Speechification

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.

Ooh, lovely. A ten-part history of the FBI from Tom Mangold - in bite-size fifteen-minute chunks. Not currently available as a podcast - which is a real pity. Wouldn’t it be nice to listen to a new episode each morning on the way to work? Terrific stuff, anyway, with lots of interesting contributors, Mangold’s authoritative tone and plenty of that terrific pre-war archive stuff about the red peril. Here’s episode one, which is about the early days, obviously. The other episodes should show up here, as they go out.

Tom Mangold’s warm, grave voice rushes me back to a childhood of very serious and grown-up Panoramas (he was on the show for 26 years). He presents this programme - from the Beeb’s religion department - about a remarkable man, Jim McCloskey, a Newark presbyterian who works to get wrongly convicted people released from New Jersey’s jails (MP3).