Radio column: An epic survey of sound

"Now you're talking," I thought as I checked out the blurb for Radio 4's Noise: a Human History, a mega-series told in 30 parts. If the likes of The Listening Project and The People's Songs – both hugely ambitious and beautifully made socio-historical documents – are anything to go by, size really does matter in radio.
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Book review: Mom & Me & Mom, by Maya Angelou

There is violence in Maya Angelou's new book. There is also sorrow and bitterness and pain. But mainly there is love. Mom & Me & Mom is about a bond between mother and daughter that is slow to come, ferociously hard-won, very nearly lost, but, in the end, indestructible.
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Radio column: Overcoming prejudices

Until now, I've always had the World Service and Radio 4 down as the places to look for hard-hitting, politically challenging documentaries. You know the kind. The ones that can deposit you, still in your dressing gown and slippers, into the middle of a sub-Saharan war zone, or a Bolivian coke factory, and deliver a sharp punch to the guts any time your concentration might be in danger of drifting off.
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Radio column: Brand rolls with it

“I'm high as a kite,” declared Russell Brand breathlessly. “I've drunk a whole lot of caffeinated beverages to get me in the mood.”

I suspect the top brass at XFM – which has the distinction of being the first radio station to fire him after he read out pornography live on air – were in the market from something stronger to steady their nerves as Brand, alongside Noel Gallagher and a selection of guests, began a one-off, three-hour stint to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

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Radio column: What women want

On Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of Clare Balding, she of horse-racing, memoir-writing, Olympics-presenting, Crufts-championing, quiz-show hosting, moorland-yomping and general switch-on-the-box-and-there-she-is-again fame.
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Devendra Banhart: 'I was singing as a woman when I was a child'

Devendra Banhart is having a cry. Not a huge one. One small tear and it's over. "I told you this would happen," he says, blinking. "Didn't I tell you?"

It's true, he did. An hour earlier, shortly after Banhart finished an interview with the radio presenter Lauren Laverne on BBC6 Music, during which his mind appeared to be elsewhere, he told me: "I find talking out loud, even to my friends, really difficult. And my friends would tell you that I will cry eventually. Not because I'm self-conscious. I know I'm an idiot and there's a liberating aspect to that. I just get teary at the most inopportune moments. It's like, because it's not really the time or place to be doing that, it just sort of happens."

Like farting?

"Exactly."

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Radio column: Bottling up

"What did you buy?" asked Victoria Derbyshire. 

"A bottle of gin," replied Rachel.

"And where did you drink it?"

"The first mouthful would have been in the toilet at Tesco... Then I went to a hotel."

"And drank the rest of the bottle?"

"I presume so, yes. I blacked out."

And so the cycle began again.

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Book Review: How Many Camels are There in Holland? By Phyllida Law

The title of the actress Phyllida Law's book refers to a question that dementia specialists put to their patients to help determine whether they have Alzheimer's. Law spent two years caring for her nonagenarian mother, Mego, in the tiny Scottish village of Ardentinny, with occasional help from friends, fellow villagers, and her daughter, the actresses Emma and Sophie Thompson.  Mego's memory was already failing when her husband Arthur died. She had been known to put her shoes in the oven and bacon in her sock drawer. Now she was brushing her teeth with shampoo and trying to exit a room via the window rather than the door. "Mother was lost," says Law.

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Radio column: The problem with comedy

"And here on 4 we have a comedy coming up," said the BBC continuity announcer. Oh God, I thought. Really? Must you? Must we? Isn't it time to give up? To admit defeat? To say to your listeners "Look guys, we've given comedy our best shot, we've brought in the big guns, we've maxed out the budget, but it's just not working." And, let’s be honest, it rarely has. The glory days of Steve Coogan and Chris Morris are long gone. With the exceptions of Just a Minute and anything involving David Sedaris, comedy and radio simply do not mix. In fact, they are sworn enemies.  Radio is where comedy goes to die.

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How We Met: Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell

'She told me she had an extra ticket; I went the next day and stayed for seven years.'

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Radio column: Tony Harrison's V

In the summer of 1972 Alice Cooper, the fright-wigged shock-rocker, sent Mary Whitehouse, the blue-rinsed umbrage-taker, a bunch of flowers along with a note of thanks. Through the latter's vociferous campaigning to have Cooper's single "School's Out" banned from Top of the Pops, she inadvertently propelled it to the top of the charts. 
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Radio column: Confessions of a castaway

My plan this week was to write about science. Honestly, it was. The World Service was running a series of solemn-sounding talks called Exchanges at the Frontier, each delivered by leading epidemiologists, physiologists and other miscellaneous ologists whose job titles were very possibly made up. However bleak their message, I felt it my duty to hear them out. And listening on Sunday morning, for a while I was genuinely concerned about the plight of humankind in the face of horrible mutating viruses that could knock out much of population and possibly leave pigs and poultry to run things.
But that was before my brain started to ache, my eyeballs began rolling into the back of my head and, just for a second or two, I switched channels and happened upon the writer Julie Burchill on Desert Island Discs squeaking: "I'd been up for three nights taking cocaine, so when Morrissey called I didn't want to see anybody. I was quite rude to him and he left." At which point there was really no going back.
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Radio column - Hitting the right notes

I'll admit it, the title of Radio 2's latest mega-series, The People's Songs, had me worried. Surely even the BBC has worked out that when it comes to music "the people" cannot be trusted. Remember when Radio 2 listeners deemed Robbie Williams' "Angels" the best song of the past 25 years at the Brits? I was there and, I can tell you, the sight of inebriated industry nobs trying to wipe the WTF expressions off their faces as the cameras swooped in for close-ups was very special indeed.
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Book review: Bedsit Disco Queen, by Tracey Thorn

If Tracey Thorn were starting out in music today, she wouldn't stand a chance. This isn't meant as an insult. It's simply that, despite having maintained a career for the best part of 30 years, and enjoyed a fistful of hits as the singer of Everything But the Girl alongside her boyfriend and musical partner Ben Watt, Thorn doesn't really do the pop star thing. As she says in her memoir: "It (has) always been a strange thing for me to be doing, a job I wasn't really cut out for."
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Radio column: Animal magic

What did George Orwell ever do for us? I mean besides giving us TV's Big Brother, in which fame-hungry nobodies lie around on designer furniture picking their toenails, and Room 101, in which fame-hungry nearly-nobodies prattle on about stuff that gets on their wick. We're probably only a commissioning meeting away from a reality series in which the cast of TOWIE are dressed up as four-legged creatures and sent to work on a farm, under the über-strict gaze of Sir Alan Sugar's Napoleon.
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