Blah Blah Flowers

It's not new by any means but sitting in a cinema this afternoon I realised how much I enjoyed the Radio 1 advert, even if I don't really listen to the station any more.

Labels: BBC, radio, Radio 1, YouTube

Harry Enfield as Dirk Gently. Harry. Dirk.

The second book is a load of pish, but the first one, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency isn't too bad, though most of the funniest jokes come from the authorial voice, not any of the characters. And I probably would have gone with Richard E. Grant myself but never mind. But as Harry Enfield has spent most of the last seven years trying to make people forget he was ever funny, is he going to be any good in this?

Labels: books, Douglas Adams, fiction, radio, science fiction

The R U Sirius Show and Neofiles With R U Sirius will be attempting to stream video and audio while the shows are recorded, today at 2 PM Pacific or 10 PM GMT. There have been a few teething problems in the past few weeks, so cross your fingers before heading to the website.

Labels: Evolution, freedom, life extension, podcasts, R U Sirius, radio, science, web toys

You should be listening to Starship Sofa anyway, if you have any interest in science-fiction that is. But their H.G. Wells episode has the famous Mercury Theatre episode, which caused such hysteria in the United States in the 1930s, appended to the end. Beats Spielberg and Cruises effort into a cocked hat.

Labels: books, fiction, H.G. Wells, podcasts, radio, science fiction

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

Hurrah! Apparently Mixing It is moving to Resonance FM. [via Doctor Vee] At the moment the only thing I take from Resonance is the weekly podcast of Hooting Yard. I suspect a podcast of MI will not be possible, what with music licensing headaches, so let's just hope there's some sort of 'Listen Again' feature.

Labels: BBC, Mixing It, music, radio, Radio 3, Resonance FM

I was annoyed at the start of January to hear one of the presenters of Mixing It , the Radio 3 program dedicated to experimental music, mention in an off-hand manner that the show would be finishing a run of sixteen years championing the avant-garde in February. I was surprised on checking the playlist for the last show that it was mainly new items, not one of those retrospective jobbies that you normally get. I noticed, with some disdain, that it was being replaced in the schedules by another jazz show (I'm sorry, I have tried, but I honestly can't tell a difference between someone like Miles Davis and what you get in any comedy sketch that is trying t parody the genre like The Fast Show 's Jazz Club). But what really got my goat was to discover that the show wasn't ending because the presenters had had enough and wanted to move on to new things, but because the show was being axed by the controller of Radio 3. The show was recorded in the presence of a 'Senior Radio 3 Editor', presumably to make sure the presenters didn't make a fuss on air. An argument could be made that a station plays classical music for most of the day and then an experimental music show for an hour each week in the night is an anomaly, but as doctorvee says here, neither Radio 1 or 6 music play any experimental music or have done for a while. It was the only show I listened to Radio 3 for, I remember when they devoted a whole show to Radiohead in their Kid A / Amnesiac period to talk about the construction of the songs on their album, P J Harvey agreed to be interviewed by them only because she felt they were the only people who would want to talk about how she put together her last album. They got me into the Third Eye Foundation, Wilco, the whole Godspeed collective and others that I'm blanking on now because I'm not sitting in front of my music collection.

This is a real shame and yet another example of the BBC moving away from trying to give a little sample of everything to blanket coverage of the banal. No Rock and Roll Fun quotes People Like Us giving the eulogy.

Labels: BBC, Mixing It, music, radio, Radio 3

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