Speechification

A mini-post featuring something from Charles Wheeler’s archive: three-and-a-half minutes recorded on the fourth of April 1968, the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination (MP3).

Terrific one-hour feature from Radio 3’s Sunday Feature slot about the history of religious tolerance, its roots in Holland and in John Locke’s luminous ‘Letters Concerning Toleration‘ (well worth a read, by the way). There’s a large minibus- or a small coach-load of grade-A scholarship on show here: very topical too. And, while we’re talking about Locke, here’s an In Our Time from February about John Locke and the Social Contract. (/programmes, MP3).

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.

Here’s a gorgeous, dreamy doc from RTE. It’s about a teacher of Irish dance born in Britain and returning to the bottom left-hand corner of Ireland to pursue his passion, but you really don’t need to know that. You could easily listen without knowing a thing about the subject matter. You could tune out and enjoy the layered mix of voice and music , memory and emotion—it’s like ambient music. Or you could pay attention and enjoy the story of Timmy “The Brit” McCarthy, Irish dancer.

I’m linking to RTE’s MP3 because the Irish aren’t encumbered by a Trust and a bunch of service definitions that require them to delete their MP3s after a week. Let’s hope they don’t change their minds.

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).

Steve, of this parish, often rebukes me for not editing my hijackings properly. I always leave it running at the end and you hear some continuty announcement, or the start of the next programme. And then he always relents and admits that that’s the stuff we’ll all want to hear again in twenty years. Not the actual programmes but the texture of radio. The voices, the coughs, the sigs, the sounds. So this edition of Ramblings will be right up a nostalgist’s street (not now, in 20 years, when speechification is archived on a gold disk on the side of a mission to another galaxy). Clare Balding takes her usual stroll, but this time in the company of the Radio 4 continuity team, all those announcers and newsreaders gathered in one place, gorgeous voices floating over Sussex. They were together in support of newsreader Rory Morrison who has a rare form of blood cancer, raising money for the Lymphoma Association. It’s rather moving and wonderful radio, a bit like being invited to a company Christmas Play, with the added bonus of some pips-based time signal geekery. The MP3 is here and there’s a typically comprehensive Ramblings page here.

And, as a special bonus for all you lovers of texture - here are various versions of the PM theme tune.

Over at RTE Ronan Kelly has got a bit of an NPR thing going on. He’s making documentaries that have that disarming, dreamy feel that I expect from the best output of American public radio stations like Chicago Public Radio and WNYC. Here’s a really excellent show that went out around Paddy’s Day in March about being Irish. Not being Irish in the hard-hitting sociological-analytical kind of way but being Irish in the allusive, poetic kind of way. This is open-ended, discursive radio that rarely arrives at a conclusion. Stories don’t resolve neatly, segments are loosely-linked, themes approximate.

Some people really don’t like this. They find it lazy and purposeless and want something tougher and better organised. Sometimes I agree but that’s mostly because it’s such a difficult technique to get right. It would be very easy to make something slack and undemanding from this material. I’d like to hear more like it in Britain, though. I’d like to hear what would happen if some of Britain’s factual radio talent was let off the hook a bit and allowed to play. With the occasional exception on Radio 3, though, the BBC’s really too uptight to create such loosely-structured radio here. I think Feedback would be swamped if Mark Damazer routinely ran shows like Kelly’s (or like This American Life or Radio Lab, for that matter). Pity.

Anyway, this show is full of good stories. In one segment some really good material comes from the simple device of phoning people up who happen to be called ‘Patrick Day’. A treat (MP3).

Humph was Shadow Controller of Radio 4. He was secretly in charge of the whole thing. You can’t understate his importance to the network. Only in the next weeks and months will we understand what we’ve lost. Humphrey Lyttelton was an accidental comic genius who, over the decades, came to set the station’s comedic tone: which was somewhere between withering senior common room irony and joyful, anarchic surrealism—and all without writing a single word.

While Clue was moving to the centre of the British radio comedy universe, becoming its timeless and unassailable mascot, Humph was modestly assuming the top spot himself. Shows came and went, comedians came and went. None could touch Humph who was, after all, a bloody trumpeter. We’ve lost our Controller of Beautifully Timed Sarcasm and our Controller of Barely Permissible Innuendo. Worse than that, I think we’re going to find we’ve lost our comedy anchor.

Here, to remember him by, is an edition of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue from 1998. It was recorded in Windsor (MP3).

Somewhere there’s an archive as big as that one in Indiana Jones, full of letters, invoices and memos, detailing the internal machinations of the BBC. They seem to keep everything. No copies of the actual programmes, obviously, but all the accounting documents relating to it. The great advantage of this is it makes for tremendous internal history, lots of little documentaries about BBC people and projects illuminated by the marvellously dry language of the internal memo. This piece on Richard Dimbleby is a perfect example. Lovely stuff. And what a bloke. (And, just in case you were wondering, the Russell Davies presenting it isn’t me. He’s one of the many other, more popular, Russell Davieses.) MP3 here.

Simple and clever news radio from The Today Programme. Mike Leigh just made a film about happiness and Professor Richard Layard has been researching happiness for years. In fact Layard recently wrote an important report for the UK Government in which he proposed that we spend a lot more money on the kinds of psychotherapy that have been shown to produce happiness. He’s a happiness guy. So, anyway, the Today people put them together for an eight minute interview and it’s not polished or deliberate but just really interesting stuff (MP3).