Speechification

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.

Here’s a excellent programme from RTE’s Documentary on One strand that’s got the strange history of British colonial rule written right through it. Savour this profoundly odd fact: a longish stretch of one of Ireland’s best fishing rivers belongs to… The 12th Duke of Devonshire. The fascinating thing is that the colonial history—700 years of slavery and all that—doesn’t even come up. Nor does the messy disentanglement of the two states that followed independence.

I think there’s something about modern Irish self-confidence and the instinctive resistance to what the Australians call ‘the cultural cringe’ that prevents contributors to the programme from even mentioning the ugly history that enabled a British aristocrat to acquire and retain huge swathes of Irish land. Can you build a modern, post-colonial state while deliberately forgetting the circumstances that produced it? Looks like it. MP3.

Read about the programme here. There’s a substantial archive of previous Documentary on One shows here and there’s a podcast too.

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).

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.

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).

Here’s a little Irish jewel from before the tiger roared. Professor Denis Donoghue, a Joyce scholar (now at NYU), reading a talk about the author recorded in 1984 (the series was repeated last Summer). There’s something precious about this: it’s a fascinating talk but it preserves the fustiness and melancholy of Ireland in the decades between independence and the arrival of all that European money in the eighties. Like a time capsule from Dev’s Ireland (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).

If you grew up Irish or you’ve got some Irish in you you’ll know all about Eamon De Valera, the independent nation’s first patriarch. He was like a kind of Irish Churchill: a big, muscular political figure who stamped his personality on the middle years of the 20th Century but he was a contradictory and old-fashioned man and ultimately departed amid disappointment and disillusion.

He was a revered figure - even people from his political opposition respected him. As a kid I saw his picture on the wall alongside the votive pictures and the holy water in many of the homes we visited. I thought he was a saint or a cardinal.

So here’s a really absorbing nine-part consideration of the old man from RTE. I’ll warrant you’ll need to be a bit of an Irish history nerd to make it through all nine (there’s a podcast, which is handy) but listen to this sample, the sixth part of the series, ‘Comely maidens and De Valera’s Cultural vision’ (MP3). There’s something fascinating about the tone of voice and the manner of the historians involved too. They’re evidently very much of the Irish social elite. Ireland may be a republic but it has a class system like a steel trap.

Here’s another terrific RTE documentary. This one’s about emigration but not about the drastic, once-in-a-lifetime emigration of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this doc we hear the voices of men and women driven from County Mayo in the decades after the second world war by rural poverty to pick potatoes in Scotland and Northern England, usually for months on end and in pretty grim conditions. It’s another beautifully made programme, too: quiet and reflective. The voices do all the work.

Here’s the MP3 and here’s the RTE Documentary on One podcast. There seems to be a disagreement between the programme’s web page - which links to two programmes and gives them different names - and the podcast. Maybe someone from RTE will read this and clarify for us.