Category: radio

A jewel of a programme about Blake’s Jerusalem from Tom Paulin (probably overwritten by next week’s show by now – drop me a line if you want an MP3) and Alan Bennett reading JM Barrie’s lovely prose version of Peter Pan and the best In Our Time yet, about Newton’s Second Law of thermodynamics (Thank you, Richard!).

Wind forward about 38 minutes into this stream of tonight’s Westminster Hour (Radio 4) and you’ll find yourself listening to another programme all together – a programme that’s not on Radio 4 and, in fact, not even on the BBC. You’ll be listening to Jazz FM. How does that work, then?

(Of course, they’ll have fixed it by now…).

You really can’t overstate the richness and usefulness of the BBC’s radio output. Not possible – honestly. A couple of brilliant examples: Peter Day does great business radio (against the odds, you might argue, in an environment like the BBC where business usually gets a pretty poor write-up) and has done for years. Here’s an outstanding show from his In Business series about the decades-long battle between AMD‘s Jerry Sanders and Intel‘s Robert Noyce. I haven’t heard an account of this fundamentally important dispute anywhere else. Understated and clever and historically valuable.

Even better – I sort of knew that the only really definitive Peel tribute would come from Andy Kershaw but it took me a while to find out that it went out in his Radio 3 slot. This is really lovely radio. The Radio 1 tributes were well-meaning but all together too chirpy. This one is emotional and personal and sad… great music too.

The Kershaw Peel tribute seems to have been overwritten already so here’s an MP3 (I’ve taken the MP3 down because it was becoming a bit too popular! People have been Googling it from every corner of the planet. If you’re desperate, drop me a line).