Posts Tagged: radio

Sock Fluff — No Comments
11
Feb 08

Radio GaGa

I’m known as a bit of a film nut, although anyone who has seen our living room dvd nook and then the two piles behind the chair and finally the overspill in my workroom will know that both bit, and nut are rather tame.

Also our collection runs at a number of strange tangents, I say tangents because they do overlap some actors and sad person that I am I can given you those tangents ;-)

However, I also adore listening to the radio, its easier when beading, and until we got the MythTv set up to record digital radio my best friends in the world where BBC’s Listen Again and MPlayer.

At the moment while I’m eagerly awaiting the next Lindsay Davis’ novel to be serialised as a Radio Play; the previous four were very well done, I’m trying to make an effort to listen to some other shows, that I might have overlooked but now have the time to listen to.

At the moment I’m very much enjoying Tomorrow, Today! which is currently in it’s second series on Radio 4. Set in 1962 it sees a somewhat beleaguered radio producer and writer trying to produce a show set in 2008, the 2008 as expected in 2008. The show deals more with the cast and crew than then actual stories they are trying to air but you get some hilarious snippets. My favourite was mention of the villian “Dr J Chaotica, bachelour of Science” which reminded me a great deal of Dr. Science, who if you are not familiar with him and his radio show where he gives the more incredible explanations for everyday things: “Knows more than you do” despite the fact that “He’s not a real doctor. I have a Masters degree. In… Science”.

Of course podcasts are great, but so far BBC radio doesn’t podcast much of its (proper)comedy, neither Russell Brand nor Chris Moyles are my cup of tea, but at the very least they do roll The News Quiz and the Now Show in to a single podcast subscription.

But yesterday after discovering that the SciFi channel have removed the Seeing Ear Theatre archive form their website, boo hiss, I did find another podcast of OTR shows at Pirate TV Theatre Classic Radio Drama . Alas, not all the shows seem to bee still in their podcast directory but there were a good 70 or more available when I set my iTunes on it yesterday afternoon. The website SFFAudio is a good source of sites which collect OTR shows, but I’ve not investigated much further, as I don’t want to deluge myself with more than I can listen to quite yet ;-)

Also, for those mourning the passing of the Seeing Ear Theatre into apparent oblivion, before I managed to capture their archive, and as far as I can tell they only every released some of the plays on tape ( I’ve got volume one which my uncle bought me many years ago, I can blame him for many things including my MST3K fixation which has since been caught by my husband) , I discovered that they are recreating the classic Twilight Zone shows as Audio Dramas, they’ve been at it for a few years now, and while it seems to only be broadcast int he US they have a number of CD sets out, at around $39 each, which gets you about 10 episodes. I’ve ordered a couple and can’t wait to hear them.

However, Amazon have just provided me with Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life, abridged(alas) read by Tom Baker(wh00t!) which should provide at least 3 hours of fun.

Sock Fluff — 1 Comment
19
Dec 07

Random Juxtapositions

Saturday morning saw Jon and myself setting off from Dublin where we had spent the previous week eating our body weight in cooked breakfasts, and in my case in Mikados. It was a nice break, the cats didn’t spurn us, Jon managed to collect a handful more stars in Super Mario Galaxy, and we got to see a number of family friends and babies of many ages including a brand new 5 week old one ( a little boy, but Jon doesn’t consider him a threat to our still-bump of a girl quite yet)

Thankfully, for Jon and myself as navigator, the journey from my parent’s house in Templeouge (not Ballyboden, stupid Google) to Dublin Port was stress free – I can’t say it wasn’t uneventful because we had the radio on at the time.

There is something unique about Irish Radio, or at least that is how it seems to me and I don’t really listen to much other than Radio 4 and 7. I can recall waking up on Saturday mornings to adverts for sheep dip on RTE Radio 1. Although the most traumatic has to have been being woken up by my parent’s previous radio, which sounded awful as it had suffered greatly form being knocked over by a cat, vomiting out Bohemian Rhapsody.

What’s that you say? What’s wrong with Bohemian Rhapsody?

Well, nothing of course, it’s a cracking song, it is a seminal work. But I’m not talking about Queen’s recording, what I am talking about is a cover. By De Dannan with traditional Irish musical instruments. The effect is, well effecting, and that’s all I can say about it.

My general response was to lie on the futon in my room screaming ‘What the Fucking Hell is that God awful Shite?’

And I’m not generally prone to swearing, and not at 8am on a Saturday morning in my parents ‘house. My mother thought it was quaint, the music, she didn’t care about the screaming, and joyously informed me that the same band had done a cover of the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba in a similiar style. I laid my head on the table and wept for Handel.

Thankfully for me, Jon and my baby the radio this time didn’t illicit such violent outbursts, but we were left on two occasions with a ‘wtf’ moment.

Firstly as we drove through the KCR and through Harold’s Cross it was the fact of Songs Sung in the French Language, two of them. This amused me as a voracious Dorothy L Sayers reader.

Then not long after we were treated to The new Supergrass single. The choices of the presenter were ecelectic to say the least. But nothing can beat Jon’s reaction to the presenter’s statement after the single finished…

‘I love a good Polka’ and, sure enough, hard on the heels of an energetic Supergrass track came an equally energetic Polka.

We had arrived at the port at this stage so escaped from the Polka by going to get a cup tea. We then returned to the car to hear some odd tune followed by – in a rural Irish accent:

‘This tune is well known to all, but not to this girl, she’s never heard it before, and never will, because she is quite deaf’

Jon, who is also quite deaf, when he chooses to be, retorted that she was damn lucky. Still, it was the phrasing as much as the words that had us rolling about laughing, and then we had to pull ourselves together to get the car on the ferry to head home.

While on the ferry, in the very nice Stena Plus lounge we settled in for the 3 hour trip to Holyhead. Jon bought himself some wifi access and actually wrote his first blog post in over a year! He seems to have abandoned xanthein.net and is now over at www.jonstill.com . I’m not sure of the reason for the domain change, perhaps impending fatherhood is causing him to cast of to some extent his old irc screen name (and given that I met him on irc he was initially xanthein to me, I was sunbug but never had that as a domain ;-) ) and embrace the real world…

I don’t think its anything so deep. He’s been mucking around with a new WordPress theme for ages on the jonstill.com domain and likes it better. He can be so finnicky!

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