The Beeb, Lor’ luv it!
Jun 10th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Berlin’s mercury stands at 88 degrees (F.) for the second of three forecast days, so I’ll make this little Sunday supplement short and (I hope) sweet.
The almost innumerable reasons this wonderful Berlin has long since become my all-time favorite city in the entire world (after leisurely samplings of such other inferior burgs as New York, Paris, Munich, and San Francisco) include such peripheral emoluments as a 24-hour FM transmitter of the BBC’s globally planned World Service right here within the city limits plus, on cable, BBC World Television, which as a matter of course provides some of the classiest examples of that magical medium you can find anywhere.
For years, until Alistair Cooke died three years ago at the age of 96 (having ceased writing and broadcasting his classic weekly quarter-hour “Letter from America” only shortly before they carried him out feet-first), that unique broadcast had me hopelessly hooked; if I couldn’t hear it live, my nifty Grundig all-wave receiver recorded it for me automatically. (I almost never use the cassette facility of my car radio, and when I recently discovered a cassette in it and started it out of curiosity, it almost brought nostalgic tears to my eyes to hear that mellifluous voice, silenced forever in 2004.)
I admit to a similar weekly addiction to a BBC World Television program[me]: “Click” – a weekly half-hour roundup of late news for computeniks with an A-1 “presenter” (to use the Beeb’s term) in the person of Spencer Kelly. I won’t even attempt to describe for you his personal mixture of breezy expertise, especially since modern technology enables you to sample that program[me] yourself at your leisure, thanks to the magic of the Internet and the World-Wide Web. I found this week’s instalment unusually interesting – especially its exhaustive presentation about “open-source” software, downloadable anywhere free of charge, much of it comparable with commercial software you’d have to pay through the nose for.
If you haven’t yet discovered this weekly blessing, drop everything right now and click here.
One Response to “The Beeb, Lor’ luv it!”
Thank you for taking the time to write about Alistair Cooke. It is strange that here in Britain just last week a few members of the new cabinet were doubting the importance of the special relationship between the US and the UK – I for one am not ready to embrace Europe. Nor, after reading this, do I think it is prudent to discount the importance of the real “entente cordiale!” Ed