Speechification

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).

BBC Wales seem to have made a slew of good programmes recently. Here's another one. Once you realise that the scary Russian leader is a top judo man, then the premise of this programme follows naturally. You get Neil Adams, a top British judo champion, and use that perspective to try and get an insight into Putin's character. And it works really well. Top stuff. (MP3 here)

A short feature from Radio France International's English service. It went out in August, just after Barack Obama's nomination. We learn that French people think of Barack Obama (correctly) as mixed-race and not black. But we also learn that as they've got to know Obama they've started to call him 'black' in response to his presentation in the US media (MP3).

Here's a lovely Radio 3 programme by American satirist Joe Queenan that does a simple and special thing: it draws our attention to the strangeness and difficulty of our language and of the concepts we use it to describe. I thought I knew what cunning was but I pretty quickly learnt that it's a fantastically tricky and contingent word, woven into the history of human misconduct in a really subtle way: Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini says in the programme that "cunning is a pathology of intelligence". Good stuff (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.

Thoroughly entertaining memoir of the events of May '68 in Paris, London, New York and San Francisco. From David Zane Mairowitz, who was both there and can recall enough of it to vividly conjure it up for us. Some fabulous archive footage, some hilariously frank, half-remembered incidents.

(Bonus points for starting with the beautiful, sparkling tones of 'Dark Star', double-bonus for some interstellar Syd-era Pink Floyd in the middle, and triple-bonus points for a raucous splash of Albert Ayler at the end.)

Radio Eye: My 68 [mp3]

This show's a bit like when you're a kid and your friend's parents are Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses or something and you're dying to get a look at the inside of their house to see if they have an altar or interesting dietary habits and then they turn out to be just like your own Mum and Dad (only no Christmas presents—which is just inhuman). It's about The Socialist Workers Party and it got me grumbling and groaning round the house ("Bloody Trots") a few weeks ago.

I never attained the heights of political awareness that my SWP mates did. But that didn't stop them bugging me for years (and selling me their infernal, braindead newspaper in my own front room). So I wasn't very positively disposed towards this 15-minute doc (part one of two) about the party. But the members and loyalists interviewed are less nutty and self-righteous than I remember and they provide some interesting insight into the ways of Britain's largest kooky political tribe (but none at all into their actual politics, which is a pity—maybe that was in part two). MP3.

The shows originally went out as part of Sunday evening's excellent Westminster Hour and they have a good archive so you can listen to both shows again here.

Analysis comes from the brainy end of the network, where orthodoxies are put to the test by clever academics and writers. This is the kind of journalism you find in places like The Economist or at the high end of the Sunday Papers. Self-confident, iconoclastic, open-minded: like the faculty common room at a good university (I can't confirm this since I didn't go to a good university).

Analysis has found room for many of the UK's more interesting commentators over the years and they're not always from the Beeb's liberal heartland: free traders and market evengelists are much in evidence, for instance - I think there must be a secret tunnel between the Analysis offices and The Economist's in St James's.

We've covered Analysis here before (and I've often linked to it from my own blog). Hugh Levinson, an editor at Analysis, has written to tell us the new series is on and that they've made some changes. There's a podcast now (hurrah!) and the programme's pages have been expanded to include more useful background. The show's tone appears to have changed too. The first show in the new series (MP3) is about storytelling in politics and presenter Frances Stonor Saunders is light-hearted, practically chirpy. Very good stuff.

A typically classy Studio 360 programme, in their 'American Icons' series, about a building and a man, but a whole lot more - the Lincoln Memorial, and Abraham Lincoln, but also America itself. Highlights? A scratchy recording of Frank Lloyd Wright not exactly sparing the rod when describing the memorial, the moving recollections of Dr. King's justly legendary speech and Marion Anderson's less well known but almost equally significant performance, and the music includes phrases from one of my favourite pieces, Aaron Copland's 'Billy the Kid'.

Studio 360: American Icons: The Lincoln Memorial (mp3)

The Sunday Supplement is one of the highlights of the Westminster Hour. This week's was "The Jam Generation" (MP3), presented by Anne McElvoy of the Evening Standard.

Photo credit: 'Jam of Sun' by yvesmoreaux

None of the "music of conspicuous consumption of Duran Duran and Wham" for the Jam Generation. The people who lived their teenage years to an acoustic back-drop of Paul Weller's 'The Jam' have reached the tops of their political parties.

Strange and fascinating to hear (around 08:20) that David Cameron listened to The Jam (and The Clash) while growing up. Hard to imagine him tapping his brand new shoes to The Eton Rifles when he was a member of the actual Eton Rifles. The cadet corps of Eton college, described by Weller as "a bunch of tossers" for heckling a socialist right-to-work march, inspired the song by the same name.

A largely interesting documentary, and is only fleetingly irritating when the politics is occasionally allowed to break the surface. I'll be looking out for the second part next Sunday.

This is the third time I've talked about the Sunday Supplement but if you're a real fan the Sunday Supplement Archive lets you listen to them all the way back to 2005.