Speechification

The true function of Speechification is to uncover the gems you missed or the ones you heard and would like to hear again. I suppose this is the kind of thing we might expect the BBC to do for us but while they’re getting around to it, here’s another terrific programme from my archive: it’s about Malcolm X and his influence but it’s also about a remarkable moment, just a few years ago, when history sort of leaked through into the present: on eBay of all places. Excellent. Here’s the MP3 and the show’s web site which has some background.

My ten year-old son’s latest reason for refusing to get out of bed before eight O’Clock on a school day is a brilliant twelve-part story by Malorie Blackman on BBC7. It’s a nicely told plucky-adolescent-saves-the-world thriller called Hacker and it’s got computers in it but not in an annoying way.

I enjoyed using the theft of £7M by hackers in the story to help me scale the US bank bail-out for the boy: “you know those hackers stole £7M? Well, George Bush wants to give the banks a huge amount of money too, but it’s not 7 million or 70 million or 700 million or even 7 billion or 70 billion but 700 billion dollars!”

Here’s episode one and you can hear the other eleven episodes here on BBC7’s excellent Big Toe Books page until 5 October. It’s well worth bookmarking this page if you have kids: there are always at least half-a-dozen stories to listen to here. Highlights at the moment include Fiddlesticks by Alan Fraser and The Lost Boys’ Appreciation Society by Alan Gibbons.

Another documentary masterclass from the Irish. I’m not going to go on about it because I’ve said all this before but over at RTE Radio One they have a strand called Documentary on One: a long-running series of handsome, entirely artless 45-minute features on different aspects of Irish life. Here’s the latest show, which is about the legendary 1995 All Ireland Hurling champions from County Clare in the West of Ireland. Ther’e nothing fancy about this: the only voices you’ll hear are those of the documentary’s subjects and the only other sounds are the match commentaries of the day and some gorgeous, evocative wild tracks fom the blustery West. Pure pleasure.

A short feature from Radio France International’s English service. It went out in August, just after Barack Obama’s nomination. We learn that French people think of Barack Obama (correctly) as mixed-race and not black. But we also learn that as they’ve got to know Obama they’ve started to call him ‘black’ in response to his presentation in the US media (MP3).

This won’t go in the podcast because I just feel bad about uploading This American Life while they’re making such an earnest effort to make a living from this stuff over there. So you’ll just have to get over to the web site where you can listen to the show for nothing in your browser (or pay for a download). The second item in this episode (which starts at about 8:10) is a really gorgeous little story, told by crime writer (Clockers and Lush Life), TV script writer (The Wire) and screenwriter (The Color of Money) Richard Price.

It’s a snapshot from the time he’s spent shadowing NYC cops while researching his writing and it was actually recorded at a ’storytelling club’ in New York that I’d now really like to visit called The Moth (and they have their own excellent podcast). His language is so disarming, so light of touch (and so American) you’ll find yourself laughing with pleasure at the dialogue and the picture painted (or your money back).

Here’s an idea. Set your alarm for 5:45 on Saturday morning. Don’t get up: just roll over and switch on Radio 4. You’ll almost always hear something lovely like this series about fungi. In this episode Lynne Boddy—one of those inspiring and passionate experts you can hear three or four times every day on Radio 4—talks about the fabulous web of battling fungi that lives just below the surface. A proper eye-opener… (MP3).

The thing about Randy Newman—let’s be honest—is that you have to be fairly old to appreciate just how often he starts a line with “So anyway…” Something about those two melancholy words makes me want to cry every time. Why? I suppose they’re about resignation, or at least acceptance. Acceptance of the sediment of missed opportunities and paths not taken that you accumulate as you get older. Newman’s acknowledging the passage of time: the busy, messy, hysterical business of getting to middle age.

So anyway… NPR ran a special live performance of his latest album (which is billed as a ’song cycle’) on 5 August and I grabbed the MP3 but I’m so afraid that the whole American public service media establishment might explode if I share it here that I’m going to suggest you get over there and listen to it yourself while you can. It’s a mellow, thoughtful treat… but probably not for you youngsters.

Not, I’ll grant, important radio. Not ground-breaking. Just a performer you’ll know well, pushing beyond the boundaries of his career so far and… well… singing Leonard Cohen. Brave stuff—with many good gags and a kind of melancholy, which I suppose is borrowed from Cohen’s words. Lovely (MP3).

For the Numbers Stations post I uploaded an MP4 instead of an MP3 and I think I broke the podcast. So here’s the programme again in the right format: MP3. Sorry!

Elliot Moore, loyal listener, reminds me about the enigmatic and spooky Numbers Stations and this terrific programme (MP3) from 2006 presented by Simon Fanshawe all about them. I’ve got a four-CD set of meticulously recorded and annotated Numbers Stations somewhere—compiled by short-wave geeks and spook-watchers The Conet Project.

There’s something profoundly unsettling about the persistence into the digital age of these cold war holdovers: radio stations that broadcast nothing but impenetrable coded messages which we have to assume (Governments won’t even acknowledge they exist) are intended for proper, old-fashioned spies. Elliot says you can get the Conet recordings here and the sleeve notes here, released under an open licence, which is nice.

I recommend that you download them and listen to them back-to-back in a darkened room with nothing but a bottle of Polish Vodka and a cyanide capsule for company. Elliot also provides links to expert Simon Mason’s web site on the topic and to another numbers stations web site whose August log shows that the stations are still very much alive. The Lincolnshire Poacher, by the way, is the name given to one of the broadcasts (presumably originating in Great Britain) by the spook watchers because it uses the folk tune of that name as a call sign.