Speaking of hijacking license payer-funded audio, I learnt a huge amount from this 13 minute, middle-of-the-night gem at the weekend. It’s one of the World Service’s ‘Instant Guides‘. This one’s about Al-Qaeda (quiz: did you know that Al-Qaeda was originally a bureaucracy – a kind of Mujihideen recruitment agency? Did you also know that Al-Qaeda offered to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait but the Saudis said ‘no thanks’ because they’d already lined up the Americans for the job?). It’s one of thousands of really good factual programmes made every year using the BBC’s awesome specialist resources that’s crying out for a good, accessible archive (this stream will be overwritten by next week’s in a few days. How stupid is that?). Building a fantastically useful media archive from the BBC’s day-to-day output should be easy. It’s driving me mad to see it coming together so slowly!
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.