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Frank Skinner’s show is the ±75 minutes of talking from his Saturday morning radio show. He’s joined by Emily Dean and Alun Cochrane. It takes a while to get into their personalities and the clique of the whole thing, but once you’re there, it’s often amusing.
Friday Night Comedy alternates between the brilliant Now Show (Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis et al.) and the News Quiz with Sandy Toksviki and Jeremy Hardy. Always funny. As comedy should be. 30 minutes per week.
The Guardian Football Weekly with C4’s Football Italia guru Jame Richardson, has two 45 minute episodes each week. This season, they seem to have taken the decision to move to a more relaxed format, and it’s better for it. Very informative and enjoyable.
Justin Moorhouse is what I think of when I think ‘podcast’. It’s hugely informal: just him, a Northern comedian, going about his weekly business, chatting to friends and family. I think the title tells you how long each weekly episode is.
Radcliffe and Maconie’s BBC 6 Music show is condensed into 25 minutes a week: it’s interesting, but it’s too short and leaves you wanting more.
The Bugle is John Oliver and Andy Salzman’s online audio comedy vehicle. It’s very, very funny, very topical and often quite near the knuckle.

In addition to this, I’ve been downloading Nemone’s Electric Ladyland shows from BBC 6 Music. 2 hours of brilliant, brilliant electronica each Saturday night. It reminds me of recording off the radio onto your TDK C90s. Hashtag Old Skool.
It also stands as a reminder of just how bad music radio is in South Africa. Which isn’t so great.

Excluding the Nemone shows, that’s around 4 hours of podcasts each week, which is just about enough for my sitting in the traffic. All other audio moments are filled in with Nemone and/or music on the iPod. Anything to avoid 5fm and Cape Talk 567.

I’ve settled into a happy place with this now, but still, as ever, please share any recommendations below.

John Snow for the Ebola era

Posted on October 30, 2014October 30, 2014

Here’s a very important point:

It’s impossible to treat an epidemic when you know next to nothing about the population it’s ravaging.

Just thought I’d plonk this here for your reading delectation. It’s a good starting point as to how the principles of John Snow and the Broad Street pump are still relevant and how they can be applied to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and also how and why that’s not happening.
The piece itself is unremarkable, but the sum of its parts and all that…

It’s an instance where the gloss of digital ubiquity hides our lack of real understanding. Where technological solutionism masks the fact that nothing has been solved.

A lesson for us all in how technological Utopianism isn’t always quite the flawless answer to everything. There’s a lesson for SA’s TB diagnostic progamme in there too, but I’m wholly unwilling to elaborate on that bit.

PSB in CPT

Posted on October 30, 2014

I can’t believe it. I pop across to the UK for a couple of weeks and the Pet Shop Boys decide to make an appearance in SA.

“Cheers guys.” “Thanks for that.”

The “Pioneers of synth-pop and global music icons” are over here in December headlining the Sónar Cape Town and Johannesburg festivals (15th & 16th December and 12th December) before doing a standalone concert in Durban on the 19th.

I’m not here for any of them. Gutted. I think it would have been an absolute must.

On the plus side, Kasabian and the Inspiral Carpets are on while we’re over in the UK, so that might ease some of the pain.