In 2011 BBC Radio 4 presented Brian Sibley’s superb radio drama adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s fantasy saga, The History of Titus Groan. The series is available from Amazon as an Audible book. It makes for particularly good listening on headphones.
Radio 4 now has another outstanding adaptation, with Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. The series features James McAvoy, who is known to comic book fans as Charles Xavier in X-Men: First Class, and Natalie Dorman.
Natalie Dormer in “The Tudors”
Neverwhere is available through this week, until March 29. The first episode is an hour long, and for convenience I’ve put it on the audio player. Parts 2-6 are 30 minutes and they’re on the BBC iPlayer.
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With the move to an online world without physical media — the so-called “cloud” — I wonder what sort of evidence of our existence there will be hundreds of years from now. NPR has this feature on what the Library of Congress is doing to preserve America’s audio past and present for the future.
Hey, WGBH in Boston. Where did your live streams go? The Jazz Decades feed is still there, as is WCAI for Cape Cod, but your primary station is g-o-n-e not only from TuneIn, but also from direct URL entry. What’s up?
Follow-up: It’s back. It was gone for at least 24 hours, and before posting this I had written to both the station and to TuneIn.
Once again, the landscape of Boston radio is changing and, like the return of Barnes Newberry, it’s found on the Internet. The Boston Globe is going back to what some major city newspapers did way back in the 1920′s, by starting its own station. It’s called RadioBDC, which I’m taking to mean “Radio Boston Dot Com.” The station is online only, and it’s essentially picking up where alternative Rock station WFNX left off, when it was sold to Clear Channel earlier this year.
I’m not the target audience for RadioBDC, but I’m hoping it succeeds. It doesn’t have a TuneIn listing yet, and I don’t have a direct URL for it, so for now I can’t play it on my Logitech Media Server network and the only way I can hear RadioBDC is with the station’s Flash player on a computer, which means I won’t be listening to it a lot. But I’ve already heard something I like a lot — Champagne Supernova, by Oasis. I was never one looking to get high, which apparently was a priority for these guys, but drug references in song lyrics have never phased me. For somebody who had bell bottom pants and a paisley shirt in the seventh grade, this is good stuff.
Deep Purple’s recording of Joe South’s “Hush” is one of those songs that takes me back to powerful memories from a particular point in my life. “There’s a Kind of a Hush All Over the World” by Herman’s Hermits it wasn’t! I’d just finished an extremely difficult year in the 7th grade, and “Hush” really excited and grabbed me.
EVERYTHING WAS CHANGING SO FAST! Not just for me as a kid on the cusp of turning thirteen, but for the world. LBJ wasn’t running for re-election, MLK and RFK had been assassinated, etc. And to top it off, a month after “Hush” peaked on the charts my family up and moved from Connecticut to Massachusetts.
Jon Lord of Deep Purple has died. “Hush”, with Lord’s incredible keyboard sound, is one of the last songs that is indelibly associated in my mind with 77 WABC Musicradio in New York. It’s my assumption that Herb Oscar Anderson’s departure from WABC was due to songs like this one.
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Thanks go to Allan Sniffen on Rewound Radio for playing a tribute to Oldies 103 in Boston, which had been one of my radio presets, but it suffered a format change a few weeks ago. With the demise of the oldies stations on broadcast radio, thankfully there are online stations to carry on, and I think Rewound Radio is the best of them. Click the link and make a request! I did.
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Another favorite online station, Beatles-A-Rama, unfortunately seems to be nearing its likely end. Here’s the story.
I’ll contribute some money, but considering the financial shortfall I don’t see how Pat can save the sinking ship.
