Global News (BBC World Service) | iPlayer
Colin Murray and Friends (TalkSport) | Listen
Natural Histories: Monkeys and Apes (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Podcasts are taking over the planet, we hear. Well, some actually are. The BBC World Service issued its first podcasts in July 2007, offering six programmes, which gained 1.3m downloads in the first month. Now, eight years later, with 78 programmes available in 11 different languages, the number of downloads of World Service podcasts has surpassed one billion. Eat that, Serial.
One of the most popular of the World Service podcasts, with 322.7m downloads so far, is Global News. This half-hour programme comes out twice a day and is a compilation of highlights filleted from WS shows like Newshour and World Update. I enjoy it. It’s sober and informative, always interesting – very BBC, with all the good and bad that implies. On Wednesday morning, Global News was dominated by Sepp Blatter’s resignation. This was dealt with deftly and with a world outlook. We heard not only from Greg Dyke, head of the FA, full of ding-dong-the-git-is-dead excitement – “it’s a great day!” – but also from the Zambian head of football, from the BBC’s Africa correspondent, from a reporter in New York. All brought different aspects to the story, rounding it out from the one-note hysteria of Dyke’s crowing.
Other stories were about US privacy laws, changing post-Snowden so that the NSA can’t hoover up phone records like it used to; about further developments for the Large Hadron Collider; whether a females-only mosque will be built in Bradford; and a report about a dinosaur bone found on a beach near Whitby. All interesting stories, well told. Not all that global, however, other than the football. Blatter’s supporters have long complained that European nations view the world in an old-fashioned manner, that Africa and Asia are not taken seriously. On occasion, you can see they have a point.
(Sorry to bang on about Blatter, but he was everywhere on radio this week. I flipped about between 5 Live and TalkSport to get the gist. My conclusion? His resignation story was exhausted by Wednesday lunchtime and, crikey, the BBC were stupid to lose Colin Murray. His TalkSport show is so much more fun than anything on 5 Live during the daytime.)
Anyway, for those who really couldn’t give two monkeys for football, let’s go ahead and talk monkeys. This week brought the first show from Radio 4’s new, much-trumpeted season with the Natural History Museum. Called Natural Histories, this is one of the BBC’s online/radio cross-platform engagement thingies that has a webpage of its own, with jolly galleries and things to do. Disappointingly, though, if you check this out properly, you realise that actually what you’re getting is brief rejigs or clips, short-attention-span highlights of recent or archived Radio 4 shows. Tuesday’s Monkeys and Apes – a fine programme to start the season off – resulted in five different snippy online bits. Did you know we share between 96 and 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees? Or that the difference between monkeys and apes are tails/no tails? If I were you, I’d just listen to the show. You get all the interesting stuff in one go.
