By some strange, freakish coincidence, just as the biggest story to hit the BBC in recent years was about to cut through the airwaves on Saturday night, Radio 4 was discussing the question, Who’s Reithian Now? It was as if, by some act of God, Lord Reith, the corporation’s creator, was speaking to us direct
It takes Alistair Cooke three minutes, or about 450 words, before he finally gets round to declaring ‘I was there’ — on the night that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. Cooke was talking just a few days later on his weekly Letter from America slot on Radio 4. You might think Cooke would
It’s business as usual for the BBC’s radio stations. While the boardroom burns, the production teams are busy creating — weekloads of entertainment, information, erudition. The doomsayers love a crisis, and this latest disaster is a devil of a mess, but we should probably remember that the Corporation depends for its survival not on the
It seems an astonishing statistic but 99.6 per cent of radio is broadcast live, delivered straight from the studio mike to your personal loudspeaker: 99.6 per cent! Compared with TV, which must be at least 80 per cent recorded, this is an extraordinary indicator of how radio is the on-message medium right now, able to
‘Shhhh! Listen!’ Peter White demands of us, his listeners. ‘You’re about to enter into a blind man’s world.’ White, who for years has presented the In Touch programme on Radio 4 on Tuesday nights and who is now a stalwart on You and Yours, has become such a finely attuned listener that he can tell
A vital sign that radio is so much more vibrant these days than tired old TV is the way the networks are rebranding themselves, extending their range, developing their programme base. On Radio 1 on Monday night Keeping Mum took on the subject of young adult carers in a feature that could easily have been
‘They were Jews with guns! Understand that…’ declares Raymond Massey, chillingly, in the final scene of The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, first heard across America on Sunday, 12 December 1943. Notice that date: 1943. Not 1953, or even 1945. Just six months after the Jews who had been herded into the Polish capital by
It’s 20 years since Classic FM launched itself on the airwaves with a blast from Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’. Its mission was to play ‘the world’s greatest music’ non-stop to an audience for whom the classics was a no-go area. On paper it’s worked a treat. The station now claims five million-plus listeners, who love
Just a snippet on an edition of Today last spring taken from the programme that had just won an esteemed Sony Gold radio award was enough to create an impact. Ray and Violet Donovan were talking about the murder of their son, Chris, on a feature made by the Prison Radio Association. The programme was
‘The aggregation of marginal gains’ is the key to success, according to Dave Brailsford, the extraordinarily successful cycling coach to Team GB. You could say that’s been the motto of this Olympic Games. Not massive injections of dosh (or drugs, for that matter). But a heady cocktail of supreme physical effort and tactical nous. Brailsford
It’s no good. We’ve been putting up with weird character changes, laughably unconvincing plotlines, calculating theatricals for a while now. But life in Ambridge has now plunged into the danger zone. If we don’t rise up in protest, The Archers is doomed, destined for broadcasting oblivion, killed off by a flash flood of OTT dramatics.
‘Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight…’ It all began on Friday night with the Shipping Forecast, made world-famous by Radio 4’s team of continuity announcers. Radio reigns supreme in these Olympics. It’s so much part of why Britain is different from the rest of the world, and Danny Boyle sparked off his extravaganza by recognising this.
Who would have thought 15 years ago that not only would the BBC still be spending money on radio coverage of the London Olympics but that there’d also be a dedicated digital station? High definition TV, with its crystal-clear images of every pimple, tattoo and six-pack, should by rights have seen off its poor sound-only
When it was announced earlier this week that Aung San Suu Kyi will soon be cast away for Desert Island Discs, it was suggested her choices of music will be ‘really interesting’, because, under house arrest in Burma, she had been forced to live in ‘a time warp, a capsule away from the world’. But
‘Oddly enough,’ declared the actor John Hurt on the Today programme last Friday, ‘radio is closely linked with film.’ This grabbed my attention over tea and porridge. Radio like film? It’s not at first an obvious comparison. Radio deals in images, but surely only those we create in our minds. Hurt went on to explain:
I know we’re all supposed to be taking advantage of the new technologies and listening to whatever we fancy on the radio whenever we like. But I reckon you have to be under 25 to really get the hang of listening by download, podcast and stream rather than at the switch of a button. When,
No wonder Clive James thought he was writing his own obituary when he was interviewed by John Wilson for the Radio 4 series, Meeting Myself Coming Back (Saturday night). Wilson played him a clip from a recent Mastermind programme on which one of the Specialist Subjects was…Clive James. ‘I was halfway between being amazed and
It’s as if James Joyce was writing for radio, as if he understood the potential of the new audio technology long before the BBC had begun to broadcast plays and poetry. All that freakish literary invention in his 1922 novel Ulysses suddenly begins to make sense when heard on air, spoken out loud, with sound
Will and Nic’s canoodling in the woods. Adam’s bashed-in head. Amy’s makeover from wholesome midwife to foul-mouthed stepdaughter. Ambridge, home to the Archers, the Grundys and of course Lynda Snell, has been transformed from a sleepy village in the heart of Middle England into a crime-ridden soap, fuelled not by the everyday happenings of ordinary
It was my first Jubilee moment — Judi Dench on Radio 4’s Today programme suddenly launching into Shakespeare mid-glam (incredibly glam) party. She was talking to Jim Naughtie at the Queen’s gala for the arts at the Royal Academy and bewailing the decline in the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. Mid-sentence, she breaks into Cleopatra’s