Speechification

Another gem from producer Tony Barrell (hear also) of ABC Radio National here in Australia. This is a quite astonishing documentary, winner of the Prix Italia (the Oscars of radio), largely concerning the allied firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945. It was broadcast in 1995, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the attack.

It’s utterly sobering, and a beautifully, sensitively crafted bit of documentary. The sound design is brave, almost experimental, and though shows its age occasionally there are some audio elements that near take the breath away.

Yet they never get in the way of the narrative, which is compelling, gruesome but also enlightening in numerous ways. The sorry history of airborne bombing of civilians is wound through the story, including the earlier attacks on Hamburg and Dresden. And when you hear these acts of bombing described as perhaps the cruellest acts of WWII - a war that had more than its fair share of cruel acts - then their significance is clear.

Radio Eye: Tokyo’s Burning [mp3]

I’d never come across Something Understood before, probably because it’s broadcast at 6am and 11.30pm on Sundays, but it seems like rather a good idea, despite its new-agey premise. Every week, “the programme examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry”. This week: aging. Lovely stuff. [MP3]

A Radio 4 staple, Word of Mouth delves into two of my favourite subjects: taboo words and aphasia (MP3). Both illuminate the inner workings of the mind, the first by overuse, the latter by exclusion. There’s also a stack of malapropisms even I hadn’t heard, and the excruciatingly awful Dr Word. Sorry about that. Words good though, when unbound by snobbery.

David Quantick is the perfect chap to do this celebration of Mix Tape culture. I suspect the speechification audience doesn’t need to be told of the joy of mixtaping, this is right up our collective street, but it’s still a splendidly evocative listen. Of course, with the advent of Muxtape et al, there might be a programme soon about the Reappearing Art Of The Mix Tape. Though it won’t be quite the same without the biro scrawling. MP3 here.

A very good 45-minute feature about the prosecution and incarceration of modernist legend (and ‘A’ Level English fixture) Ezra Pound. He made over 400 broadcasts on Italian radio during the Second World War and narrowly escaped a conviction for treason on his capture and return to the USA. He wasn’t sent to prison but to serve twelve years in a psychiatric hospital, after which he returned to his adopted Italy. Fascinating and bewildering. Grand and infuriating. (MP3). Here’s a 1958 interview with the poet from BBC4’s interview archive.

Radio National recently dusted off a few archive programmes to mark the work of producer Tony Barrell. I’ll post a few of the shows here, for sure. This one’s a beauty - on the life and work of photographer Edward Muybridge, and thus the nature of time. Some charming moments, not least a few shards of Philip Glass cross-fading into the sound of a train. But also some mind-boggling insights into time itself, from scientists and skateboarders. An absolutely lovely piece of work.

Radio Eye: The Space Between Time [mp3]

In quiet corners of the BBC remarkable things happen. Here’s an example from Radio 3. It’s a play, written by Stephen Phelps (a veteran of investigative TV) about the Piper Alpha disaster that tells the story of the critical ninety minutes from the first failure to the final explosion, in real time, twenty years after the disaster—to the second. As an experiment I think it’s a total success. Tense, moving and terrifying: high octane stuff, structured like a movie. It’s genuinely spine-tingling and left me thinking about it for a long time after it had finished (MP3).

And thanks to the people who offered copies of the programme from their archives in response to my appeal.

I don’t think I’d had the nerve to post another Archive Hour, it seems we do it every week, but this one was a listener request so I couldn’t resist. And it is a complete audio joy. The words, the voices, the music are all great, a welcome departure from the Radio 4 norm in the use of music. But the sheer sound of it is delicious. Lots of crackly phones, under-powered tape recorders, badly tuned radios. It’s incredibly evocative. Hats off to Brook Lapping who made it, and in an absolutely unheard departure for a radio production company, mention it on their website! Genius. MP3 here.

It seems to be my job to bring you the heartbreaking stuff round here (I think I’d like to switch to the cheery shift). This is an excellent programme about the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, in which 167 men lost their lives twenty years ago. What’s fascinating is that the most affecting stories are not those of the survivors or the bereaved but those of the secondary characters: the hospital chaplain, the helicopter pilot… The measured contribution of the oil company’s PR—whose job was to tell the media what was going on out in the North Sea that night—is somehow more moving for its detachment (MP3).

This show went out as part of the Radio 4 Choice podcast, which is definitely worth signing up for. I was also interested to read that Radio 3’s contribution to the programmes marking the anniversary of Piper Alpha was a ‘real-time drama‘ set on that terrible night that went out on 6 July but I missed it and, obviously, it’s now been replaced by the following week’s drama so it’s gone for good. Do drop me a line if you saved a copy. It would be great to feature it here.

There is plenty of video relating to Piper Alpha at bbc.co.uk too: a news piece from 1988, interviews with survivors and widows, and a piece about the anniversary,

Another of Ben Thompson’s interviews for Resonance. This time with national treasure Vic Reeves. He takes us on an excellent musical tour, including a childhood encounter with Jimi Hedrix in Darlington (perhaps a few hours before this photo was taken). There’s also some Dave and Ansel Collins, some splendidly odd British psychedelia from Piblokto, some Strauss, some Dick Gaughen, and Shoplifting by The Slits. Which, strangely, in researching this post I discovered you can get as a complimentary ringtone. That can’t be right. MP3 here.