Speechification

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).

In our house we are exceptionordinarily fond of Lauren Child and especially of Clarice Bean, her resourceful and funny character for 8-12 year-olds. I’ve read all three of the Clarice Bean novels to my older two kids and we really definitely can’t wait for her to write another one (although we suspect that her absolutely mega-blockbuster picture book brand Charlie & Lola is probably taking up all her time right now).

BBC7 just ran an excellent reading (by Elisha Mansuroglo) of Clarice Bean Spells Trouble in the early morning Big Toe Books slot (I keep meaning to put the show on while we’re having our breakfast. I wonder if a nice story might suppress the breakfast-time shouting and violence). So here, in a departure from our usual programmes with blokes talking about caves or electro music, is part one. There are seven parts all together and you can listen to them all on the Big Toe page until 23 April.

Here’s something first broadcast on Resonance FM - a history of electronic music around the world, made by Ian Helliwell and Simon James. It’s broadcast every Friday evening at 7.30 on Resonance. Or you can get a podcast via Simon’s blog. There are more links at Music Thing and the mp3 is here. Lovely stuff.

Here’s one I’ve been meaning to post for a few weeks - a beautiful and moving mosaic of immigrant voices from all over Europe. This is the kind of collaboration you get if you’re a small economy and better wired into Europe than we are in Britain. The show was produced (in German) by RBB (Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg) and first aired in May 2007. The English-language version was mixed by Radio France International and the show was broadcast again as part of RTE’s Documentary on One strand in Ireland on 10 February this year, which is where I picked it up. Here’s the MP3 (and the Documentary on One podcast is here).

So we have a problem. Out there in Radio Land there exist a few radio programmes that are always always good, week-after-week, show-after-show. I don’t know why but—if you ask me—a disproportionately large number of these programmes comes from America, where they have no state broadcaster and precious little state funding for radio.

Why is this a problem? Of course it’s not really a problem. It’s just that, here at speechification, we like to bring you a variety of great speech radio. How can we do that if the producers of This American Life keep coming up with clever and beautiful shows like this one? This episode is about memory. Read about it here.

We’re not linking to MP3s for This American Life since the show is self-funding so you should really get over there and pop a few quid in the collecting tin—the podcast is free. In fact, I think they’re developing a pretty interesting economic model: the streaming MP3 and the podcast are free but if you want to download and keep the show you pay 95 cents. I wonder if it works.

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.

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.

Forgive me as I stray a little northwards from my Antipodean lair to bring you this quite wonderful edition of Studio 360, presented as usual by Kurt Anderson. It’s devoted to amateur inventors and ‘mad scientists’, with Nikola Tesla as the super-dense object bending the show’s waves around him. The programme lovingly and carefully explores Tesla’s pioneering work in radar, radio, alternating current and just about everything else in the modern world - which was all to little acclaim at the time.

Mike Daisey relates the life of Tesla in a hilarious and bewitching set of excerpts from his one-man show. With a delivery like Emo Phillips with the fast forward button held down, be sure to stay for the story of Tesla’s death ray. Just after the story of Tesla x-raying Mark Twain’s head.

The WYNC Director of Engineering takes Anderson to the top of the Empire State Building, to see the big machines that carries the sound WYNC upwards into the sky - and then gets him to put his hand in them. Then there’s a gentle section on garage inventors from Kansas. Samantha Hunt, writer of a new (fictional, but barely) book on the extraordinary life of Tesla. Plus some notes on the popular perception of the mad scientist, from a mildly disgruntled, real (not mad) scientist. Beautifully produced of course, this is just great, great radio. There’s lots more info at the S360 site.

Studio 360: Nikola Tesla: Strange Genius (mp3)

Here’s a beautiful thing. A 40-minute feature from RTE’s Documentary on One strand about Amos Oz, Israeli novelist and humanist. It’s a lovely programme, based on his 2005 memoir A Tale of Love & Darkness. Oz is fascinating and humane and I could easily have filled this post with luminous quotes from the programme.

An intriguing detail is that it’s an adaptation of a programme originally made by Barbo Holmsberg for the Finnish state broadcaster YLE (I wonder if it’s Holmsberg narrating the programme). Anyway, for me that’s another hint of the speech radio richness that must exist out there beyond the English language fortress (MP3).

The Irish State broadcaster’s equivalent to Radio 4 (which, confusingly, is called Radio 1) has a show called The Curious Ear. Ronan Kelly records people and events with the kind of wry, slightly sideways attitude you normally get from features on NPR (like the Lost and Found Sounds shows from last week). You don’t get this kind of stuff on Radio 4. It’s too gentle, a bit purposeless. I think people would complain. Anyway, this one’s about the World Draughts Championships which took place in Buncrana, Co. Donegal in October. Lovely (MP3, podcast and here’s a page showing all the RTE factual podcasts. Lots of good stuff here).