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!

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.

NOT that I wish family illness on anyone...

...but, damn!, it sure is nice to listen to CBC Radio One's Metro Morning without that pretentious blowhard Andy Barrie yakking over the people he's "interviewing". If Andy doesn't return, the Corp. would be seriously remiss if they didn't offer the job to the always-engaging Kevin Sylvester.

Doctor When?

It wasn't until speaking with a couple of friends that I realized the CBC has not yet shown "The Next Doctor", the Doctor Who Christmas Special. I download all these things through bittorrent as soon as they've aired on BBC UK, as I prefer to see them sooner than later, and also because I want to see all the related shows, like Doctor Who Confidential. Does the casual viewer of Doctor Who on CBC even know they've announced a new Doctor?

What is CBC doing? Given that this is a very popular show, why are they so haphazard with when they run it?

So, to those of you haven't seen the Christmas special, you now know it's set in Victorian England, features the Cybermen and a creature called the Cyberking who destroys chunks of London, and that Tennent is being replaced, all thanks to my previous posts.

Um... sorry?