Blah Blah Flowers

Doctor Who: The City of Death- Shada Damnit, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency has started being broadcast on Radio 4, an adaptation of one of Douglas Adams' better books. Sadly most of the meanderings in the novel have been excised, perhaps so that the story begins in episode one rather than episode five, and if you don't know the book then you might find it all verging on the incoherent.

Labels: comedy, Douglas Adams, Radio 4

The Hypocrisy of anti-trans "feminism" at National Women's Studies Association. [via Feministing]. I've not really talked too much about the Julie Bindel/Hecklers thing here, it's something I posted to my LJ but it's made me interested in the anti-trans 'Feminist' position.

Labels: feminism, Julie Bindel, Radio 4, transgenderism, transphobia

"Oh God, we've got to put up with an hour of Julie Bindel's rationalisations for her transphobia based on unreconstructed Seventies seperatist-lesbian-feminism? Can I club myself into unconsciousness with the DSM-IV first?"
"Cheer up, there's four of us, one of her, we're supposed to be mean, Evan Davis is over there, just think of it as 'Dragons Den' with better lighting."

Labels: BBC, Flickr, Julie Bindel, Radio 4, transgenderism, transphobia

The Unbelievable Truth. It's really just Call My Bluff for people that Radio 4 is presumably hoping have forgotten Call My Bluff, starring David 'are you starting to get annoyed with my ubiquity?' Mitchell and the usual panel of slightly less mature comedians* you'd expect from Radio 4.

* That's 'slightly less mature' in the sense that Barry Cryer and Grahame Garden haven't been in it yet.

Labels: BBC, comedians, radio, Radio 4

I've been listening to Radio 4's Archive Hour on gay and lesbian radio. No surprises that the 'B' word isn't ever mentioned. But in it's coverage of BBC queer programming amidst the work by other radio stations it does bring back memories, most strongly of 'Out This Week', a sometimes rather po-faced half-hour news and current-affairs programme on Radio 5 that I came across while coming out in the mid-nineties. It apparently ran for five years and I probably listened to it for about the last three. By the time they had finished they'd already been transferred to a late slot on Sunday evenings and the BBC announced it was cancelling the show because 'gay issues were now mainstream' so we didn't need our little show any more. And ten years on you realise what bollocks that was. True, back then I couldn't believe they bring back Doctor Who let alone have him snog a dashing fifty-first century guy, that openly queer people wouldn't get typecast as 'the gay' on TV and in films. But it's still a hetero, hetero, hetero world out there and all the gay marriages in Ambridge are going to change that. The fact that an hour long programme can cover the last ten years of queer radio in the last five minutes of the show would suggest a marginalisation of the LGB voice on radio, not that it's conquered the mainstream. So, when do we get rid of Women's Hour , on the grounds that surely women's issues are mainstream? When do we get rid of all the Radio 4 shows about books and reading as that has been proved to be a fairly mainstream activity? When do we get rid of Quote, Unquote , because it's shit?

Labels: BBC, bisexual, documentaries, gay, lesbian, media, news, queer, radio, Radio 4, Radio 5