Speechification

Roger Law, he of Spitting Image, takes us on a visit to Dafen, the “art factory village” in China, where expert (and not-so-expert) fakes/replicas are churned out for the world market. It’s splendid radio. Mr Law is a little more spontaneous and bouncy than the average radio voice, he clearly knows what he’s talking about and is more mischievous about the morality and economics of the whole thing than a normal correspondent might be. Lovely, lovely. It would have been nice if there could have been some pictures on the Radio Four page though. I can’t believe no-one took a camera. Ah well. MP3 here. (And some Reuters video of Dafen here.)

I don’t often listen to the whole of Radio 4’s ‘Broadcasting House‘ programme (because smug reviews of newspapers usually annoy me), but I was glad to catch the final five minutes of this morning’s edition. Paddy O’Connell interviews the artist Jonathan Yeo, who unveiled his portrait of Blair yesterday. Here is a recording of just that final four-minute segment (MP3).

Photo: Reuters

In this slot, Jonathan Yeo talks eloquently about the way the poppy in the painting subverts the New Labour rose, as well as being an allusion to the the war(s) for which Blair will be remembered.

We don’t often share just a short clip of a programme, and I wonder if you think it works. In case you did want to listen to the show in its entirety, the stream is now online too, and Broadcasting House has its own podcast too.