Speechification

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.

Mark Radcliffe—practically radio Royalty these days—has made a lovely programme about his old friend Hovis Presley, Bolton stand-up and poet who retreated from fame and died much too young (MP3).

Elegiac, pre-dawn listening from my favourite provider of… er… elegiac pre-dawn listening: Lionel Kellaway. This edition of The Living World comes from an ancient rookery in Norfolk - nighttime home (since at least the Norman invasion) to tens of thousands of rooks. I feel almost certain that if there is a heaven (which, obviously, there isn’t) it’ll be people like Kellaway who provide the soundtrack (MP3).

Pic by John Haslam.

Last night I went to an interesting (well, frustrating really) event about the future of radio (Russell was there too but he passed through like a wraith) and, afterwards, in the bar, I met several very interesting people, including Adrian, who invented After Our Time, but has struggled to keep it going on his own (I reckon we need to mount some kind of rescue mission and chopper in some assistance from the Speechification community), Neil Gardner, whose excellent independent production company brought us Tom Mangold’s FBI series and his The Divine Detective, both featured here, and Naomi Gryn, who is really a proper celebrity and made a programme I really liked back in 2006 about The New Yorker (she wrote some words to go with it). So here [some sort of flourish or fanfare], from the archive, is that very programme: MP3.

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.

This really marvelous show sent me off into a kind of radio nerd reverie. It’s an Archive Hour programme by British experimental radio legend Piers Plowright about Canadian piano legend Glenn Gould and his strange and fascinating radio career. One of my most treasured CDs is a three disc set featuring three of Gould’s CBC docs: The Idea of North, The Latecomers and The Quiet in The Land. On the show you’ll hear clips from these and lots of other shows, including his notorious meditation on Petula Clark. Yes, Petula Clark. Also lots of quirky, brilliant Gould (was he autistic? I think so) and some good anecdotes (like the one about the carphone). Need I say more? No (MP3).

The CD set, which is called The Solitude Trilogy, is very expensive at amazon but I notice there are a few second-hand copies listed too and also another cheaper CD of clips from his other docs that I haven’t heard. UPDATE: and another 5-CD set which appears to be definitive.

And while I’m linking, here’s a lovely Plowright interview about ‘the innovative feature’ from The University of Pennsylvania’s Ubu web site.

I like the way Speechification is turning into a useful reference on programme makers and themes. Click on Paul Gambaccini’s name in the links below and you’ll get a page with all the shows presented by him that we’ve featured here. Imagine how useful this will be in a few years time! So I’m really just posting this terrific show from his ‘For One Night Only‘ series to bump up the Paul Gambaccini quotient (MP3).

Geoff Emerick and James Lock are two pioneering sound engineers who helped shape the sound of the last 40 years: Emerick as the teenage tech behind the experimental sound of the Beatles and former Decca guru Lock as the classical mastermind behind recordings like Pavarotti’s Otello.

In The Sound Makers (here’s the homepage and MP3) Paul Gambaccini - who’s going through something of a purple patch on Radio 4 at the moment - guides them along as they dole out reminiscences of working on some of the most legendary recordings of our lifetimes… including Emerick’s tale of how he got “a letter from the management” about his microphone positioning during the recording of Revolver.

Half an hour didn’t feel like quite enough - sound geeks will probably be itching for more by the end, as the discussion broadens out - but it’s intriguing listening that had me reaching for my record collection.

Paul Gambaccini seems to have become the Beeb’s unofficial historian of 20th Century pop culture. He’s got a new four-part series about the Oscars which has got off to a good start with a show about the 1962 best picture Lawrence of Arabia. Contributors include David Thomson, Kenneth Turan, Bob Osborne and - my favourite - Kevin Brownlow.

Actually David Thomson is my favourite really (his Biographical Dictionary of Film is a genuine wonder) but I needed a reason to link to an exceptional Brownlow programme from March 2005 featuring his interviews with artists of the silent era. So here (for the podcast) is the Gambaccini programme (MP3) and here (for later) is the Brownlow (MP3).

Get up early Saturday morning for the next few weeks for Julian Putkowski’s quirky 15-minute snapshots from the national archives: this week, a breathtaking incidence of corporate manslaughter from 1900 in which hundreds of people from the North of England were poisoned, apparently by bad beer. But were they? MP3.