Speechification

I first heard about police departments podcasting a while ago, and the Tulsa Police Department's "Street Stories" in particular, but when I had a look, the official Tulsa PD website hadn't been updated since last April, so I rather lost interest. Thank goodness for Crossing Continents then, who just reignited it with a whole half hour of absolute gems from Officer Jay Chiarito-Mazarrella.

"This midget Don King stuff happens all the time." Enjoy. [MP3]

Kick-starting Christmas Week at Speechification, from a series about Christmas preparations that went out on Radio 4 last year, a lovely fifteen minutes from John Guest, the Severn Valley Railway's Santa. How can you go wrong? MP3.

(and what do you think of the Christmas decorations?)

Adventures in Poetry is up to its ninth series: that's 36 episodes of lovely, accessible, informative radio—the kind of stuff that could be really useful in a school or a college or in the ipod of a poetry nut or anywhere really.

One of these episodes is currently available for you to listen to online (plus this one, I guess). Where are all the others? Where's the nicely-organised library of episodes? Nowhere, that's where: and by this I mean "in storage, on tapes, on a shelf or a hard disk somewhere in the BBC. Effectively lost to us all. And that is heartbreaking and a bit stupid (if you ask me).

I've been waiting for this one to come round again. Two funny old men: Alan Coren and Christopher Matthew, comic writers of the clever post-war generation that made my parents laugh in places like Punch and Private Eye and then on the radio and TV—and then later made me laugh in turn.

Lovely programme: gentle, clever and quite moving, not least because Coren died since we last heard it (Radio 4 repeated the series as part of a tribute). In this episode he and Matthew use their Freedom Passes to go off on a day trip to Southend, which is only about twenty miles by sea from Margate, which came up in the last post. I think that's what you call a link (MP3).

Friend of Speechification Matt Jones suggested this one. A nice half hour presented by Robert Elms, White City native, about one of those glorious temporary fantasy cities, this one built to house the Franco-British exhibition of 1908: a dazzlingly white affair that filled a huge vacant plot between Shepherd's Bush Green and Wood Lane (where the BBC now stands). Also the reason we now call White City White City. MP3.

The pic is from the White City Stories Archive project for primary schools in Hammersmith and Fulham. And here's a set of lovely pictures made by children in the project.

The true function of Speechification is to uncover the gems you missed or the ones you heard and would like to hear again. I suppose this is the kind of thing we might expect the BBC to do for us but while they're getting around to it, here's another terrific programme from my archive: it's about Malcolm X and his influence but it's also about a remarkable moment, just a few years ago, when history sort of leaked through into the present: on eBay of all places. Excellent. Here's the MP3 and the show's web site which has some background.

Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed can slip very easily into patrician BBC mode, but in this broadcast it manages to keep it's head above water, and however many times I hear it, I'm a sucker for Iain Sinclair's Dracula-in-Purfleet, Martians-in-Woking spiel. Throw in some stuff about Ballard and post-war planning, and I'm sold. [MP3]

I'd never come across Something Understood before, probably because it's broadcast at 6am and 11.30pm on Sundays, but it seems like rather a good idea, despite its new-agey premise. Every week, "the programme examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry". This week: aging. Lovely stuff. [MP3]

A Radio 4 staple, Word of Mouth delves into two of my favourite subjects: taboo words and aphasia (MP3). Both illuminate the inner workings of the mind, the first by overuse, the latter by exclusion. There's also a stack of malapropisms even I hadn't heard, and the excruciatingly awful Dr Word. Sorry about that. Words good though, when unbound by snobbery.

Here's a particularly egregious example of the wastefulness of the BBC's programme archiving policy. Heather Couper's marvelous Cosmic Quest is a thirty-part series about the history of astronomy that's been going out over the last six weeks on Radio 4: a top dollar resource for enthusiasts, educators and the generally curious. The first twenty-five episodes of the series have been thrown away already and you're going to have to get your skates on if you want to hear the last five because they too will have been overwritten by the end of this week.

I know this is more a sin of omission than of commission—that's just the way the automated archiving set-up works. I also know that there'll be some rights issues here (I imagine Couper herself has plans for further exploitation of the series and BBC Wordwide probably has an option to repackage the shows) but I believe that it's essentially a kind of public service vandalism to commission such powerful stuff and not to create a permanent home for it online where licence fee-payers, schools, parents and the rest can get at it.

The optimal location for a content asset like this, created using public funds for use by the British public, is in a public place like the BBC's web site. Any other use of this asset will, inevitably, under-utilise it (even if thousands can be persuaded to buy it on CD or in book form) and the BBC's purpose here ought to be to make the best possible use of it by sharing it as widely as possible.

So, enough with the whinging. Here's the final episode, about the search for extraterrestrial life. You can listen to an omnibus edition of the last week's shows here for the time being and, I notice, the whole series seems to be knocking around the torrentsphere in chunks of various sizes if you're that way inclined.