Category: Audio
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LA Stories
Listeners to The Geoff Show may have heard ITV’s Head of Entertainment recently fielding programme suggestions from listeners. He was very good, and a scarily high proportion of ideas had already either been pitched or even produced. Anyway, Jackson is no Johnny come lately to the broadcasting game, and he’s just presented the first pair…
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Sell of Radio 1 and Radio 2
A report from the European Media Forum is reported to suggest that BBC Radios 1 and 2 should be sold off. They’d raise £500m and since this would “re-balance the radio market and level the competitive playing field between commercial broadcasters.” I beg to differ. What’d actually happen is that vast parts of commercial radio…
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Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
I’ll freely admit that I’m not exactly up on my Russian fiction, so I came to Dead Souls quite fresh. Narrated by Michael Palin, who “appears” in the story, he accompanies Chichikov as he goes about his way trying to buy dead peasants. Chichikov, played expertly by Mark (Spaced, Green Wing) Heap, has a scheme…
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Radio Programmes
I’ve been meaning to write a little more about some of the radio I’ve been enjoying recently. First up is Nebulous, Graham Duff’s sci-fi comedy starring Mark Gatiss. Series 2 has just passed the half-way mark – it’s broadcast at 11pm on Wednesday. It’s more of the same, and very very silly. I love it.…
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Sony Awards (and Ed Reardon)
I work in the radio industry, and Tuesday night was a very important night. Arsenal completely trounced a tired, lacklustre and aging Juventus team in the first leg of the Champions’ League (I prefer The Fiver’s “Big Cup”) quarter final. But that’s not what this is about. Tuesday night was also nominations night for the…
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Music in Podcasts
A quite hilarious “Crib Sheet” from last week’s Music Week about Radio One making unsigned artists available on a special podcast. It’s all behind a pay-wall, so here are a few choice extracts with my thoughts: Isn’t that illegal? Hardly the kind of behaviour I would expect of the nation’s favourite. Well not if –…
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New Folk
I was going to get on my new bike today (more anon), but the weather forecast was poor, so I settled down to a lot of BBC Four’s recent Folk Britannia season that I’d saved on my PVR. First up were a couple of concerts from Celtic Connections in Glasgow. They’re all available to view…
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More BBC Podcasts
The BBC has announced a new raft of podcasts to be added to those it already serves. The highlight seems to be an audio version of the key Newsnight interview (in the same way as Today offers the 8.10am interview). It’ll be interesting to see how the hourly World Service news download works. If I…
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West Side Story
I’ve just been watching, again, the BBC documentary that recorded the creation of the 1984 Leonard Bernstein conducted “operatic” version of West Side Story. It was on BBC Four a few weeks ago, and I’d not watched it since it was first shown in 1985. It’s a fantastically interesting document of the wonderful musical’s first…
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Contrived
Spot the story that’s been completely contrived for PR purposes on RAJAR day…
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Smash Hits Is Dead
So Smash Hits is no more. What a shame. Where will be without Smash Hits editorial alumni like Neil Tennant, Mark Frith and, er, Kate Thornton. Ah, those happy days I spent memorising the lyrics to Baggy Trousers and Shuddupa Your Face from its hallowed pages. The free badges on the cover. But it does…
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Classical MP3s Again
I just thought I’d post here, the comments I left over at On An Overgrown Path in relation to free mp3 downloads of classical music: My question is this? What proportion of the UK population (and I’ll limit this to the UK for simplicity’s sake), currently purchase classical music CDs? Unfortunately, the BPI, who’d probably…
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Free Mozart podcasts
Record companies may have scared off the BBC from doing more classical downloads following their Beethoven symphonies last year, but the idea seems to have taken hold in Scandinavia where both Swedish and Danish state radio services are offering free Mozart downloads to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth. Swedish Radio is offering a…