Speechification

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.

Rupert Allman, editor of iPM, got in touch to recommend a segment from Broadcasting House on Sunday. He’s right, it’s terrific. Here’s the intro to the piece:

“They were the best of times they were the worst of times, as a generation came to its political senses. In 1968, alongside a string of protests in Democratic countries was a series of calamities that might overpower today’s mood swings. The world veered from disaster in Vietnam to the assassination of Martin Luther King and on to the Soviet clampdown in Prague and Bobbie Kennedy’s murder in a US Presidential Election year. They were the generation that gave us Jack Straw, Peter Hain and Hillary Clinton. Collectively, they’ve become known as the soixante-huitards and they’ve been given a warning; this is your last chance to influence politics. For BH Brian Hanrahan re-joins the sixty eighters: ”

MP3 here. Thanks Rupert.

The companion piece to the aforementioned documentary on the early-’80s Melbourne music scene, this programme paints a vivid picture of Brisbane of the same time (it’s almost an inadvertent companion piece to the Berlin doco Steve posted recently). Known as Pig City, due to insanely right-wing and entirely corrupt administration of state premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and particularly the ‘iron fist wrapped in another iron fist’ approach to community policing, Brisbane generated a rich subculture in response, with bands like The Saints, The Go-Betweens and The Riptides all emerging from an atmosphere where just being in a band was a political act in itself.

I saw a great exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane last year - Taking to the Streets (my photos here) - that collated numerous artifacts illustrating how Brisbane was effectively living under police state conditions from the early-’70s to the early-’80s. The right to protest was removed, enforced by ’special powers’ imbued upon the police; anybody walking down the street with more than 3 people would constitute “a march” and could be arrested. Describing many more, er, imaginative state-led approaches to creating social cohesion in the Queensland of the time, what comes through in this doco is a sense of just how warped a ‘western’ political system can get - only 20 years ago - and yet also the optimistic message that a subcultural scene can emerge to resist this, and ultimately prevail. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history is long but bends towards justice. With some top tunes along the way, he might have added but didn’t.

The key role of community radio station 4 Triple Z (4zzz) also comes through the first-person accounts in the programme, including from Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison and several University of Queensland alumni, all students at the time and suddenly and inadvertently radicalised by police pressure.

As with most Hindsight shows, it’s hugely atmospheric, including quite unsettling sound recordings from right within the protest marches as police move in on the crowd, and the sound of Brisbane’s architecture being torn apart by the state’s bulldozers. The latter, in particular the much-loved Bellevue hotel being deceitfully pulled down in the dead of night, was something that would eventually unite conservative Brisbane with the protesting counterculture. The final nails in the coffin, somewhat reminiscent of Woodward & Bernstein, were provided by an pioneering ABC TV programme ‘Four Corners’ and associated articles in the Courier Mail newspaper, detailing corruption in the so-called ‘Moonlight State’, and the subsequent Fitzgerald Inquiry that would prove beyond doubt the rampant corruption at the core of the administration, kicking the National Party out of office in Queensland and plonking a few of them in the jails they’d previously reserved for kicking the crap out of Aboriginal people and hairy students.

Another great documentary from Radio National, it only loses one point for failing to include the brilliant Go-Betweens track, ‘Lee Remick’, whose opening lines effortlessly articulate the self-deprecating cultured wit that would’ve so infuriated their conservative fellow citizens of the ‘big country town’ …

She comes from Ireland
She’s very beautiful
I come from Brisbane
I’m quite plain

Despite that omission, there’s some great music in here, and it’s a rich portrayal of a city in turmoil. The gleaming Brisbane of 2007 is now large, diverse, smart, cultured, architecturally innovative, growing fast, and increasingly seen as hip by a Sydney and Melbourne shuffling uncomfortably as they look north. It’s a good time to be reminded of where the city has come from. A fairly incredible story.

Hindsight: Pig City (MP3)

The current Matthew d’Ancona Sunday Supplement reminds me of another one, the best bit of thoughtful commentary on modern political bullshit I’ve recently heard, and I’m glad to see it’s still online. Not My Words, Mr Speaker by Matthew Parris was broadcast a couple of months ago.

Matthew Parris takes a canter through the arid badlands of political language and asks why politicians drape their speeches in the tired glad-rags of stale phrases.

Matthew Parris was an MP before he was a political commentator, and understands this world as well as anyone. He seems to delight in highlighting the clichés which litter political life in Britain. At one point Parris suggests a “ticking time-bomb” as an example of a well-worn phrase to Norman Tebbit. Tebbit, you’ll remember, was injured in the 1984 bomb attack of the Tory party conference in Brighton. Much as I love Matthew Parris, it’s also rather fun to hear him blush at that point.

Part one (MP3, Real) covers

1. Grabbing attention by dramatising with sensational language (holed beneath the waterline)
2. Padding (year on year on year)
3. Make a question sound like an answer (we need a debate…)

Some brilliant examples, including “Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”, “Hearts and minds” and “I’ll take no lectures”. In part two (Real) we hear more modern examples of post New Labour bullshit bingo, including “rolling out”, “we must be seen to walk the talk” and the latest favourite, “across the piece”.

Matthew d’Ancona (he’s the editor of the Spectator, but you might know him for doing a great Al Pacino impression at Interesting 2007) asks “whether the World Wide Web has the potential to reshape society” in Power and the Web. Here’s the first part (MP3, Real).

You can also hear it as the ‘Sunday Supplement’ of the Westminster Hour, broadcast on Sunday evening.