Doc On One: My Father Takes a Vacation

Last week, RTÉ's Documentary on One was called My Father Takes a Vacation.

It's a lovely piece. It uses tingly music, the type that may be becoming a radio cliché, but still works well! It uses what sound like answering-machine tapes, another near-cliché meaning Dublin – those screaming traffic lights near Trinity – and delicious editing.

It uses a first person narrator and is compiled excellently. The narrator is a young man, and it comes across. Great images are painted throughout the documentary. It's a dream of a travel doc!

You can listen to it in Real Audio linked from the RTÉ website, or in the Documentary On One podcast.

Here's what the webpage for My Father Takes A Vacation says:

Martin Johnson's mother died of cancer eight years ago. The Johnson family lived in Sweden at the time and after his mother's death Martin's father decided he needed a break and disappeared, leaving Martin and his siblings alone in Sweden for a month.
Two years later Martin Johnson's father cycled along the southern coast of Ireland. After that he continued to disappear periodically. He now lives a new life in New Zealand, having left his three children behind in Sweden.
This is a travel documentary about trying to understand a father, about what Martin's father saw in Ireland, about loss and most of all why one most keep on moving on.
Martin Johnson produced this documentary, following in his father's footsteps from Dublin to Dursey Island in West Cork. In the documentary Martin also meets a fisherman from Dunmore East who talks about leaving home as well as Dennis who owns a Bed & Breakfast in Castletownbere and who lost his wife five years ago and a farmer on Dursey Island - to name but a few.
Producer: Martin Johnson
Supervising Producer: Peter Woods

Surviving the Century

This week's World Stories on BBC World service is called Surviving the Century.

It was made by my colleague Haimo Li, and it's good! The first transmission is this morning, with repeats over the weekend, and of course the Podcast.
Have a listen, in stereo if you can.

Music on special interest stations

Where do you think music fits in on special interest programming?

Special Interest, I guess, means the same thing as Community programming. Feel free to object!

How important is music to community programming? If the community is very broad, the music will be wallpaper to many listeners. Wallpaper is a part of general listening radio, cos it's on all day and you need some breaks. But when you're tuning in once a week for an hour, how much do you want to hear music?

Music can be great on such programmes. "Nostalgia" music can really help define your commununity. But if you are a "special interest" community, chances are you're a small community. And nostalgia for one person might be meaningless for someone just a few years older.

Some nostalgia that works goes back to childhood. As an example, the Ray Darcy Show this morning opened with Caroll Spinney – aka the vocie of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. That's been on TV for nearly 30 years, so it clicks with a lot of people.

Thoughts? Comment me!

Out and about

I've been a busy boy of late. And I've hardly had the chance to listen to the radio. But I've noticed a couple of things, such as:

Around Alexandra Park road, a portable DAB radio'll get a good singal wouthout any aerial at all.
The pure pocketDAB 2000 uses the headphone cable as it's antenna, and without plugging anything in, the signal metre shows a good strong signal, on the residential roads around the Ally Pally TX site. I'd like to see if it works out to Wood Green.

And yes, I understand the pointlessness in seeing if you can get a signal without being able to hear it!


You can see the Crystal Palace mast from the Putney Bridge tube bridge. A nice clear view of it.

The 1296kHz antenna for BBC World Service DRM in Orfordness is like a pair of 3 element beams, stuck into the ground with the boom running along the ground.

No not a good description, but those masts suddenly make sense to an amateur like me once I can visualise that :-)

George Cook – spoof

This is funny, if you know George Hook from Newstalk and rugby on TV

Martin Williams on Thirdcoast!

The Thirdcoast Festival have Martin Williams on their frontpage – hurray! Martin trained me up in my first week in the BBC. He does creative features for Resonance FM – and tries to infiltrate the BBC with creativity too ;-)

Here's hoping being featured by Thirdcoast gives him the recognition he deserves (like an award or two!).

London Chinese Radio Media Literacy Project

London Chinese Radio is doing a project on Media Literacy. I've been roped in to making some content for it too, and I'll not be in London for much longer so I'd better get the finger out!

Media Literacy can be difficult to define. The whole concept is based round community strengthening. But the name is quite daunting, as much for people who take part in community Radio as anyone.

At the first meeting on the project, no one really had an idea. For some, literacy meant to do with books and literature. After a while, the idea of ability was generally accepted.

Then there came the problem of media. If you weren't a media student or practitioner, then media was too distant a term.

Yet everyone thought "Online Literacy/ability" was important to them.
This does point to the age range of our users, plus the fact that immigrants tend to use the internet a lot (speaking from personal experience here!).

It's a good project – but without even a studio, it's a real pressure to reach the proposal's full potential.

I feel without a building, it's difficult for the broadest community value to be maintained at a clear level. When we all go home and use our own facilities to make our own content, we use our own values and goals. That's what podcasting and blogging is about. Podcasting is like YouTube – you can chose to only use established broadcast content if you like. Blogging is personal, though builds up a sense of community in who comments on, links to, and quotes your blog.
But community radio is about good old fashioned community centres, in a geographical location. The common language of community media should be the place and the way of life.

But all that's separate from the problems of East-West – we white Europeans might not give a toss what the people in the Chinese Embassy think. But for people from the PRC, the embassy staff are to be respected (I'm more "laugh/cry" about them, but anyway). Likewise the difference in production values.

And of course, all us media types have huge egos, and every one of of thinks "I'm right"!

New Racial Harmony website

My colleague Britt Yip has launched a new website on positive news in race relations. www.RacialHarmony.net I've written an article for it -- truth be told I wrote it quite a while ago and can't really remember what it says.

Still, the website is on a very worthy cause, and if you have a positive story, or opinion, about Racial Relations, send it in!

Natural History Unit God

I briefly met a senior producer from the Natural History Unit today -- Sarah Blunt. She produced the Sounds of Life, that I blogged giddily about below. Quite inspiring -- she uses layers so very well! And she is clearly very passionate about what she does.

She recommended the DolphinEar Hydrophone as a good way to get into that area. I wished I had one on Sunday, when I found frog spawn in Richmond Park.

Most impressive, not only did I not fall at her knees in admiration, I was reasonably coherent. Yay!

Cool sounding job

Advertised elsewhere on the web:

Wanted: Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast

Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast

Monocle.com is the broadcast arm of Monocle, producing high-quality audio and video related to subjects covered in the magazine. The website, and corresponding mobile channels, aim to 'raise the bar' for internet-based video, both in terms of editorial and production values.

Monocle is looking for a highly motivated, skilled all-rounder to join our core team in London, helping with the creation of both the website and the new broadcast-led formats it carries.

Looks like RTÉ are about to do DRM :-)

RTÉ have a notice up on Aertel (this one) saying that 252 kHz will be off air from 09.00 on 26/03/07 until 18.00 on 30/03/07.
"Network requires this outage for the transmitter replacement project. At the end of this outage the new transmitter will be operational".

Yay!

The Now Show returns to Radio 4

I've just heard the first episode of the new series of the Now Show on Radio 4. I have two tickets for next week's recording, but after hearing tonight's show, I'll not be using them!

New website: Media Helping Media

I just noticed a link to the Media Helping Media website, on Richard Sambrook's blog.

It describes iself thus:
Media Helping Media is for all involved in promoting freedom of expression in countries where the media is under threat.

Given the tightening up planned for the BBC Chinese Service, I hope Media Helping Media becomes widely used.

Degen DE 1105 review update – it's broken!

My Degen 1105 is more or less out of service. Why? Because the aerial fell out! The telescopic antenna is fitted into the body of the radio, so there’s no joint for it to turn around outside the set.
Two segments of the aerial have fallen out. So it’s fairly useless – you can put the segments back in, but they just fall out again, and the connection is unreliable, needless to say.

This reminded me to root out the DE 1102. All AM is dodgy on that, MF and HF. I think the ferrite rod came lose first, and then I poked around at it zapping the shortwave coverage.
I'm a bit disappointed at the build quality of the Degens now -- they feel very solid, but mine have both failed inside, mechanically.

MSF time signal changes

the UK's reference source longwave signal is changing, as reported on Media Network. They are moving transmitter site. So the fixed phrase will have to change! "MSF Rugby" is becoming MSF Anthorn.

During yesterday's test, I noticed the singal meter on my radio-controlled watch was blank – and that never happens when I'm in the UK or Ireland! It was 11:56, and the test was due to finish at 12:00, so I put the watch on the window sill and told it to "GET" – it hadn't updated in the early hours. The watch has a little signal meter, of three bars – that mean time data and date data are both being received. For a few minutes it could only get one bar. After that it reached two – which I think means time data is being received. Then by 11:58, it started to get full strength, but it kept fluctuating between level 2 and 3. After 12, I asked it to calibrate again, and it did no problem.

It's possible my wall clock missed an overnight calibration too, as I was half-woken by an odd whirring in the middle of the night. Once I figured out what it might be, I noticed that I could still hear the second hand ticking merrily along, so I imagine it might have been the minute or hour hands doing their thing.

I never opened my eyes though so who knows!


ooooh. But now I've jsut noticed: the wall clock is a minute slow! Golly.

BTW, the watch is this Casio, and it's fab!

Beyerdynamic DT-770 Pro headphones

I was given a pair of these in late January. By all accounts they are very good. I’m not in any position to judge to be honest, as I haven’t much to compare them to.

I’ve been using them at home in the place of the DT-100s. So far I have this to say:
They’re very comfy. They block out a ton of outside sounds, I reckon more than the DT-100s.

So far the sound quality has only struck me in one example. I am now much more aware of the hiss in recordings made on the Edirol R-09 with its built-in mics.

I haven’t compared them directly, but for isolation alone, the DT 770’s absolutely wipe the floor with the Sennheiser HD-480 (modified by Canford) that we use as standard issue in the BBC. I’ve seen training videos of BBC Radio 1 newsbeat presenters using the DT 770s. Good!

Being very childish…

China National Radio have moved their web addresses to one: cnr.cn.

All very good, I'm sure. So I have to look for vulgar juvenile fun. Click the link for 中广演播厅。

And look at the web address that appears.

Sorry, but it must be done :-)

More in the Guardian

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2021124,00.html

It opens thus:

Access denied


Frustrated by government jamming and dwindling audience figures, staff at the BBC's China service are worried about an increasingly uncertain future. John Plunkett reports on the dilemmas facing the corporation

Monday February 26, 2007………



There'll probably be an update tomorrow – after a big announcement today.

Article in the Guardian

So now I know why the press office sounded pressured today…
http://media.guardian.co.uk/radio/story/0,,2013029,00.html

Upcoming posts

I've been shamefully absent! But I promise to update the blog in the next week. I'll be adding to my reviews, of the AKG K27i headphones, the Pure PocketDAB 2000, and the Degen DE 1105.

I'll also add a review of sorts, of the Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro cans.

In the meantime though: I'll be at the BBC Chinese stand in Chinatown on Sunday -- Chinese New Year -- so if you're around, come and say hello! We might even give you some freebies, if you're nice to us.
And speak Chinese.
And fill in a questionaire.

Maybe.

See you there!