (I didn’t imagine it did I? Is there any evidence that he did live there?) was so unlikely and such a mad, peacock-haired challenge to the dreary suburban surroundings that boys I knew used to gather outside his house and throw chip papers and coke cans at him when he came out.

He passed by, implacable and apparently unmoved. Later he’d show up as support at practically every gig I ever attended. In fact I seem to remember thinking he must be resident at The Hammersmith Palais (or was it The Lyceum?). So here’s a lovely half hour about the man from the other reason I cut my hair weird and bought an Oxfam overcoat: Paul Morley (MP3).

Here’s the programme’s web page and here’s its press release, which has some more information.

Here’s a excellent programme from RTE’s Documentary on One strand that’s got the strange history of British colonial rule written right through it. Savour this profoundly odd fact: a longish stretch of one of Ireland’s best fishing rivers belongs to… The 12th Duke of Devonshire. The fascinating thing is that the colonial history—700 years of slavery and all that—doesn’t even come up. Nor does the messy disentanglement of the two states that followed independence.

I think there’s something about modern Irish self-confidence and the instinctive resistance to what the Australians call ‘the cultural cringe’ that prevents contributors to the programme from even mentioning the ugly history that enabled a British aristocrat to acquire and retain huge swathes of Irish land. Can you build a modern, post-colonial state while deliberately forgetting the circumstances that produced it? Looks like it. MP3.

Read about the programme here. There’s a substantial archive of previous Documentary on One shows here and there’s a podcast too.

Here’s something from the hard drive; a splendid 30 minutes from 2003. Julian Putkowski tells us all about Mosely and his black shirts, Garibaldi and his red ones, and more benignly, eccentrically and Britishly John Hargrave and his green ones. (Plus other shirts in other colours.) A great programme, which has fun with the form, entertains and informs and tells us why anarchists don’t have collars on their shirts. MP3 here. There don’t seem to be any traces of the programme on anything owned by the BBC, but there’s at least some information from the production company here.

Three poets (two postgrad students and one faculty member, Fred D’Aguiar) from Virginia Tech remember the massacre which took place a year ago. I’ll warn you: this is a very moving programme. I think poetry must speak to a special centre in the brain. It short-circuits rationality and this gives it permission to provoke the kind of involuntary emotional reaction that this 23 minutes must have produced everywhere it was heard. Poetry also seems to have a special freedom to deal with topics untouchable in other forms—like this most awful story of death and loss. Outstanding (MP3).

The World Service web site has improved a lot lately and programme pages are now excellent. Here’s this programme’s page.

I’m a little late with this, but things pertaining to Sir Arthur C. Clarke tend to have a timeless quality. Just after his recent death, ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live show re-broadcast an interview with Clarke from 2001. It’s a gentle listen, as host Philip Adams carefully and respectfully coaxes memories out of Clarke - on such matters as working with Stanley Kubrick, science and religion, marriage, writing, pondering death and satellites, and so on. We also discover that 2001 is one of the Pope’s favourite movies. All of this quietly and humbly revealed in Clarke’s warm Somerset burr, still detectable over a crackly line from Sri Lanka to Sydney.

Late Night Live: Arthur C. Clarke [mp3]