BBC 4, Baby

Recently I've taken to listening to the BBC while working since I'm doing rather repetitive grunt work at the moment. Normally if I'm writing, I can only listen to instrumental music, preferably baroque music, with the odd earworming infinite repeat of certain bands that aid me in my madness. I'm sure you can suss that out if you check my lastfm stats.

However, I've been really enjoying BBC, particularly BBC 4 "Literate Speech" for the indeed literate and often very witty discussions, and the comedies can be hilarious. It's like reverting back to the Golden Age of Radio.

For comedy, I particularly recommended His Master's Voice, a political satire that has just started, and I'm Sorry I Haven't Got a Clue, an extremely long-running program that bursts with innuendo and bon mots.

For a more serious bent, there is Start the Week, a discussion group of four newly published authors about their books and related topics. Very literate, very well-informed. It's hard to imagine mainstream media of this quality in American.

You can also poked around and find local programming in the arts scene in Scotland, say, which can be fun. I think I'll avoid the Welsh language programming for the moment though.