Speechification

I think The Forum is the best programme on the World Service at the moment. A weekly grown-up debate with brainy guests, in this case musicians Amit Chowdhury, social entrepreneur Mdidi Muenelli and psychologist Stephen Pinker (spellings a bit uncertain there, I can’t find anything about the show on the site—the archive is a couple of weeks out of date). It’s like a kind of topical In Our Time. This one (MP3), which went out on 15 June, is presented by scientist (and baroness) Susan Greenfield. While you’re at it, check out the latest edition, which features Mark Mazower, historian of the Nazis, Jan Zalasiewicz, Geologist and Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov. The show’s very complete archive is here.

Three poets (two postgrad students and one faculty member, Fred D’Aguiar) from Virginia Tech remember the massacre which took place a year ago. I’ll warn you: this is a very moving programme. I think poetry must speak to a special centre in the brain. It short-circuits rationality and this gives it permission to provoke the kind of involuntary emotional reaction that this 23 minutes must have produced everywhere it was heard. Poetry also seems to have a special freedom to deal with topics untouchable in other forms—like this most awful story of death and loss. Outstanding (MP3).

The World Service web site has improved a lot lately and programme pages are now excellent. Here’s this programme’s page.

Is African football any good? How much does a Ghanaian Premiership player earn? Will a team from the continent ever win the World Cup? The World Service is going large on the Africa Cup of Nations that kicks off in Ghana this weekend. Here’s 8:14 of the kind of stuff only the World Service can do: wide-ranging, authoritative commentary on stuff that happens in foreign places. (MP3).

John Steinbeck called them “the last free men”, and American mythology has a special place for the rail-riding hobo. This unencumbered hero, the happy-go-lucky bum, is an icon that occupies strange territory today, being so at odds with materialistic 21st century society.

Hobo Heaven (MP3), a documentary dredged up from the BBC World Service archives, tries to find out the truth behind these images of the itinerant boxcar rider - and goes to the National Hobo Convention (held every year in the tiny middle American town of Britt, Iowa) to see whether the hobo’s freedom is just a myth.

Steve Evans talks to religious people about business, including an American evangelist whose Dallas construction firm actually belongs to God (MP3). This is the Christmas Day edition of Business Daily on the World Service.

My wife’s all-night World Service habit brought this one to my attention. Outlook is The World Service’s three-times-a-week collection of personal stories from around the world: really absorbing stuff: the kind of thing they used to call ‘human interest’.

For the podcast I’ve picked out an almost unbelievable item: pages from the diary of a young Dutch woman who’s run away to join a Colombian rebel group (the FARC).

As far as we know she’s still out there in the jungle, whinging about her boyfriend. Here’s the item and here’s the whole show which includes items about Muslim comedians, political slogans and Switzerland’s first black MP. Note to producers: Outlook needs a podcast and a proper archive. (MP3).