Speechification

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.

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.

A really vivid and exciting half-hour about the journey of Togo and Arsenal footballer Emmanuel Adebayor to Ghana and Togo. He’s 24 but so mature and comfortable with his fame and the quite awesome responsibility that goes with it. A remarkable man (MP3).

An experiment. Listen to the MP3 and, at the beginning, you’ll hear me, reading aloud the kind of words you might have read here. A lot of Speechification users don’t read our blog entries at all, you see. They just listen to the podcast. Adding an introduction to the MP3 means they can’t escape! It’s a bit of a pain to record the intro (adding about twenty minutes of fiddling around in Garageband in my case) but it might be fun to do. What do you think? MP3.

Saddest and truest radio programme this week. Soldiers’ letters, meant to be read only in the event of their death in action. A small tribute to the resilience and humanity of those left behind and to the courage (and humour) of those who died (MP3).

A particularly good Moral Maze from a stage at The Cheltenham Science Festival (which sounds like a riot). Rancorous and funny by turns. And Melanie Phillips is always a laugh isn’t she? Had me shouting and grumbling at the radio throughout (MP3).

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.

I think The Material World is my favourite radio science show. It’s to do with presenter Quentin Cooper (it’s not as good when someone’s filling in for him), to do with the real live scientists interviewed every week and to do with the very broad range of subject matter: all the sciences, all in one place, which is great for your pop science dilettante. This one’s about polythene and sound perception and a new supercomputer for British scientists. MP3 and podcast.