Speech Radio You Have Listened To Lately

[Dermot]

''The Time of My Life'', Hans Keller (Originally broadcast on Radio 4, February 3, 1974).

Vienna 1938, at the time of the Anschluss:
Hans Keller, caught up in the anti-semitic riots that heralded Hitler's ' final solution ' of the Jewish question, makes a promise he has kept ever since. Tonight, he tells of the nightmare of his arrest, imprisonment and near-miraculous escape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUEuu5Mn4Mk

Outstanding radio which has stayed in my memory since listening to the broadcast.

[jayne lee wilson]

''The Time of My Life'', Hans Keller (Originally broadcast on Radio 4, February 3, 1974).

Vienna 1938, at the time of the Anschluss:
Hans Keller, caught up in the anti-semitic riots that heralded Hitler's ' final solution ' of the Jewish question, makes a promise he has kept ever since. Tonight, he tells of the nightmare of his arrest, imprisonment and near-miraculous escape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUEuu5Mn4Mk

Outstanding radio which has stayed in my memory since listening to the broadcast.

The complete text is in this book, as "Vienna 1938"... and very remarkable it is, along with all the other extraordinarily insightful essays within...
The extended essay "Music, 1975" taught me more than any other single piece about 20th Century Music, listening to it and trying to understand it...
5-star recommend, to any forum members!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-Closed-Societies-Football-0/dp/0907689213/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535065925&sr=1-5&keywords=hans+keller

As for Radio 4....Any Questions and Any Answers are the great unmissables...along with Newsnight and the Sky/BBC24 Press Previews, absolutely essential in these troubled, terrible times...

[Lat-Literal]

I find there is less and less on BBC R4 that appeals to me, as with every other aspect of broadcasting. Sometimes I go out early in the morning. There is a hard of hearing woman on one road. She has her window open. This has enabled me to discover that she is the other person in this borough who tunes into BBC R3 although she goes to "Today" at 7am. A programme which was always there in the 1960s with a civilising way of bringing news from WW2 battlefields. The ones that had migrated to the everyday. It was a teddy bear of sorts. From the 1990s it wasn't ever quite the same. It has taken me 25 years to realise why. It has become the war and of every sort imaginable. I miss the 1960s. That standing by the bonfire on our garden hill. Looking up at the gliders. The feeling that when the bombs were released we'd all just run past the roses. To the Anderson Shelter...... and Jack de Manio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhu_W62h9Is

[LMcD]

The News Quiz is back, with Miles Jupp and guests on truly sparkling form - SO much wittier than HIGNFY!

[johncorrigan]

Best speech programme I listened to lately was 'Archive on 4' titled 'The Ballads of Emmet Till', the subject of many songs and poems by the likes of Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes, among others. Fascinating and frightening programme with a story that, unfortunately, still feels relevant today.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bgb435

[johncorrigan]

I haven't heard Rob Newman for a long time, but caught the first episode of his latest series on Radio 4 earlier this week - 'Total Eclipse of Decartes'. I thought it was very interesting and funny, despite the presence of annoying live audience where people seem to have to laugh all the time - anyway, think I'll listen to more of the series.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08nkn4k

[DracoM]

Or is it canned applause / laughter?

[Bryn]

Or is it canned applause / laughter?

Live.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I haven't heard Rob Newman for a long time, but caught the first episode of his latest series on Radio 4 earlier this week - 'Total Eclipse of Decartes'. I thought it was very interesting and funny, despite the presence of annoying live audience where people seem to have to laugh all the time - anyway, think I'll listen to more of the series.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08nkn4k

I'm not a huge fan of most of the R4, 6:30 sitcom-type efforts (there's a particularly dire example with Jane Horrocks, Miles Jupp, and Simon Callow wasting their talents on at the moment) - but Sarah Kennedy's monlogues, The Australian Trilogy, I thought was absolutely perfect - hilarious, humane, wistful, and touching:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bfz5jy

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bgg3b6

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bgrsr7

[johncorrigan]

Or is it canned applause / laughter?

As Bryn says, Draco, it's definitely live. It's something that afflicts live shows almost as much as canned laughter does studio recordings. I find people laughing at the end of every sentence, filling every pause with laughs and applause. I just get more annoyed about it as I age. When Ivor Cutler recorded his 'Life in a Scotch Sitting Room', in Glasgow's Third Eye Centre I seem to recall, I found the interminable laughing got right in the way of the genius, whereas the studio recordings on the likes of 'Dandruff' or 'Jammy Smears' or 'Velvet Donkey' are so wonderful. Still the studio versions of some episodes only exist on the live record, so it's beggars can't be choosers...just a touch grumpy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNguddGEdw8 - genius

as compared to the great man live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h58ufdv8bNo - still genius, but annoying!

[Serial_Apologist]

As Bryn says, Draco, it's definitely live. It's something that afflicts live shows almost as much as canned laughter does studio recordings. I find people laughing at the end of every sentence, filling every pause with laughs and applause. I just get more annoyed about it as I age.

I've noticed in recent years that even Today recruits audiences for entire programmes, partcularly at weekends, or awaydays when the Beeb descends on your local resort like the Queen Mother on the East End during the war. They seem to be on from the start of the programme at 6.30 or whatever to the finish, without explanation - just there, in the background, not called on to ask questions or contribute views or have exchanges, just to sit there like dummies, and to laugh at various points in proceedings to remind us they're actually there, presumably. I wonder what one has to do to have the extraordinary blessing visited upon one to be able to attend: sign some form stating that one is prepared to sit for two and a half hours, only contributing by laughing at presumably some signal, and otherwise stay quiet and unobtrusive. In fact I wonder what the point of them being there actually is: where they come from. Are they bussed in from remote places where "radio" is a recenty introduced novelty, so that to be there listening appreciatively to Famous People From The City in coversation with erudite BBC interviewers and presenters of superior intelliigence intermediating all the peasants need to hear and understand to be informed enough to be higher members of society is perceived as some special outing, like pensioners to Margate? I'm buggled if I know...

[LMcD]

I've just been listening to an excellent programme on Radio 4 Extra about Philip Larkin, in particular 'The Whitsun Weddings' which has long been one of my favourite poems. The programme offered numerous valuable insights which further increased my great admiration for Larkin in general and this poem in particular. Anybody interested will find the programme under 'Poetry Extra - The Whitsun Weddings'.

[antongould]

I've just been listening to an excellent programme on Radio 4 Extra about Philip Larkin, in particular 'The Whitsun Weddings' which has long been one of my favourite poems. The programme offered numerous valuable insights which further increased my great admiration for Larkin in general and this poem in particular. Anybody interested will find the programme under 'Poetry Extra - The Whitsun Weddings'.

Just downloading now .... thanks very much LMcD ......

[muzzer]

The Backlisted Podcast is consistently interesting and a regular cause of my to be read pile increasing. Warmly recommended.

[johncorrigan]

Found this morning's 'Start the Week' with Andrew Marr interviewing Yuval Noah Harari very interesting indeed...and a bit scary too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000m7b