Speechification

It's always worth having a dig around on the BBC World Service site. There are some excellent documentaries there, and they tend not to expire. So I can just point to their MP3 here. This is a show from August 2008 about Medina Wasl - a large scale recreation of a set of Middle Eastern villages, built by the US military in California, for practising fighting and peace-keeping amongst civilian populations.

This is just lovely. It's got the stuff you want from radio feature-making: something you didn't know, an unexpected insight, evidence that people you thought you knew all about aren't what you thought they were. It's about soldiers and birdwatching: specifically birdwatching done in warzones, birdsong on battlefields. Twitchers in uniform—and in peril of death. Moving and enlightening (web page, MP3). (Here comes the clunky link). And while we're talking about sound (we were talking about sound weren't we?), you should get over to the WNYC web site and listen to this really gorgeous show (there's a link to the MP3 on the page) from the Radiolab team (from the end of 2007) about the way they work with sound to tell stories. Clever and humane communication.

Radio 2's occasional oral history strand is called Don't Start Me Talking. This one's about the second world war and it's a contribution to the BBC's remembrance season. Don't expect anything cutting edge, just old people talking about their experience of the war—no narration, no interrogation. The programme starts with Vera Lynne and ends with The Last Post... It's really good (MP3).

While everyone's wibbling on about the world crashing around our ears it's worth listening to this programme - about a time when it nearly was; when unflappable gents were parked in Vulcan bombers, only half a minute away from taking off with their nuclear payloads and various people had to make serious plans about how and where they wanted to die. MP3 here. (And thanks to Curtis for alerting us to this one.)

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).

A war-time story of the 1942 campaign for the Kokoda Track, (relatively) well-known in Australia as the battle that turned back the Japanese advance south in World War II. The large and well-equipped Japanese army had got within 40 miles of Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea and then part of Australia. With air raids on Darwin in Australia's north and a cheeky if ill-fated intervention by two Japanese subs right into the heart of Sydney's harbour, Australia was riven with fear of invasion from the north (Watch out for Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming epic Australia, set at this point).

This fine, straight-ahead historical documentary tells the story of the herculean efforts by Australian soldiers in lugging artillery by hand up the near-vertical sides of the Ioribaiwa ridge, in conditions that were described at the time as the most inhospitable on Earth. A famous victory, told here with many first-hand accounts from the soldiers involved - who are a predictably characterful bunch. But it's a victory that was barely marked at all at the time, with a shameful lack of recognition from the US commander-in-chief, General Macarthur, and Australian counterpart, General Blarney, who in a now-infamous incident, accused his troops of being "running rabbits" in a formal address on the parade ground. Thankfully this story redresses the balance.

What's also interesting to my ears, other than the epic story, is how the sound design for the reportage has changed over 60 years. The music, and tone and pace of the presentation, accompanying those original war-time reports is predictably jaunty, a fully Western orchestral war-time pomp, laden with a sense derring-do and nationalistic fervour - not that far removed from the sound of shows like Dick Barton. Now, the ABC reporter's voice is perhaps appropriately quieter, considered and reflective, and the accompanying music is more of an atmospheric ambient backdrop of sombre washes and percussion-driven pulses, inflected with a kind of ethnomusicology-meets-Café-del-Mar sense of the surrounding tropical environment, perhaps - not 'Western' at all, in its symbolism, and certainly devoid of pomp.

Equally, it should be noted there is no representation of a Japanese presence here - and thus not part of contemporary attempts to present balanced views of these campaigns and experiences - but this is still a gripping story, well-told.

Hindsight: The Guns of Ioribaiwa (mp3)

Today (by which I mean 'yesterday' because I forgot to click 'save' last night), in Britain, is Remembrance Sunday. The day we remember the 'glorious dead' of all the wars since 1914. It's a complicated and emotional day for me (more so, I find, since my Dad died back in March). It's a day when I feel like an especially pudgy and pointless middle-aged man while we remember the braver and less pointless men who died in defense of something I take for granted and winge about in approximately equal measure.

I observed today's two-minute silence standing next to a rugby pitch where my nine year-old was busy training. The boys - girls too - lined up quietly against the low sun while the awful and inspiring stories of those other young men crowded in and made some of us cry.

My Dad (an undemonstrative man who did his national service just after WWII) would listen to the service from the Cenotaph on the radio, weeping every year on this day. This, in fact, is how I learnt that men could cry. He was crying for the men he knew and loved and for the brave men he didn't know.

Here's a small and lovely programme that's full of memory and emotion, about the memorial and crematorium for Indian soldiers who fought and died for Britain. It's on the South Downs above Brighton and sounds like a lovely place (MP3).

The pic shows Lt. Hardit Singh Malik, a Sikh airman during World War One. I got it from Sikh Heritage in Britain.