For the last two weeks I’ve been on holiday in Ireland, where I found my niche (if you can call a mainstream national radio station a ‘niche’) in RTÉ 2fm. 2fm is aimed at young people, although it doesn’t sound as youthful as Radio 1 here in the UK, and they play an awful lot of U2.
The thing I found most refreshing about 2fm was its light-touch, nuanced approach to interviews. In one item, a bunny girl was able to talk at length about her experiences of working in a Playboy club, without having to defend her corner against the presenter or another contributor. It was an interesting discussion.
Listening to it made me wonder how the same topic might have been covered on Radio 4. I imagined John Humphrys hamming it up: “Dressing up in bunny ears and serving men drinks?” he might say, sounding aghast at the very thought, “Surely there’s no place for that kind of thing in this day and age?!” Turning to bait the opponent, Humphrys would swap sides: “Playboy bunnies are completely harmless! It’s just a bit of fun and all the women are earning themselves plenty of money. What’s your problem with that?” The two contributors would contradict each other a bit, fail to say anything new, and everyone would go away feeling slightly embarrassed.
While I was having these thoughts far away in rainy Galway, back at home a minor row was brewing following an appearance on the Today programme by the writer Graham Linehan. Having been brought on to talk about his stage adaptation of The Ladykillers, Graham Linehan was pitted against a contributor who preferred new plays. What a juicy item this promised to be! One of them had adapted a script! The other wasn’t much into adaptations! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!
After the discussion, Graham Linehan complained on his blog about the adversarial style of Today, “an arena where there are no positions possible except diametrically opposed ones, where no nuance is permitted, where politicians are forced into defensive positions of utter banality.” Yes, this is precisely the problem with the Today programme – and the most common cause of early morning swearing in our household.
The theme was taken up in this afternoon’s Feedback, where it turned out that many people share a frustration with this artificial, black and white debate. One caller summed up the problem: “Why does so much on Today have to be like this? It’s such an essential programme and yet conflict seems to be a prerequisite often for the sake of entertainment. It’s tedious.”
Can we imagine a flagship news programme that doesn’t set arguments up like this? Perhaps it’s worth looking to other countries – like Ireland – for tips.
You can listen to Feedback on the BBC iPlayer until 8:30pm on Sunday 19 June 2011.
Filed under: Radio | Closed
Tags: BBC Radio 4, Graham Linehan, John Humphrys, Playboy bunnies, RTÉ 2fm, Today
Friends say that our warm, crackly 1950s valve radio sounds like listening through a time machine to stuff that happened in the past. Well, now a group of hackers have designed a radio for just that purpose. Rather than tuning into a frequency, the ChronoTune lets you tune into a particular year and listen to audio from that time. Sadly, it doesn’t actually work as a time machine, but is filled with mp3s taken from old news broadcasts and imagined events of the future. In a nice twist, if you tune to 2011, an FM receiver plays live radio.
See the ChronoTune in action and find out how it was made in this YouTube video.
Filed under: Radio, Tech | Closed
Tags: Arduino, ChronoTune, i3 Detroit
Gig For Japan
As a wise person once said, “Why don’t you just switch off your radio set and go and do something less boring instead?” So last night I went up to Norwich for the excellent Gig For Japan. James Broad from Silver Sun played a great acoustic set, with some of the more committed fans in the audience contributing wobbly harmonies on Golden Skin. James also did a Cheap Trick-ified version of Scared, which you can listen to online, thanks to the power pop blog Shake Some Action!
Filed under: Music | 1 Comment
Tags: Cheap Trick, Gig for Japan, Norwich Arts Centre, Silver Sun
Fascinating episode of Crossing Continents last night. David Goldblatt investigated the commercialisation and gentrification of east Berlin, which threatens to force out the area’s artists, musicians and alternative culture.
In one memorable scene, riot police come to raid a squat, but the protesters have filled the house from floor to ceiling with helium balloons. After shouting warnings through a megaphone, the police break their way in and we hear the steady sound of balloons bursting as the police gradually pop their way through the building.
Goldblatt interviews the developers who are trying to take over east Berlin, but sympathy is definitely on the side of the residents. The capitalists even have a cartoon baddy for their spokesperson.
Journalist: “The protesters might just about be able to cope with MTV, how are they going to feel, do you think, about Mercedes coming here?”
Cartoon baddy (stroking white cat): “I hope they feel bad, ja. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
You can listen on the iPlayer indefinitely.
Filed under: Factual, Radio | 1 Comment
Tags: art, BBC Radio 4, Berlin, culture
“Hits and memories… HCR”
Congratulations to HCRfm, the new community radio station for Huntingdon. As a teenager, I worked on the first Huntingdon Community Radio broadcasts from above a betting shop on the corner of the High Street. 15 years and lots of short-term licences later, the team have been granted a full-time licence and began broadcasting 24 hours a day on Saturday.
The launch event began with live music from an outdoor stage in the middle of town. It was an ambitious start and sounded great. I only wish they’d pointed a mic at the audience so we could hear the crowd cheering.
It’s been interesting listening to HCR online over the weekend. It still plays the same mix of classic (and not-so-classic) hits and many of the presenters I knew are still there.
The mistakes are familiar too. At regular intervals over the weekend, we’ve heard presenters leaving the mic open during a record, forgetting the station’s frequency and deleting all the station’s jingles in one click (“I pressed yes to something and the screen went blank!”). Coming back into the house from putting the bins out, the radio was silent. Oh grief, have they gone off-air? No. Is the stream buffering? No. What then? They’re just not saying anything. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” a voice pipes up, before it goes quiet again.
The music is mostly terrible, but I’m looking forward to catching the speech content. While the BBC is scaling back on radio drama and children’s radio, HCRfm have plans for youth programming and a new soap opera set in a fictional Cambridgeshire hair salon.
Listen to HCRfm online or on 104FM in the Huntingdon area.
Filed under: Radio | Closed
Tags: Community radio, HCRfm
Pop Up Radio: 1930s dance music
This week I’m enjoying 70 Years Without Al Bowlly, a temporary radio station dedicated to the singer and guitarist who died in the Blitz in April 1941.
The station is being run by the people behind Angel Radio, who broadcast from a fabulous-looking ‘nostalgia’ shop in Hampshire. Since much of the dance band music they play is on shellac, they have a transfer room for turning 78s into mp3s.
Between tracks, the presenters tell us about the artists – Victor Silvester, Bing Crosby and so on – and, being under 70, it’s all new to me. The only thing that grates is the jingles. They’ve gone for a slick, commercial radio voice, which doesn’t sit well with the unpretentious presentation style.
You can listen to 70 Years Without Al Bowlly online and on the Pop-Up Radio channel on DAB until 28th April.
Filed under: Music, Radio | 1 Comment
Tags: 1930s, Al Bowlly, Angel Radio, Pop Up Radio
Behind the Mike
“Radio. With the switch of a dial, radio brings you tragedy, comedy, entertainment, information, education. A whole world at your command. But radio isn’t all on the surface. There are stories behind radio, stories behind your favourite programme and favourite personalities and radio people you never hear of. Stories as amusing, dramatic and interesting as any make-believe stories you hear on the air. And that’s what we give you. The human interest, the glamour, the tragedy, the comedy and information that are… Behind the Mike!”
This week I’ve been listening to Behind the Mike, a lively magazine show that ran on NBC from 1940 to 1942. The listener finds out how radio is made: what an 1940s studio engineer does, how to warm up a live audience, how an independent production company sells a programme to a sponsor.
The show is nicely interactive – listeners can send in questions by post, sit in the studio audience, or tell their story on-air. 14 year old Johnny fights off a mystery illness with help from his favourite radio serial, Miss Wilma Gray is declared Radio’s Most Loyal Fan and Mr Sidney Anthony is pleased to be able to pay off his bills thanks to radio’s Pot O’ Gold competition.
The format takes some getting used to. Live interviews sound heavily scripted and performed, and often fade out midway through a sentence and turn into dramatised reconstructions. Some of the interviewees play themselves in the dramatisations, but others are played by actors. We seem to drop in and out of the dramatisations as the interviewee describes what happened next. All of which makes it hard to tell what’s “real” and what’s not.
Nonetheless, it’s a fun listen, with plenty of tall tales and bloopers that wouldn’t be out of place on Radio Fail.
32 episodes of Behind the Mike are available on archive.org thanks to the Old Time Radio Researchers Group.
Filed under: Radio | 1 Comment
Tags: Classic radio, Interactive, NBC
Fags, Mags and Bags
Brilliant to hear the corner shop sitcom Fags, Mags and Bags back for a fourth series yesterday. The local priest is away in Bangladesh, but he’s keeping in touch with Dave and Ramesh by postcard. Father Henderson says he’s established an informal confessional booth under a tree, but his parishioners’ confessions aren’t much to write home about.
Dave: “Seemingly Arif Ali has been pilfering from his sister-in-law’s peg bag. Then he’s just written ‘boring’ with four Os.”
Ramesh: “Booooring!”
Dave: “Aye, and the rest of the card’s just exclamation marks.”
Episode 1 is on BBC iPlayer until midday, Monday 11 April 2011.
Filed under: Comedy, Radio | Closed
Tags: BBC Radio 4, Comedy
All of UK radio in one place?
Have you tried the new Radioplayer yet? Radioplayer, which launched today, is an online console which lets you listen live and listen again to hundreds of UK radio stations. It’s a collaboration between the BBC and commercial radio broadcasters, and it makes it easier to search and switch radio stations when you’re listening at your computer.
It’s madness that online users haven’t had a way of accessing lots of radio stations in one go before. Oh wait – they have. Reciva’s internet radio portal contains tens of thousands of stations from around the world, which are easily searchable by name and browsable by genre or location. What’s more, Reciva’s reach is not just limited to public service and commercial stations, but encompasses community radio and internet-only stations too. And if the obscure station you want to listen to isn’t there, you can ask them to add it.
On the BBC Radio Blog, Steve Bowbrick bills Radioplayer as “all of UK radio in one place”, which it clearly isn’t. The console currently gives access to 137 stations, by my count. That sounds a lot, until you spot that 36 of them are local Heart stations and 14 are Capital FM. There are plans to add more soon, as other commercial companies come on board. Radioplayer might encourage some cross-fertilisation between BBC and commercial audiences, but it doesn’t offer enough range to make it exciting.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to hop between live stations, Radioplayer won’t revolutionise your listening experience, but Reciva might.
Filed under: Radio | 1 Comment
Tags: Radioplayer, Reciva
Bear attack on The World Tonight
A 12 year old Swedish boy, Ollie Frisk, made an impression on The World Tonight last night. While he was skiing in Sweden, he accidentally disturbed a hibernating bear. It attacked him, biting his legs and clawing his back. Not only did Ollie manage to escape, but he was also able to tell presenter Ritula Shah what happened in near-perfect English. I wish I could have described a bear attack so vividly in a second language at the age of 12.
The interview is available on the BBC iPlayer indefinitely (starts 41 minutes in).
Filed under: Radio | Closed
Tags: BBC Radio 4
