Category: Radio

I watched Chris Addison’s enjoyable The Hunt For Middle England documentary over the weekend. A little long, but otherwise an entertaining piece. However, at one point, having been told that a town in Derbyshire might best represent “Middle England”, Chris pitched up at BBC Radio Derby to broadcast a request on their morning show for…

So the big news in the US at the moment is the announcement by the Copyright Royalty Board of the prices for internet radio royalty rates. A summary can be found here on Radio and Internet Newsletter site. As that same site points out, the prices being talked about, based on a “per play” basis…

A very interesting piece on BBC Radio Five Live by Tim Luckhurst in this weekend’s Independent on Sunday. He was an assistant editor of the station when it launched in 1994. I’m not sure that I altogether agree with everything Luckhurst has to say about the station. The basic tenet of his argument is that…

Lots of excitement from Unique about them getting Chris Tarrant back onto commercial radio to host a series of programmes called Small Price 2 Pay. Tarrant is quoted as saying: “I am very excited about this new project for digital radio, where once again I find myself in the hot seat, giving away big cash…

Today’s Media Guardian leads off on a big piece about the state of play of radio comedy in this country at the moment. The piece is titled “Why Radio Comey Is a Joke”, although all it seems to do is question whether quite as many radio series are making it through to TV as they…

Paul Temple is one of those radio detective serials, the likes of which no longer exists today. The radio serials were broadcast between the 1930s and 1960s with a number of different actors and actresses playing Temple and his wife Steve. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the series, you almost certainly will be familiar with…

Have you listened to new digital radio station theJazz yet? I must admit that I haven’t much, since although I can take or leave jazz, I do need to be in the mood to spend much time listening (Mind you I am tempted to get the newly remastered Beiderbecke trilogy including a CD of the…

I make no apology for mentioning Ed Reardon’s Week once again. Two reasons to mention it this week: 1) The third series starts on Friday morning at 11.30am on BBC Radio 4 with an episode called The Name-Check. Listen live, or listen again! 2) BBC Radio 7 is repeating the first series on Monday evenings…

Regular readers will know that I’m an enormous fan of Ed Reardon’s Week. The paperback of what’s effectively the first series recently came out, and with any luck, next March should see the release of the CD of series one. But more imminently, at 11.30am on Friday 15 December, the first of six episodes of…

I don’t mention radio dramas very often here, and I should really. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is based on the book by Toby Young relating his experiences working as a journalist in America – in particular for a spell spent at Vanity Fair. In this radio version (the link works until Friday),…

This week’s Mediaguardian has two articles that are worth commenting on regarding radio. The first is a piece on the future of DAB. It focuses on the recent decision, since reversed, to lower the Radio 3 DAB bandwidth from 192kbps to 160kbps. A further drop in bit-rate occurs when either Radio 4 or Radio Five…

It’s the sixtieth anniversary of Radio 3, or The Third Programme as it once was. It might be reaching pensionable age (well, maybe another five years to go), but in this time of age discrimination, I don’t want to see it pensioned off! I commend Humphrey Carpenter’s The Envy of the World as a history…