Category Archives: Radio

Farewell Radiotalk

At the end of the coverage of the Radio Festival, Trevor Dann revealed the weekly podcast is no more.

I’ve never really worked in radio beyond running a mixer evaluation for Radio2 (the glamour), but RadioTalk often left me wishing I had done. It had a decent range of voices on, the roster was the right size that you could remember most of them. Even industry big-wigs like Tim Davie popped in from time-to-time. It had the pleasingly conversational tone of good radio, and combined with the occasional fuck-ups around the Academy-MDF as previous the non-studio studio was known, was an accessible listen to an outsider.

Anyway, thanks to Trevor and (long-suffering?) producer Heather Davies for creating something good for the last few years.

http://www.radioacademy.org/podcasts/

A Hunt related suggestion for styleguide writers

Many years ago a friend of the family got divorced: “Alan and Julie” were longstanding friends, and when “Alan” got into another relationship, we found it difficult to say “Alan” without “And Julie”.

We flipped them, it was always “Sue and Alan”.

In the light of recent naughtieness, can I suggest it’s always “Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt”.

Is scientific tear-down fair use?

Ben Goldacre has been asked by the lovely Lawyers at Global Radio to take-down his 44 minute extract of Jeni Barnett’s piece she did on MMR. Jenni, who later admitted she was woefully ill-prepared and started off an emotive debate on her blog with the standard pathos laden phrases like “as a mother…”, spouted a load of quasi-plausible pseudo-science about how awful vaccines were.

As Goldacre and others have pointed out many times, the Wakefield claims are totally refuted/withdrawn/dismissed now. There is no evidence that immune systems are overloaded by vaccination. There is a plethora of evidence that Measles is returning.

I hope he finds some legal representation, because at a time when we’re questioning the impact finance reporting can have on the real world economy, we should ask the same about science. But “as a mother…” people don’t tend to have opinions about the state of the credit default swaps market.