David Hepworth on the power of speech, being in Vogue, blowing up speakers, and the north/south divide
The most poignant listen of the week is sound artist Sebastiane Hegarty's elderly mother failing to recognise a recording of her younger self. It's the centre of his programme in the *Between The Ears* series (Saturday, 9.45pm, R3), in which he persuasively argues that the timbre of recorded speech is a far more telling way of keeping the departed in the now than any amount of old photographs.
I think somebody at Radio 4 is hoping that the title of *Zeitgeisters *(Saturday, 10.30am, R4) will become a thing. Arts editor Will Gompertz promises this series will focus on the creatives who make the money, rather than the ones who spend it. The first is Angelica Cheung, editor of Vogue China, the most luxurious magazine in the biggest luxury market in the world. Like all Vogue editors she remains brutally pragmatic beneath the airy-fairyness, reckons the editors of the American and British versions have been very welcoming (they know which way the wind is blowing), but says she hopes that one day Ai Weiwei will be as free to practise his trade as she is hers. Similarly I dream of the day Radio 4 will be able to do a programme about fashion that features neither David Bowie singing about fa-fa-fashion, Madonna's Vogue, or a clip from Absolutely Fabulous. That day has not arrived yet.
A distinguished record producer of the 70s and 80s recently complained to me that record companies nowadays took the money they used to pay to a producer and gave it instead to a mastering engineer who was capable of getting their new release to sound louder than all the other records. This quest for something capable of crashing the faders, often blamed for the limited dynamic range of the current chart, is addressed in *Loud Wars *(Monday, 9pm, R1), where Zane Lowe attempts to answer the question: "why is music so loud?"
*TalkSport* seems to have decided listeners in the north won't tolerate spivvy southerners, and listeners in the south don't have much patience with northerners, whom they suspect of being covered in woad. Which must be why their programmes are so often presented by contrasting pairs from different sides of the vowel divide: Adrian Durham of Peterborough is twinned with Darren Gough of Barnsley; Andy Gray of Glasgow yoked together with Richard Keys of Coventry; and Islington's Danny Kelly doesn't seem to be allowed out without being accompanied by the reassuring Liverpudlian tones of former player Micky Quinn (weekdays, 10am, TalkSport).
When I worked with Danny he invariably entered an office clutching a piece of paper. You never learned what was on the paper, but the implication was that he had just ripped it from a hot teleprinter. It's the same sense of urgency that makes him such a great sport broadcaster. Unlike a lot of TalkSport's talent, who worry when they stray too far from the Premier League, Kelly will know how many flights Brian Lara missed in the course of his playing career and where the bodies are buried in the world of curling. If he doesn't, he'll bluff quite convincingly. Like Danny Baker, with whom he's about to be reunited on TV via BT Sport, he's a good interviewer of players, as he recently demonstrated when Ricky Ponting was his guest. He built up Ponting's appearance as the second coming, kept the conversation on the kind of concrete lines that sportsmen respond to, and avoided any sentence involving the words "how" or "feel". Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.
The most poignant listen of the week is sound artist Sebastiane Hegarty's elderly mother failing to recognise a recording of her younger self. It's the centre of his programme in the *Between The Ears* series (Saturday, 9.45pm, R3), in which he persuasively argues that the timbre of recorded speech is a far more telling way of keeping the departed in the now than any amount of old photographs.
I think somebody at Radio 4 is hoping that the title of *Zeitgeisters *(Saturday, 10.30am, R4) will become a thing. Arts editor Will Gompertz promises this series will focus on the creatives who make the money, rather than the ones who spend it. The first is Angelica Cheung, editor of Vogue China, the most luxurious magazine in the biggest luxury market in the world. Like all Vogue editors she remains brutally pragmatic beneath the airy-fairyness, reckons the editors of the American and British versions have been very welcoming (they know which way the wind is blowing), but says she hopes that one day Ai Weiwei will be as free to practise his trade as she is hers. Similarly I dream of the day Radio 4 will be able to do a programme about fashion that features neither David Bowie singing about fa-fa-fashion, Madonna's Vogue, or a clip from Absolutely Fabulous. That day has not arrived yet.
A distinguished record producer of the 70s and 80s recently complained to me that record companies nowadays took the money they used to pay to a producer and gave it instead to a mastering engineer who was capable of getting their new release to sound louder than all the other records. This quest for something capable of crashing the faders, often blamed for the limited dynamic range of the current chart, is addressed in *Loud Wars *(Monday, 9pm, R1), where Zane Lowe attempts to answer the question: "why is music so loud?"
*TalkSport* seems to have decided listeners in the north won't tolerate spivvy southerners, and listeners in the south don't have much patience with northerners, whom they suspect of being covered in woad. Which must be why their programmes are so often presented by contrasting pairs from different sides of the vowel divide: Adrian Durham of Peterborough is twinned with Darren Gough of Barnsley; Andy Gray of Glasgow yoked together with Richard Keys of Coventry; and Islington's Danny Kelly doesn't seem to be allowed out without being accompanied by the reassuring Liverpudlian tones of former player Micky Quinn (weekdays, 10am, TalkSport).
When I worked with Danny he invariably entered an office clutching a piece of paper. You never learned what was on the paper, but the implication was that he had just ripped it from a hot teleprinter. It's the same sense of urgency that makes him such a great sport broadcaster. Unlike a lot of TalkSport's talent, who worry when they stray too far from the Premier League, Kelly will know how many flights Brian Lara missed in the course of his playing career and where the bodies are buried in the world of curling. If he doesn't, he'll bluff quite convincingly. Like Danny Baker, with whom he's about to be reunited on TV via BT Sport, he's a good interviewer of players, as he recently demonstrated when Ricky Ponting was his guest. He built up Ponting's appearance as the second coming, kept the conversation on the kind of concrete lines that sportsmen respond to, and avoided any sentence involving the words "how" or "feel". Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.