One more radio comedy series...

One only has to listen to Cabin Pressure, written by John Finnemore and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Roger Allam, Stephanie Cole, and John himself, to realize what a perfect medium radio is for a sitcom.

Cabin Pressure is the story of small, struggling airline, MJN Air, and their small staff's struggles to stay out of bankruptcy and just get along. It's keenly-observed human behavior, with well-defined characters and jokes that flow naturally from the characters. The four main performances are uniformly excellent. Let's hope Benedict's TV role as Sherlock allows him time to record another series.

Available as a set of Audible downloads, and a must-hear for anyone who like well-written sitcoms.

Found it!

"It" being the radio program that fills the void left when CBC Radio 2 canceled Brave New Waves in 2007...


...it's Late Junction, on BBC Radio 3. Yes, I'm sounding like a shill for BBC Radio lately, but I don't care. Where else am I going to hear a guitar quartet arrangement of Arvo Pärt's Summa?!

Enjoy!

More Who Fun

This time from BBC Radio Wales. It's... The Terry Nation Story, an overview of the career of the man who created the Daleks.

Available until 8:00 p.m. (GMT) Sat, 1 Jan 2011.

In praise of BBC Radio

If I could pay the BBC license fee of £142.50 annually, I'd do so gladly. What? you gasp. Nearly C$300 for radio?! Yes. First because of the excellent content, and second because, out of the major English-speaking countries' public broadcasters, the BBC's media player is the best.

Have you ever tried to find a podcast or live radio stream on the CBC's website? Maddening. You bounce around from page to page until you hit a dead end or, all too often, a dead link. Then you get to click "back" a bunch of times and start your quest again. Program and podcast pages are separate (why?) and often not even linked (huh?). It's like the Mother Corp doesn't want you to find something to listen to.

The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) site has fewer dead links, but it's difficult to find programming of interest due to poor layout. That said, the program pages, once you find them, archive past shows nicely. Once you find a program you like and its corresponding page bookmark it! You may not be able to find it from the main page a second time.

NPR's player is better, but a lot of their old material is up in .ram format, requiring you forego the player and use RealPlayer, if you have it installed... Does anyone use RealPlayer any more? I haven't seen it for years. Also, the site's navigation is far from intuitive: new content could be posted at any time on one of hundreds of pages, and with no index page or all-encompassing guide, you'd miss it quite easily.

The BBC iPlayer (despite some marketing dork's stupid recommendation for its name) is uncluttered, well-organised, and well-maintained. Everything from the stations' last seven days of airplay is there, listed by station then chronologically.

You want listeners? Build it simply and they will come.

And finally because I'm talking about finding content there are two excellent sites to help with that: PublicRadioFan.com and Radio-Locator.

P.S. BBC? I wasn't kidding about £142.50.

Hellblazer-like programme on BBC Radio 4 UPDATED

Are you a fan of Hellblazer?

Rich Johnson, from BleedingCool.com writes, "Pilgrim is a modern day magical fantasy horror series by Sebastian Baczkiewicz, broadcast by BBC Radio 4. And it gloriously and unashamedly rips off John Constantine, by way of Fables." A fair summation, though the show does have a bit of original charm, too, despite the fact that it's a wee bit over-written in the amusing style of radio drama ("It's the phone!" says someone after the sound effect of a phone).

Series 2 consists of four episodes, running once a week on Tuesdays at 12.15 p.m. (London time), starting August 31. It can be heard live on bbc.co.uk/radio4 and will then be available for another week worldwide on the BBC Radio iPlayer.

Series one can be found as a bittorrent file at RadioArchive.cc. I imagine someone will post Series 2 once it has completed its run.

More on the series and other Constantine-like characters here.