Speechification

I can do no better than quote from the world service’s site:

“Each year the BBC World Service collaborates with radio stations from around the world to make a documentary series on a contemporary subject of international importance and interest. Each partner station contributes a documentary which gives a local interpretation of the chosen theme, and this year the theme is Escape.”

Splendid idea. You can listen to all eight programmes here. I’ve done about half and they’re all good so far. And they serve to illustrate that it’s not just the Beeb making interesting radio. Escape From Time is a good example of the way American public radio seems much happier than the BBC to play with sound and music when telling a story. Good stuff. MP3 here.

Misha Glenny’s new book McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers has been recieving excellent notices all over town, and the World Service have snapped him up for a four-part series charting the explosive growth of international crime following the end of the Cold War and other conflicts. He estimates that industrious crooks account for a fairly staggering 20% of the world’s GDP.

In the first programme [MP3] Glenny travels to British Columbia to meet the Canadian weed growers who use science (and Blackberries) to get their product over their border to a wealthy, heavily toking, but increasingly annoyed US. Access is key here, and as a former and much-honoured reporter in the former Yugoslavia (him, not me), I look forward to seeing who he’s cosied up to next week, reporting on cigarette smuggling in the Balkans.

I was prompted to wander over to the World Service this evening for a rummage around their documentary archive. Most of the links seem to point to programmes sitting on the News site, which is no bad thing. It’s all well-organised with full and helpful pages giving you useful background and there are all sorts of listening, streaming and downloading options. This programme about the economic and social effects of Nokia on Finland is a lovely example. MP3 here. Hurrah for the World Service.

This is at the top of my pile of miscellaneous audio and I remember loving it when it went out. But only on googling it just now did I discover it was part of a series of programmes called Thinking Earth, across Radios 3 and 4, and the World Service. Only fragments seem to be Listen Again-able which is a shame because I really fancy the Radio 3 contribution - Earth Mapping; ‘a meditation on mapping with international artists who each tell us a story of a map that it important to them’. (You only get ‘meditations’ on the radio don’t you?) If anyone happens to have a copy of Earth Mapping please let us know.

Anyway, the Radio 4 contribution is An ABC Of The Night; 26 short pieces from 26 different parts of the globe, all recorded at night. It’s great stuff, with music and sound design from Nina Perry weaving it all together. And there’s a photo gallery here. (MP3 here)

As we’ve been seeing on Speechification recently, Radio 4 is not the only place to go for intelligent speech. The World Service should be an obvious choice, and I’ve recently been addicted to Mike Williams’ three part series “Inside the Climate Change talks” which I discovered thanks to the documentary archive podcast.

It soon gets out of being an introduction to climate change, and becomes a fascinating guided tour of the behind the scenes action at G8 in May, and the preparations for the December UN Summit in Bali.

• Part one (mp3)
• Part two (mp3)
• Part three (mp3)

At its best, it’s like Today in Parliament on an international stage. I would have liked to hear more of the international negotiations on the floor of the G8 from the horses mouths though; Mike Williams is so keen to explain what we’re hearing in these meetings that we sometimes don’t get much of a chance to hear it for ourselves. Other than that, it’s an enjoyable and fascinating series.

Photo credit: intimaj on Flickr.

My wife put me on to this one. She’s one of those people who likes to have the World Service on all night. Consequently we dream about Congolese politics and tense UN general assembly sessions… Anyway, it’s a play (you don’t get many plays round here do you?) and it’s a good one. Part of the World Service’s World Drama series.

It’s quite cinematic: the passage of a hundred years, an ironic voiceover, a clever narrative structure and a genuinely engaging story, knitting together the adoption of Morse code in 1906 and a turbulent family history up to the present day (which I kind of think must be based in fact: haven’t done my research on that yet). Don’t ask me why it’s presented by Robin Lustig. (MP3, Real).

Pic by thparkth.