For the past seven years I’ve presented a weekly half hour radio show about bicycling, broadcast on Resonance FM, London’s arts and community radio station. The Bike Show came into being in 2004 at around about the same time as podcasting began to catch on amongst its earliest adopters, according to the Wikipedia entry on [...]
RadioPlayer was launched today. It’s a collaboration between the BBC, Absolute Radio and a various other media groups and it aims to put all of UK radio in one place. Absolute Radio boss Clive Dickens described it as “the most important development in the 50 year history of UK radio”. My view? It deserves to [...]
I love listening to the radio. I love podcasts because it means I can listen to my favourite radio programmes from around the world whenever I like. And I’ve recently made a fantastic discovery.
Each month the Mayor of London faces a grilling from the London Assembly, a kind of Mayor’s Question Time. It lasts up to a few hours and there is a webcast of it. But the image quality is spectacularly bad: I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about ‘faceless officialdom’. It’s only [...]
In a post earlier this week, I referred to my ‘weekly diet’ of podcasts and I thought it was only fair to open up the larder. I have been podcasting the radio show I present since May 2005. Initially I didn’t know what podcasting was or how to do it. A kind listener explained and [...]
Credit crunch, sub-prime mortgage, collateralised debt obligations… Obscure terms that now feature in everyday pub chatter, even more so after this week’s spectacular events involving the collapse of investment banks, unprecedented interventions by governments and a looming global economic downturn. But can you, hand on heart, say that you understand what the credit crunch really [...]
The London Festival of Architecture goes from strength to strength and this year runs from 20 June to 20 July. Along with the exhibitions, talks, guided walks, debates and parties there is a series of excellent architectural podwalks produced by Ruby Wright. I did one about my neighbourhood, entitled ‘Backstreets of Southwark’. It was featured [...]
Last year I posted a recording of an interview with Senator Robert ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, conducted by David Frost, just a short while before Kennedy was assassinated. There is every chance that had he not been slain, he would have secured the Democratic Party nomination for the 1968 presidential election and beaten Richard Nixon, the Republican [...]
Have you ever dreamt of playing in a symphony? Have you heard of the early-20th-century-futurists favoring the street over the canvas or the stage? Maybe Godfried-Willem Raes’s 2nd Symphony could be your chance. And, it isn’t even very difficult: join the symphony with your bicycle. We carefully prepare and tune your instrument; you and bicycle [...]
Last weekend I came across a second-hand vinyl record of Senator Bobby Kennedy interviewed by David Frost. The interview was conducted during RFK’s 1968 Presidential bid which was to end in his assassination in Los Angeles – just hours after winning the California Democratic primary. The record is a fascinating document of a remarkable man [...]