The average American rises at dawn, swallows a couple of Dexedrine tablets and a stack of pancakes, climbs in his monster car and hits the freeway, dashes to his dictaphone for an hour or two, is sharply out at noon for two double martinis and a steak, dashes back to his car and the freeway, another brace of martinis, another steak, a game of poker, a stretch at the telly, a quick trip on LSD, a couple of seconals and a fitful sleep.
He spent his whole life breaking stereotypes, and through radio, his little evening chats flew all the way from America to London to my Dad’s car radio on our long rural roads on the far side of Australia.
triple j: The Culture Club - It's hard to accept I'm an outcast
Sick of whiny hip-hop? ‘Ooooh, I don’t beloooong, I’m an ooooutcast’, they moan. In this one-minute-fortynine-seconds of radio, Craig Shuftan argues that all modern artist live on the fringe, but explains that it wasn’t always so.
These little packages are my favourite thing on triple j. You’re driving along, or doing the dishes or having a nap, and all of a sudden you’re thinking about the role of the artist in revolutionary France. You get to have an intellectual moment in the middle of your mundane day, a minute to remind yourself, ‘hey, I’ve got an awesome brain, maybe I should use it some time’.
Subscribe to the Culture Club podcast here. Make them into regular non-podcast tracks on your ipod and let them pop into your ears when you’re not expecting them.
Reasons to love radio #463: “on good nights, I can get North Africa”.
It’s such a romantic idea… tune in your short-wave, talk to people on the other side of the world. I know the internet does the same thing, but it doesn’t seem as special as some 10-year-old randomly spinning the dial for whole evenings. I guess for him, it was a surprise to find something, and he wouldn’t have known what he’d get that night. Me, I expect to find exactly what I look for, and to have my search completed in less than 0.27 seconds.
My wanderings are directed by me; his were deliciously random.
Best. advice. ever. I think this is why I love radio - you say something and it’s just out there, you know, in the ether. You can’t overthink things, you can’t revise what you’ve said. Print does my head in, I try too hard to make it perfect. But radio, ah sweet radio, it just takes my words as soon as I think them.
This is how a radio play should be. It’s not just a story read out loud with token sound effects. It’s using the medium to tell a story in a totally original way. The way the voice switches between the old guide and the new, the jog-jog-jog proof system, the sense of place and scene from a simple echo on the Vogon voice, and the overdubbing on Zaphod Beeblebrox. An entire backstory, told in less than two minutes of radio, using a few simple audio tricks.
The opening to the third radio series of the Hitchhikers Guide - Tertiary Phase - Fit the Thirteenth. Find it from the BBC Radio 4 website.
Best explanation of Google Ads that I’ve ever heard… I never realised that advertisers had to outbid each other to stay at the top of the ads column.
Radio lets you be a bit more folksy in your explanations. A less-awesome talent might have resorted to reading chunks of his book, but this guy really just sounds like he’s explaining Google to a mate
