Speechification

When I was 12 or 13 my dad came home from one of his twice-a-year Territorial Army jaunts to Germany with a lovely Sanyo transistor radio and I fell in love with it (I wish I could find a picture of it). It had shortwave and that was the start of the whole radio thing for me. I huddled in bed, listening to all of those impossibly distant, impossibly exotic foreign voices. The voices I remember best were the two newsreaders on Radio Tirana (one male, one female) who would keep me up to date with the production of oranges and tractors and diesel trains in Albania.

Their English was so perfect, so squeaky-clean ivy league American, and what they read out so prosaic, that I wondered, even then, how they'd been persuaded to read the news for nutty Hoxha.

But it was gripping all the same, I always listened right through, until the station switched to a French transmission. I wrote to Radio Tirana at the address provided ("Radio Tirana, Albania") and my dad, who collected stamps and knew about these things, told me it'd never get there because Albania was the only country on the planet that wasn't a member of the Universal Postal Union. But it did get there and they wrote back: a huge, rough brown envelope full of posters and books of aphorisms by Hoxha and Lenin (and Chairman Mao too, I seem to remember) and a fantastically crudely-printed card with the shortwave frequencies on it and something called a QSL card (like the one shown). Treasure.

And all that was a very self-indulgent way of introducing part one of David Hendy's terrific 5-part series of essays about radio - this one, called The Ethereal Mind, about its pre-history and his own discovery of its joys (also via Albania). Radio 4 nuts will be familiar with Hendy's excellent history, Life On Air: A History of Radio Four. Here's the MP3 - length: 4:16.

Thanks to Jasmund for permission to use the picture (lots more here).

Billy Childish is the permanent outsider, but a few more people are starting to hear his name and - if very lucky - his music, too. The ICA is about to launch a large exhibition of his work, so his reputation will only be growing. John Wilson explores his work and his world. [MP3]

Not much to say about this, except it's bloody lovely. Naturalist Paul Evans takes us on a sound tour of Dungeness and the Romney marshes. Enjoy. [MP3]

(Dungeness pic by me. More at Flickr.)

For Radio 2, Stephen Fry looks at how Hitler's Germany pioneered many - if not most - of the recording techniques that made later music possible. This, the second episode, covers the Rock'n'Roll years and tells how the multi-track recording process changed the face of music production forever. [MP3]

Excellent and timely little doc, following the fortunes of Steve, a former Woolworths employee, as he struggles to find a new job - just one of over 27,000 former employees now looking for work. Camaraderie and reminiscence abound. [MP3]

Peter White is one of my favourite Radio 4 presenters. I find myself listening to In Touch on a regular basis, because he's always interesting and informative and, well, friendly, even when discussing issues of minority interest. He pops up elsewhere on a regular basis - I heard him recently explaining on another programme that blind people don't get jokes about horses with long faces - and it's always good to hear his voice. Here he is talking (to all of us) about Louis Braille, and the story behind his invention. As an added bonus, lots of great French accents. [MP3]

I should also say that this doc is taken from my latest exciting discovery, the World Service's awesome Documentary Archive podcast, which contains hundreds of 20 minute docs, which apparently don't go unavailable after a week. Go grab that RSS.

A perfect little programme from Hardeep Singh Kohli featuring Camus, Nabokov and Bob Wilson. And drawing a compelling parallel between drummers and goalkeepers. Also reminds us of the best football song ever: "Nayim, From The Halfway Line". MP3 here.

Tim Bodett's small town stories could easily slip into folksiness, but that's not the root of his writing. As he writes on his website: "I'm not a more decent person because of rural life, but I act more decently than I probably would if I didn’t have to see these people again." BBC7 is broadcasting his series of Alaskan Christmas stories, Christmastime at the End of the Road, and their gentle, Keillor-esque drollery seems like a pretty good expression of the season to me. [MP3]

P.S. How do you like them Christmas decorations? The animated gif throwdown starts here.

Canadian radio. We sometimes do Canadian radio. Here's a lovely soundscape about Toronto, from CBC's And The Winner Is... podcast, which features Canadian shows that have won radio awards around the world. I'm linking to the MP3 on the CBC site so if it's gone away by the time you click to listen, let me know. Here's what they say on the CBC web site:

Toronto is the city the rest of Canada loves to hate. It's the largest city in the country. It's a financial hub and it is, to some, the centre of the universe. But what is Toronto really like? This week on And the Winner Is... we'll hear an award-winning portrait of the invisible Toronto - from the sounds of the city, to the stories overheard on the subway, to the tales told by the people who live there.

As far as I can tell, this version is a 35-minute edit of the one hour original, presumably trimmed to fit an on-air slot. Pity we couldn't hear the full length version online though...

Another documentary masterclass from the Irish. I'm not going to go on about it because I've said all this before but over at RTE Radio One they have a strand called Documentary on One: a long-running series of handsome, entirely artless 45-minute features on different aspects of Irish life. Here's the latest show, which is about the legendary 1995 All Ireland Hurling champions from County Clare in the West of Ireland. Ther'e nothing fancy about this: the only voices you'll hear are those of the documentary's subjects and the only other sounds are the match commentaries of the day and some gorgeous, evocative wild tracks fom the blustery West. Pure pleasure.