The update of the BBC iPlayer Radio app has arrived just in time to make a valuable contribution to the debate around the licence fee and also improve your summer holiday experience. For years now, radio producers have had lots of their best work go unheard thanks to the accident of scheduling. Entire lifetimes of good radio are missed because most of the audience is at work, in bed, or watching TV when it’s on.
The “listen again” function of the iPlayer has already made it possible to retrieve programmes that have slipped by. The new version of the app, which is available now (for free, of course), makes it possible to download the majority of programmes to a smartphone or tablet, a great thing for all seasons but particularly at this time of the year when you can load up enough good listening to see you through the longest holiday journey or most interminable baggage-reclaim wait. The download facility doesn’t apply to all shows – music rights will never be straightforward – and you can only listen within 30 days of broadcast, but it’s a major step forward and helps bolster the corporation’s claims to be providing value for money.
As you read this, I’ll be undertaking a long car journey with all 12 episodes of The Pallisers from Radio 4 Extra; all the episodes of John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme from Radio 4; Iggy Confidential from 6 Music (with all the music); Radio 4’s Bunk Bed, the recumbent musings of Peter Curran and Patrick Marber, which is always on too late for me; and David Rodigan from 1Xtra. The interface looks great and works well, though take it from one who knows that a search for Rodigan can also return Terence Rattigan. Nothing wrong with that. The BBC should factor in at least one fat-fingered result in every search.
In The Night Shift (Monday, 8pm, Radio 4), Sarah Montague, who gets up at 3.30am every morning in order to present the Today programme, looks at the stresses placed on the body and mind by working such unsocial hours. She spends time with a DJ who discovered clubbing in the mid-70s and claims not to have been home since, and a chap who spends all night cleaning offices and then goes on to drive a long-distance lorry for the majority of the day. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t wish to be identified. What she finds is an increasing amount of research pointing to the fact that those who work all night don’t live as long as the rest of us.
Radio 4 Extra is presenting a True Crime season, which is one of those ideas that never gets old. It makes an early start with Crippen (Saturday, 6am, Radio 4 Extra), which is a dramatisation of Emlyn Williams’s book Dr Crippen’s Diary, continues with Deborah Findlay’s reading of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher (weekdays, 2.45pm, Radio 4 Extra), and finishes off the evenings with Murder Most Foul (weekdays, 8pm, Radio 4 Extra) in which Nick Ross recounts the stories of a number of very English murders of recent years.
Radio revisits a couple of notable movies this week with Mystery Theater (Sunday, 11am, Radio 4 Extra) running a 1950 radio production of Lifeboat starring Tallulah Bankhead and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and the Saturday drama being Martin Jarvis’s production of Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever (Saturday, 2.30pm, Radio 4) starring Toby Stephens as Bond. Of course, if you miss either of them, you can always download them via the radio player.
