“The BBC are very bad at sharing,” said former radio boss Liz Forgan during the recent Media Show debate on the corporation’s future. The defence might cite BBC Music Jazz, a co-operative pop-up venture with Jazz FM and London jazz festival, which will run on digital radio, online and via the iPlayer Radio app between this Thursday and 15 November. One of the programmes to be broadcast under this umbrella is Neil n’ Dud (Friday, 6pm, BBC Music Jazz), pianist Neil Cowley’s tribute to the underappreciated musical side of the late Dudley Moore. Cowley isn’t just good at playing music; he can talk about it, too.
Podcasting makes radio people nervous. They come out with brave statements about it being merely another channel for their skills but remain anxious about the consequences of encouraging their most committed listeners to pursue their various enthusiasms in their own sweet time rather than in the pattern dictated by the schedule. At the beginning of In Pod We Trust (Saturday, 10.30am, Radio 4), a new weekly series devoted to pointing people to interesting podcasts from around the world, host Miranda Sawyer reassures the audience that this is not an attempt to wean them off Radio 4. For the digital immigrants who make up most of Radio 4’s audience, that won’t be a problem. Most of them are no more likely to bother to find a podcast than they are to retune their radios to TalkSport. The next generation, who will be digital natives, will be different. They won’t have patterns to unlearn. They will grow up expecting to point and click at whatever they want.
Where radio, like all forms of broadcasting, loves a neat conclusion, the podcast medium is at its best when accommodating baggy, open-ended subjects like football and politics. That’s why everybody loved Serial until it ended. That’s why the best thing in the recently launched New Yorker Radio Hour, which is being distributed by select radio stations in the US and is available elsewhere as a podcast, is not the interview with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s Jill Lepore talking to a childhood friend about her relationship with her birth and adoptive parents. If I were at a dinner party where a high-flown exchange of ideas was taking place at one end of the table I would instinctively gravitate towards the other end, where the conversation was likely to be quieter and the prospect of personal revelation higher.
On Remembrance Day, Alwyn Turner presents an excellent programme devoted to The Last Post (Wednesday, 11.04am, Radio 4 FM), the five-note bugle call that is indelibly associated with honouring the dead. It reunites the two buglers who were on duty at Winston Churchill’s funeral in 1965 and takes them to the whispering gallery of St Paul’s, where one of them played The Last Post and the other did Reveille. “It was another gig,” remembers Pete, a musician to his boots. The bugler who played at the funeral of John F Kennedy in 1963 had to stand in the freezing cold for four hours waiting for his cue. When it came he fluffed one of the top notes. Journalists put it down as a striving for additional poignancy. He was just cold.
A special edition of Junior Just A Minute (Sunday, 7.15pm, Radio 4) for Children In Need has Douglas from Chester competing alongside Josie Lawrence, and Matilda from Edinburgh aiding and abetting Paul Merton. Nicholas Parsons is in the chair.
