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| Slow radio is a silly idea. Give me speed and brevity instead | Slow radio is a silly idea. Give me speed and brevity instead |
| (1 day later) | |
| All things ‘slow’ are now in fashion, but is this just a particularly daft example of intellectual snobbery? | |
| Sun 3 Sep 2017 00.05 BST | |
| Last modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017 02.46 GMT | |
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| In what can only amount to a direct challenge to rival broadcasters with an eye on its birdsong, the controller of BBC Radio 3, Alan Davey, has claimed his station as “the natural home for slow radio”. | In what can only amount to a direct challenge to rival broadcasters with an eye on its birdsong, the controller of BBC Radio 3, Alan Davey, has claimed his station as “the natural home for slow radio”. |
| Announcing his new season commissions last week, Mr Davey added that Radio 3, historically the home of music and arts broadcasting, has an additional mission, one advanced by, say, the sounds of footsteps and cheeping, as “an antidote to today’s often frenzied world”. There were ambitious plans, chilling to anyone who has, thus far, found the BBC’s experiments in slow radio to be approximately as effective, as a frenzy-antidote, as a pneumatic drill in a pavement. The station wishes, he said, to take the fashion for slow radio to “the next level”. | Announcing his new season commissions last week, Mr Davey added that Radio 3, historically the home of music and arts broadcasting, has an additional mission, one advanced by, say, the sounds of footsteps and cheeping, as “an antidote to today’s often frenzied world”. There were ambitious plans, chilling to anyone who has, thus far, found the BBC’s experiments in slow radio to be approximately as effective, as a frenzy-antidote, as a pneumatic drill in a pavement. The station wishes, he said, to take the fashion for slow radio to “the next level”. |
| You thought nothing could be more challenging in today’s often frenzied world than the award-winning writer Horatio Clare’s recent 10-mile “sound walk” along Offa’s Dyke, broadcast over four hours? How about the same author’s forthcoming 250-mile sound walk as he repeats a journey made by the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach, in 1705, from Arnstadt to Lübeck? “Clare’s programme,” the BBC promises, “will feature the sounds of the natural landscape and the trudging of boots, interspersed with snatches of Bach’s music and Clare’s reflections on the journey.” | You thought nothing could be more challenging in today’s often frenzied world than the award-winning writer Horatio Clare’s recent 10-mile “sound walk” along Offa’s Dyke, broadcast over four hours? How about the same author’s forthcoming 250-mile sound walk as he repeats a journey made by the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach, in 1705, from Arnstadt to Lübeck? “Clare’s programme,” the BBC promises, “will feature the sounds of the natural landscape and the trudging of boots, interspersed with snatches of Bach’s music and Clare’s reflections on the journey.” |
| Listeners new to the genre should prepare themselves, then, for the sound of trickling streams, of obscure rustling, of warbling, baaing and, between plentiful pauses – so long, sometimes, that you wonder, immersively, if Mr Clare is still all right – murmured observations such as: “An aeroplane high above.” Another long pause. Is the walker OK? He is: “Beautiful heavy dew this morning.” | Listeners new to the genre should prepare themselves, then, for the sound of trickling streams, of obscure rustling, of warbling, baaing and, between plentiful pauses – so long, sometimes, that you wonder, immersively, if Mr Clare is still all right – murmured observations such as: “An aeroplane high above.” Another long pause. Is the walker OK? He is: “Beautiful heavy dew this morning.” |
| Not that it’s all fun. Radio 3 has, you gather, a deeper, almost spiritual purpose for slow radio, Edward Blakeman, its head of music programmes, told the Guardian. “A lot of us lead busy lives, we have to think quickly, constantly thinking about new and different things… this is a chance to be reflective.” | Not that it’s all fun. Radio 3 has, you gather, a deeper, almost spiritual purpose for slow radio, Edward Blakeman, its head of music programmes, told the Guardian. “A lot of us lead busy lives, we have to think quickly, constantly thinking about new and different things… this is a chance to be reflective.” |
| To judge by previous experiments, many listeners will be delighted to oblige. Its fans, including those who could presumably, if they chose, go out for a long walk of their own, are apt to describe slow television and radio as relaxing, even “hypnotic”. If this form of entertainment cannot, like a Derren Brown show, successfully hypnotise everyone, its proliferation on both radio and on television is the BBC’s response to a significant part of the audience that is captivated by the sights and sounds from a narrowboat or by the noises contributed by fellow slow-radio fans that now occupy a regular slot on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. Cowbells, for instance. Waves. | To judge by previous experiments, many listeners will be delighted to oblige. Its fans, including those who could presumably, if they chose, go out for a long walk of their own, are apt to describe slow television and radio as relaxing, even “hypnotic”. If this form of entertainment cannot, like a Derren Brown show, successfully hypnotise everyone, its proliferation on both radio and on television is the BBC’s response to a significant part of the audience that is captivated by the sights and sounds from a narrowboat or by the noises contributed by fellow slow-radio fans that now occupy a regular slot on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. Cowbells, for instance. Waves. |
| On Radio 3, meditation might be invited via a colony of gannets or the deceptively – it turns out – calming sound of a sandbar in a Tanzanian river. “It may sound tranquil,” said the sound recordist, Chris Watson, “but there were lions and elephants in the bushes.” A frenzied world can evidently live without their roaring and trumpeting. | On Radio 3, meditation might be invited via a colony of gannets or the deceptively – it turns out – calming sound of a sandbar in a Tanzanian river. “It may sound tranquil,” said the sound recordist, Chris Watson, “but there were lions and elephants in the bushes.” A frenzied world can evidently live without their roaring and trumpeting. |
| For the Norwegians, long acknowledged as the pioneers and masters of unimaginably protracted programmes, the message is clear: the British – and their gannets – are coming. Already, when compared with the BBC’s more austere offerings, some Norwegian classics – a five-day cruise along the coast, for instance, or a 12-hour National Knitting Eve – have come to look a little lurid. In a TED – and therefore mercifully succinct – talk on the invention and evolution of slow television, Thomas Hellum, a producer at the state’s NRK broadcaster, expands on the logistics that established the cruise film as much more – though this is how it has often been depicted – than a tranquil record of maritime sights. Hi-tech cameras were installed to capture faces in crowds; a team of 23 occupied the shipboard control room. | For the Norwegians, long acknowledged as the pioneers and masters of unimaginably protracted programmes, the message is clear: the British – and their gannets – are coming. Already, when compared with the BBC’s more austere offerings, some Norwegian classics – a five-day cruise along the coast, for instance, or a 12-hour National Knitting Eve – have come to look a little lurid. In a TED – and therefore mercifully succinct – talk on the invention and evolution of slow television, Thomas Hellum, a producer at the state’s NRK broadcaster, expands on the logistics that established the cruise film as much more – though this is how it has often been depicted – than a tranquil record of maritime sights. Hi-tech cameras were installed to capture faces in crowds; a team of 23 occupied the shipboard control room. |
| Norwegians, who turned out and waved at the ship in huge numbers, were invited to transform the voyage, using social media, into an act of collective celebration. Or collective-ish. Academics at Lillehammer University, researching the appeal of slow television, found that half the Norwegian population had not watched any, or hardly any slow, TV, with the two groups differentiated more than anything by age. The average age of the Norwegian slow TV viewer was around 60. | Norwegians, who turned out and waved at the ship in huge numbers, were invited to transform the voyage, using social media, into an act of collective celebration. Or collective-ish. Academics at Lillehammer University, researching the appeal of slow television, found that half the Norwegian population had not watched any, or hardly any slow, TV, with the two groups differentiated more than anything by age. The average age of the Norwegian slow TV viewer was around 60. |
| For not-much-younger Radio 4 or Radio 3 listeners, then, particularly those with time to spare, 10 minutes of warbling or five hours of immersive sound walk could be just the thing to stop them switching over to Chris Evans. | For not-much-younger Radio 4 or Radio 3 listeners, then, particularly those with time to spare, 10 minutes of warbling or five hours of immersive sound walk could be just the thing to stop them switching over to Chris Evans. |
| It could be, as a member of this unhurried demographic, that I have simply yet to find the seabird colony, farm animal or solitary walker – there being little competition as yet from rival broadcasters – with a sound that is conducive, as intended by the BBC controllers, to meditation. And, to be fair to the gannets, in this era of overpaid talent, they at least supplied their 10 minutes gratis. That was half of slow television’s initial appeal in 2009, when it was suggested to NRK’s then head of programming, Rune Møklebust: “We thought it would be something completely new… and cheap.” | It could be, as a member of this unhurried demographic, that I have simply yet to find the seabird colony, farm animal or solitary walker – there being little competition as yet from rival broadcasters – with a sound that is conducive, as intended by the BBC controllers, to meditation. And, to be fair to the gannets, in this era of overpaid talent, they at least supplied their 10 minutes gratis. That was half of slow television’s initial appeal in 2009, when it was suggested to NRK’s then head of programming, Rune Møklebust: “We thought it would be something completely new… and cheap.” |
| For all that, there must be a strong case, for anyone truly oppressed by the frenzied world described by Alan Davey, for cutting down on time spent passively imbibing not much at snail’s pace, even if the raw material is landscape-related. “I’m looking for the external sounds of the countryside which will create inner thought,” Davey said of the first Clare ramble, giving the distinct impression that such special cognitive events might not be available to someone, say, looking out of a window in Hull. It’s a tribute to our leading slow broadcasters, in fact, that their experiments in mediated experience are so readily categorised as authentic and transporting as opposed to inducements to further, protracted, sofa-bound inactivity: Flog It!, with chaffinches. | For all that, there must be a strong case, for anyone truly oppressed by the frenzied world described by Alan Davey, for cutting down on time spent passively imbibing not much at snail’s pace, even if the raw material is landscape-related. “I’m looking for the external sounds of the countryside which will create inner thought,” Davey said of the first Clare ramble, giving the distinct impression that such special cognitive events might not be available to someone, say, looking out of a window in Hull. It’s a tribute to our leading slow broadcasters, in fact, that their experiments in mediated experience are so readily categorised as authentic and transporting as opposed to inducements to further, protracted, sofa-bound inactivity: Flog It!, with chaffinches. |
| As much as Radio 3’s offer of enhanced reflection opportunities is appreciated, these moments are conceivably more precious when self-created, on actual country walks, in the time we could enjoy if many other things – from sprawling novels, films and two-interval, custodial-length plays, to agonising PowerPoint presentations, podcasts and certain BBC programmes – were halved or more in length. | As much as Radio 3’s offer of enhanced reflection opportunities is appreciated, these moments are conceivably more precious when self-created, on actual country walks, in the time we could enjoy if many other things – from sprawling novels, films and two-interval, custodial-length plays, to agonising PowerPoint presentations, podcasts and certain BBC programmes – were halved or more in length. |
| The best thing slow radio could do, for this listener, is speed up. Ideally, Mr Clare could complete his broadcast walk at a rapid trot (little being known, according to Radio 3, about Bach’s journey), at a broadcast speed of around 250mph, leaving the unused hours for more than the designated snatches of related music. | The best thing slow radio could do, for this listener, is speed up. Ideally, Mr Clare could complete his broadcast walk at a rapid trot (little being known, according to Radio 3, about Bach’s journey), at a broadcast speed of around 250mph, leaving the unused hours for more than the designated snatches of related music. |
| One of the greatest pleasures of the Edinburgh festival, I have just discovered, is that so much, plays included, goes on no longer than an hour. What you lose in cumulative effects, you gain in extra discoveries. As with a slow radio gannet, so with a four-hour 35-minute Oresteia: the briefest exposure can sometimes be as good as a feast. | One of the greatest pleasures of the Edinburgh festival, I have just discovered, is that so much, plays included, goes on no longer than an hour. What you lose in cumulative effects, you gain in extra discoveries. As with a slow radio gannet, so with a four-hour 35-minute Oresteia: the briefest exposure can sometimes be as good as a feast. |
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