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.

Steve recently posted an episode of the Reunion. It’s a great show and the most recent episode, which reunites the creators of Withnail and I (surely one of the best British films of all time), is possibly the best yet. [MP3]

Sue MacGregor introduces and interviews Richard E Grant (Withnail), Paul McGann (Marwood), Ralph Brown (Danny) and Bruce Robinson (the writer & director) as well as an interview with Richard Griffiths (Monty).

This is just lovely. I could listen to old men remembering interesting lives forever anyway, but one of these old men invented Minnie The Minx for The Beano. And the others drew or edited or wrote storylines for The Dandy at DC Thompson in Dundee. Morris Heggie and Dave Torrie both edited The Dandy (in 71 years the comic has had four editors), Bill Ritchie and Jim Petrie were artists and Walter Fearne worked his way up from storylines to Managing Editor. What a life to look back on… (MP3)

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.

A radio nostalgia special! First, part one of a two-part feature about Wolfman Jack, legendary 1960s DJ who broadcast from a Mexican ‘border blaster‘ and was made famous when he provided the soundtrack for George Lucas’ American Graffiti in 1969 (MP3). Second, a really fascinating Archive Hour from last year about the surprising early years of commercial radio in Britain: God, Pirates and The Ovaltineys (MP3). Third, an hour-and-a-half of memories from 80 years of Irish radio made to mark the closure of the state broadcaster’s medium wave service last week (MP3).

Only the Wolfman doc will show up in the podcast so click the links to listen to the other shows. Border Blaster: In Search of The Wolf,  God, Pirates and The Ovaltineys, Medium Wave Goodbye.

My wife put me onto this one: really special speech radio from Ray Kershaw, reportage veteran. Somehow I missed the first two episodes of this series, called In Living Memory, billed as a ‘contemporary history series’. This one’s a quiet and mournful piece about the awful deaths of six young potholers in Mossdale Caverns on a rainy night in the Yorkshire Dales in 1967 (MP3).

So we have a problem. Out there in Radio Land there exist a few radio programmes that are always always good, week-after-week, show-after-show. I don’t know why but—if you ask me—a disproportionately large number of these programmes comes from America, where they have no state broadcaster and precious little state funding for radio.

Why is this a problem? Of course it’s not really a problem. It’s just that, here at speechification, we like to bring you a variety of great speech radio. How can we do that if the producers of This American Life keep coming up with clever and beautiful shows like this one? This episode is about memory. Read about it here.

We’re not linking to MP3s for This American Life since the show is self-funding so you should really get over there and pop a few quid in the collecting tin—the podcast is free. In fact, I think they’re developing a pretty interesting economic model: the streaming MP3 and the podcast are free but if you want to download and keep the show you pay 95 cents. I wonder if it works.

Presented by Natasha Mitchell, All In The Mind is ABC Radio National’s weekly psychology programme (or, “the mind, brain and behaviour”), and is always worth a listen. This particular episode featured an interview with Jonah Lehrer, who wrote last year’s popular science bestseller Proust was a Neuroscientist. The book essentially argues that certain artists and writers anticipated some of the great discoveries about the mind and brain that took place in the early 20th century. Lehrer - something of an over-achiever himself, and editor-at-large for SEED magazine - looks at the work of Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Auguste Escoffier, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Cezanne, and what, with a bit of imagination, they might have foretold about perception, representation, memory and the nature of the psyche. It’s a fascinating discussion.

(And though Proust was in no way a neuroscientist, of course, his implicit understanding of the power of smell and taste recalls the 2007 Boyer Lectures we blogged about here, featuring Prof. Graeme Clark’s work on contemporary understanding of the senses. Oh, and All In The Mind also has its own blog, where Mitchell wrote about this episode.)

All In The Mind: Proust was a Neuroscientist (mp3)

Here’s a beautiful thing. A 40-minute feature from RTE’s Documentary on One strand about Amos Oz, Israeli novelist and humanist. It’s a lovely programme, based on his 2005 memoir A Tale of Love & Darkness. Oz is fascinating and humane and I could easily have filled this post with luminous quotes from the programme.

An intriguing detail is that it’s an adaptation of a programme originally made by Barbo Holmsberg for the Finnish state broadcaster YLE (I wonder if it’s Holmsberg narrating the programme). Anyway, for me that’s another hint of the speech radio richness that must exist out there beyond the English language fortress (MP3).

Here’s a lovely example of the kind of material that the Kitchen Sisters gathered for their Lost and Found Sounds show on NPR (the show itself is off the air). This one’s got stories from early radio in Nashville, a really marvelous train whistle and the legendary Sam Phillips from Sun Records. I ripped this MP3 from a 2000 Real stream. There are lots of other shows - all excellent and unbelievably varied - here and you could, if you felt like it, give the Kitchen Sisters some money to help them make more.