Something for the road

The staff of ITM will be taking a short break for the next week as I travel to Hungary for what I hope will be a most worthwhile trip.  Naturally, I have given much thought to entertainment for the thirty-hour bus journey there and back, and have already half-filled my MP3 player with music. However I am going to suggest, briefly, something both for my stimulation and for that of my readership during this hiatus - the broadcasts of the Reith Lectures.

If you are unaware of the existence of the RL, their format is simple: an expert records a series of talks, some with an audience present, on a pertinent and stimulating subject.  They are then broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service. Bertrand Russell was the first, setting the mark pretty high with 1948's Authority and the Individual, but there have been many great figures and as many interesting topics since.  My personal favourite, for obvious reasons, is Daniel Barenboim's In The Beginning was Sound from 2006, memorable for his devastating attack on piped muzak in public.

Back to the first paragraph.  For the former purpose, an enormous archive of programmes from the very first Lectures to those of 2010 are available for download, and from these I shall select one or two sets to listen to as I travel in the coming week.  For the latter, the 2011 Lectures are now being broadcast and transcribed (for those outside the UK unable to access the audio) and are possibly the most extraordinary yet. For a start, they have not been recorded in a London studio, but in a secret location 6000 miles away. Also, they are illegal - or at least, they are in the country where they were produced.

That country is Burma, and the lecturer Aung San Suu Kyi (along with contributions from a former head of MI5) which explains the previous two caveats.  The tapes were smuggled out of a country with one of the most oppressive governments in the world (and one where the BBC is banned from reporting) and, appropriately enough, are on the subject of 'Securing Freedom'. The BBC's production team have written a quietly uplifting blog entry on how they actually got the videos made (all of which can be viewed on YouTube if you are outside the UK), including, incredibly, a live satellite link to Kyi after the audience showing. The quality and hypnotically engaging content of the talks are both superb.

I appreciate that a coach full of students, most younger than myself, is not the ideal environment to hang on every word spoken on such learned subjects, but there are far worse ways to fill the time. The Reith Lectures also provide further evidence for my belief in the considerable superiority of radio over television. When I return: what happens in Hungary, the myth of elitism, and more in support of the previous sentence.