Radio Archives
February 21, 2007
Radio twittering
Be my Twitter friend if you want to know what I'm listening to on the radio.
I know I'm always going on about BBC Radio 4 here: 'jewel in the crown', 'best speech radio in the world', 'liberal education in a box' and all that. Forgive me but here I go again. The network is 40 years old this year but really much older. Radio 4 replaced The Home Service which itself replaced a bunch of earlier national and regional stations, one of which was 2LO, the first proper British radio station, launched by the fledgling BBC in 1922. So, when you tune into Radio 4 you're really listening to 80-odd years of continuous British radio history – there are even several shows on the network that have been running for longer than 50 years.
Radio 4 and the BBC in general are funded from a licence fee, a gloriously anachronistic compulsory levy on every household with a TV that really annoys libertarians and free market ultras but seems, somehow, to make perfect sense to the British public. So we – those of us with TVs anyway – pay directly for the corporation's output and that gives us certain rights over it. It's ours. This is why I quite often rip a Real Media stream from bbc.co.uk and stick it up on my server without worrying about the tap on the door in the dawn. Although I probably shouldn't, nobody's going to stop me.
One thing I've always wanted to do, though, is find a way of reviewing and linking to radio progs in a slightly more spontaneous way than blogging them, which is a bit of a pain at the best of times. So now I've found it. I'm going to use Twitter – the brilliant hybrid of messaging and publishing that's got the geeks' thumbs twitching. I've been enjoying Twitter for a couple of weeks already – one of those genuinely fertile consumer tech innovations whose various parts have existed here and there for years but which really makes sense now that they're all joined together.
I've created a Twitter account called LWB (Listen With Bowbrick) which I'm going to use exclusively for micro-reviews and, where available, links to Real Streams or web sites for radio shows I really enjoy. If you want to know what I'm listening to on the radio you just need to add me as a friend. Click here to do so (you'll obviously need a free Twitter account).
The reason I like Twitter for this job is because, like I said, it's spontaneous and you can do it from your mobile but also because it's ephemeral. If I tell you that I'm listening to The World Tonight (which I am) then I can provide a link to the stream without worrying about the fact that it will overwritten by the next one in seven days (which is why I hoovered up all those Real streams in the first place).
I'm going to try, where I provide links, to make sure they go to stable pages in the BBC's nifty programme directory – they look like this one and have a unique ID at the end of the URL. From there you should be able to learn about the show while getting to a Real Stream if it still exists. I'm kind of assuming that the go-ahead geeks at the Beeb will want to offer some kind of slightly more formal Beeb/Twitter mashup soon enough – like something, for instance, that will allow you to embed a short URL automatically or something that would work from a mobile (wouldn't it be entirely cool if you could receive a tweet referencing a Radio 4 show on your mobile and then click to listen to it?).
September 29, 2006
Podcasting saves radio?
If podcasting is going to yield a real business model for the media owners and broadcasters it probably won't involve stations centrally creating podcasts and giving them away or selling them.
It'll more likely involve building (or badging) a big rights-cleared library of music and other content and then making it available with some funky creation and distribution tools to the wannabe DJs out there. They'll use it to create twenty-first century mix-tapes for their friends and – if they're good at it – for larger audiences – true 'long tail' stuff.
Take Astrid. She's got a terrific music podcast over at Switchpod. I'm pretty sure that a healthy proportion of the world's music fans would rather listen to stuff like this than to the seamless, playlist-driven stuff provided by local radio or the Beeb. Switchpod doesn't offer anything in the way of rights-clearance but it surely can't be long before services like this start to kick back a percentage of their no-doubt booming revenue to the rights groups in return for allowing their users to thrash around in the archive without penalty.
In fact, the next wave of downloading services would be well-advised to add a rights-cleared roll-your-own radio toolkit as a basic service on launch. Fans obviously still want to listen to music radio. It's just that they'd quite like to be making their own too. The good news is that – at least in Britain – the rights owners already have a legal framework for this stuff.
They've just spent some time coming up with a new legal concept they're calling the Value Recognition Right (VRR) whose purpose is to stretch the threadbare rights envelope to cover currently unrecognised intermediaries like P2P networks and (let's say) podcasting rights aggregators. My advice: get on and ratify the VRR and get your comprehensive rights-cleared content databases out there now. You never know, the podcasters might just save your business.
June 15, 2006
While I've been away...
I'm sorry, I've not been concentrating properly lately. Also, I'm not 100% sure you can even see these entries since I got Robin to upgrade me to MT 3.2 the other day. From my house I can't see anything more recent than the Eurovision Song Contest. Anyway, here are some great things: Elvis Costello's collaboration with Allen Toussaint. Juliet hates Costello so I'm winding her up something rotten by leaving the album playing in the car whenever I switch off. It's quite awesome. About ten absolutely brilliant songs that I can't stop singing (the kids shout at me to shut up on the school run – I have become an embarrassing Dad). Toussaint and Costello are men in their prime: driving, soulful, humane, er... tromboney (also, this year's best lyric: "What happened to that Liberty Bell I heard so much about?/Did it really ding dong?/It must have dinged wrong/It didn't ding long.").
Obviously I'm a regular listener to 'On Your Farm', the BBC's weekly farming show that goes out at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. Last week it came from a dairy farm in Somerset run by a friendly sounding geezer called Michael Eavis (of course, no one at the Beeb thinks it worthwhile keeping stuff like this available for longer than a week so here's an MP3).
It's sort of rambling and not, perhaps, the toughest critique the author will see but I am an absolute junkie for Freeman Dyson in any context and his review of Daniel Dennett's anti-religion book in the NYRB is readable and clever and full of good anecdotes (my own view is that scientists don't serve the scientific cause as well as they think they do when they wade in to demolish religion. In fact, I think they almost always wind up making a series of category errors that make them look obsessive and pedantic and not lofty and disinterested as they no doubt intend).
May 12, 2006
Excellent business radio
Peter Day's excellent In Business is back on Radio 4 – and, now that they've got a podcast, I don't need to steal the episodes any more. The first in the new series is about Britain's stubbornly low rate of productivity. Some fascinating and surprising conclusions... Like, for instance, one way to increase our effective productivity rate would be to fire a couple of million people to get our unemployment rate up to French and German levels. In those countries they achieve higher levels of productivity by keeping unskilled and unproductive people out of the workforce and on the dole.
March 06, 2006
Google on Radio 4
Jonathan Freedland's excellent The Long View maintains no archive and isn't part of the Beeb's podcasting trial so here's the latest episode – a terrific parallel reading of 21st Google and 19th Century Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with The Economist's Tom Standage in attendance.
January 06, 2006
Radio Fun
Went to the Beeb to talk about Web 2.0 on Heather Peyton's estimable Radio 4 business programme called Shop Talk. Four of us in the studio plus three other contributors in various parts of the world, including Joe Krauss, Excite founder and now the man behind Jotspot. The last time I saw Joe was at Belgo in Covent Garden in 94 or 95. I think he still owes me dinner.
Also in the studio was Graham Hobson whose PhotoBox picture sharing and printing service has a million customers and £5M in turnover. I'd never tried PhotoBox but I checked it out last night and it's a thing of beauty. Emphasis on printing with dozens of options and a superb UI. The Java uploader works and works really fast (I uploaded three files, one of which was over 12Mb, and barely noticed the upload). Ordering a panoramic print was a piece of cake – and you can pay with Paypal. Hope the print's nice.
(The show goes out Tuesday 10 January at 1600. Here's an MP3 and here are some more pics).
Update: the print arrived less than 48 hours after my order (ordered late Thursday evening, arrived Saturday morning) and is absolutely lovely.
December 31, 2005
Radio comedy genius
One word: Ed Reardon (OK, two words). The best radio comedy in years. A suffering artist at the end of his tether. Beautifully observed, nicely judged comic pathos. Nothing cute or redemptive. A twenty-first century Hancock. Brilliant.
December 21, 2005
Another Radio 4 fan
Russell (or 'Mr Davies' as I feel obliged to call him since his book came out) has been playing with Squidoo.com and has come up with a Radio 4 lens – a page of links to programmes and series he likes. A worthy enterprise.
December 20, 2005
Tree story
Some really evocative sounds – mostly squelching and chopping, actually – in this lovely Open Country programme on Radio 4 about the astonishing natural and social history of the Oak tree. The producers of the show have gone to the trouble of securing a proper archive for their past programmes so there's a pretty good chance you'll actually hear the show when you click, which is as it should be. Amen.
November 17, 2005
Excited scientists
At the bottom of the Southern North Sea there is a landscape: river beds (including one as big as the Rhine which has been named The Shotton), coastlines, lakes and lots of preserved human settlements, spread out over the tens of thousands of square kilometres of land lost when the last ice age ended and sea levels rose, cutting off our island from the continent. This landscape came to light when it occurred to a PHd student that there might be some mileage in examining seismic data from the oil exploration companies who've mapped the sea floor in minute detail over the last few decades.
I love excited scientists and these archaeologists are very excited. They've begun to uncover a stone age landscape, essentially untouched in 9,000 years – dwellings, hearths, graves, middens and all the rest – and they're beside themselves. The only problem, obviously, is that it's under the sea. But... Do they look bothered? The Bridge at the Bottom of the Sea is brilliant radio and this is the kind of quietly mind-blowing news that should really be on the front pages instead of all the other rubbish. Here's an MP3 in case it's overwritten.
By the way, I find myself wondering, how does a creationist account for this vivid and pristine evidence of human settlement from thousands of years before the bible's proposed start date? Don't answer that.
October 03, 2005
Some things are only possible on the radio
Three beautiful and evocative examples of the art of radio from the Radio 4 treasure trove. Last week's Open Country, a really fascinating programme about East Anglian Churches and Chapels, evoking an era of simplicity, piety and ugly class brutality.
A terrific insight into the work and thought (and language) of theatre directors: John Caird and Max Stafford Clarke talk about putting on Macbeth (I think you'll need my MP3 because the programme's probably been overwritten by now).
The best of the lot, if you ask me: John Killick's spent the last ten years talking to people with Alzheimer's and turning what he hears into poetry (likewise, you might need this MP3 if the Real stream's gone).
June 13, 2005
Monday afternoon listening
Just what you need on a Sunny Monday afternoon: a lovely Russell Davies George Formby doc (MP3) and part one (MP3) of an interesting series about work from Bill Morris, who used to be General Secretary of the T&G. Get your skates on and download Radio 3's complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies, all recently recorded by the BBC Philharmonic and all free to download (would it be really ungrateful to wonder if they couldn't have broken the MP3s into movements?). They're about to take the MP3s down so get a move on.
June 06, 2005
More radio gems
You'll cry. You will. This programme (MP3) about a scheme encouraging imprisoned parents to record bedtime stories for their kids at home is a gem. And before you get on your Daily Mail high horse about yet another indulgence for pampered convicts, take note that parents who retain an emotional connection with their kids through a prison sentence are markedly less likely to re-offend once on the outside (enjoy, especially, the convict reading Burglar Bill to his kid at home). Also a gem (although you're less likely to cry) is Matthew Paris' lovely Archive Hour (MP3) about the first half century of the motor car in Britain.
May 11, 2005
A creature of the Beeb
You know those kids abandoned in the woods and brought up by wolves? Well, I was brought up by the BBC. By Radio 4, to be specific. I mean that about 75% of everything I know and believe was provided for me by an unbroken 8 or 10 hours-per-day Radio 4 habit. And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. I think that a largish part of my generation got to be who they are courtesy of the amazing, precious and unusual breadth and intelligence of BBC Radio 4. It's a liberal education in a little box (labelled 'Sanyo' or 'Roberts') and nowadays, of course, it's a liberal education on the Internet (and on your Sky digibox).
Case in point. Last night on Radio 4: a sequence of three programmes – one after the other – so good and so varied as to take the breath away: First Cut, a lovely, illuminating documentary about the 'cut men', the magicians in the corner who magically heal boxers' cuts and often keep them fighting when no one else could. Then, an utterly fascinating doc about animal sex selection. Did you know that, for every 100 human females, 105 males are born? Did you know that, in wartime, more human males than females are born? That birds and mammals produce more males in times of food scarcity, more females in times of plenty? After that, one of Charles Wheeler's five moving programmes about the end of war, marking the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Essential listening.
February 08, 2005
America on the radio
First: amazing story, this: Malcolm X's personal archive – correspondence, photographs, writings, the lot – wound up on eBay (or at least on eBay's posh cousin Bonnington's). Tony Phillips made a very personal programme about it for Radio 4.
Second: the US Government's own auditors say that $8.8 billion (including three palettes of hundred dollar bills weighing 14 tons for which someone forgot to fill in a deposit slip) have gone missing from the funds set aside for reconstruction in Iraq. Gerry Northam, in this File on 4 programme, notes that Capitol Hill has taken very little interest in the missing billions while putting the boot into the UN over Oil for Food.
Provided they haven't been overwritten you can listen to these programmes at these links: Selling Malcolm X and File on 4 on Iraq or download MP3s here: File on 4 and Malcolm X.
January 18, 2005
Yodeling for pleasure
Lots of infectious laughter in Sandy Toksvig's programme about yodeling on Radio 4 last weekend. The thesis: yodeling cheers you up. I can't help but agree. My iTunes library contains 28 songs with the word 'yodel' in the track name ('Yodeling Hobo', 'Swiss Yodel', 'Yodeling Cowboy', 'The Whipporwill Yodel' and so on... Please don't judge me – I had a difficult childhood). I can't yodel (can you?) but I'm adding it to the list of things I'd like to learn how to do when I'm old (I suppose I mean 'older').
This file will, predictably, be overwritten by next week's show so drop me a line if you'd like an MP3.
January 07, 2005
Keane on Keane
When I was young and a bit scary-looking I used to hitch-hike round the West of Ireland and I once spent a couple of nights in a small town in deepest Kerry called Listowel. I went there because I'd read some plays and stories by a funny and clever and sentimental writer called John B. Keane (the Irish Dylan Thomas if you ask me). Keane, I knew, kept a pub in the town (called, as you'd expect, John B. Keane's).
I arrived in town on the last night of an amateur run of one of Keane's plays (I wish I could remember which one) in a freezing church hall. I saw the play (laughed like a drain) and then went back to Keane's pub for what turned out to be the private cast party. I have no idea how I got in but it's a proper testament to the generosity of the Irish (and their unwillingness to mix it with a twenty year-old spotty skin-head in camouflage and ten-hole Martens) that I didn't learn it was a private party until I read the notice on the front door on the way out.
In fact, I had a lovely evening, got a bit drunk, talked for ages with the man himself and felt privileged to be included in a quite sophisticated, quite introverted, quite alien, provincial bubble – a community that, back then, before EU money translated the whole of Ireland into Barcelona or Helsinki or Toulouse or somewhere, seemed like the very final edge of the European literary universe – what with The Atlantic and all that.
Anyway, twenty years later, I learn that Fergal Keane, BBC foreign correspondent and dreadful romantic, is John B's nephew. He's made a nice radio programme about his uncle (who died in 2002) which gave me goose-bumps – memories crowding in and the voice of the man himself and his friends – literary and otherwise – and the rush of the River Feale and Keane's friendly pub and the modest, undemonstrative fame of the local hero. Excellent.
January 05, 2005
Let's hear it for 40-ish blokes
My wife is always telling me that our generation is now in charge. Although I seldom, these days, feel very in charge (I'm doing my best, though. Me: "yes. It is bed time. No you cannot watch another ten minutes of Inspector Gadget..."), I can see what she means.
On the radio last night, there were two really inspiring programmes from men of my 40-ish generation: Jon Ronson on... Going West (one of a very clever series) and Simon Armitage's one-off Surtsey and Me about the strange volcanic island off Iceland with which he (almost) shares a birthday.
December 30, 2004
Stick this lot in your iPod
A jewel of a programme about Blake's Jerusalem from Tom Paulin (probably overwritten by next week's show by now – drop me a line if you want an MP3) and Alan Bennett reading JM Barrie's lovely prose version of Peter Pan and the best In Our Time yet, about Newton's Second Law of thermodynamics (Thank you, Richard!).
November 28, 2004
Explain this, then...
Wind forward about 38 minutes into this stream of tonight's Westminster Hour (Radio 4) and you'll find yourself listening to another programme all together – a programme that's not on Radio 4 and, in fact, not even on the BBC. You'll be listening to Jazz FM. How does that work, then?
(Of course, they'll have fixed it by now...).
November 08, 2004
Peel and Day – more really good radio
You really can't overstate the richness and usefulness of the BBC's radio output. Not possible – honestly. A couple of brilliant examples: Peter Day does great business radio (against the odds, you might argue, in an environment like the BBC where business usually gets a pretty poor write-up) and has done for years. Here's an outstanding show from his In Business series about the decades-long battle between AMD's Jerry Sanders and Intel's Robert Noyce. I haven't heard an account of this fundamentally important dispute anywhere else. Understated and clever and historically valuable.
Even better – I sort of knew that the only really definitive Peel tribute would come from Andy Kershaw but it took me a while to find out that it went out in his Radio 3 slot. This is really lovely radio. The Radio 1 tributes were well-meaning but all together too chirpy. This one is emotional and personal and sad... great music too.
The Kershaw Peel tribute seems to have been overwritten already so here's an MP3 (I've taken the MP3 down because it was becoming a bit too popular! People have been Googling it from every corner of the planet. If you're desperate, drop me a line).