131–140 of 167 posts
I'm going to miss his waffle-free 'Hello' intro. It is/was like stepping on to an airport travelator that's moving 30% faster than you were expecting.
Ach, very sad. Like Paxman on University Challenge, he was clearly finding it harder and harder towards the end. I hope he's alright, it'd be a tough one to let go of, I can't imagine a better show to present. Brilliant series, can't recommend highly enough to anyone who's not encountered it.
i wouldnt be surprized if hes been gently pushed out. unfortunately the clarity of his voice has noticeably worsened. listen to a 10+ year old episode and he sounds much clearer as a native speaker its all fine and intelligeable, but for anyone ESL it'd be challenging bc its so much mumbling now
I had, and I still have a lot of issues with understanding his accent. It's very hard for me to get what he's saying.
In Our Time has been my favorite podcast to listen. It made me appreciate how well moderated a discussion among experts can be and how poorly most moderators on other radio programs or conference panels do their jobs. My complaint with In Our Time is that BBC started inserting the "this program is supported by ads outside of the U.K." ads in the middle of the discussions. The ads start and end with an extremely annoy…
The thing that makes it work (aside from Melvyn's excellent hosting) is that they have an unspoken but fundamental assumption about the audience, which is that the listeners are intelligent. Like, it's ok to have nuance, to dig deep into topics, it's even ok for listeners not to follow every point precisely. But the listeners are smart people that appreciate hearing from people who know what they're talking about. Th…
Its odd that when places like HN or Reddit ask for favourite podcasts the amazing resources of BBC radio (that precede all modern internet podcasts and the best of which still wipe the floor with most of them) are often forgotten. In Our Time represents the best of the form, and the BBC, and that's significantly down to the excellence of Bragg. The archive (you may need a VPN outside the UK): https://www.bbc.co.uk/pr…
I do feel that IOT would benefit from being longer - it often feels rushed. Podcasts excel at "deep dives" in a way that radio is barred from doing: a podcaster can say "I think I'm gonna do 30 hours on George Jones this year" (real example), and nobody can stop them. IOT's format has a lot of statements, but not many questions. Bragg doesn't often say "hold on, what are the consequences of that?" (unless it's a prep…
If ever I feel there is a need for a deeper dive into a subject, there a thousand ways I can spend hours listening or watching someone drone on about it.
Its odd that when places like HN or Reddit ask for favourite podcasts the amazing resources of BBC radio (that precede all modern internet podcasts and the best of which still wipe the floor with most of them) are often forgotten. In Our Time represents the best of the form, and the BBC, and that's significantly down to the excellence of Bragg. The archive (you may need a VPN outside the UK): https://www.bbc.co.uk/pr…
Excluding things like political things which wouldn't land the same to international listeners, my favourites are:
The Kitchen Cabinet You're Dead To Me Crowdscience Inside Science Just a Minute The Unbelievable Truth Nature Table Take Four Books Witness History Last Word Gardener's Question Time A Good Read (I wrote a blog post a while ago about scraping the books using LLMs to extract from the text of the descriptions: https://rpep.dev/posts/a-good-read-extracting-books-with-llm...)
Its odd that when places like HN or Reddit ask for favourite podcasts the amazing resources of BBC radio (that precede all modern internet podcasts and the best of which still wipe the floor with most of them) are often forgotten. In Our Time represents the best of the form, and the BBC, and that's significantly down to the excellence of Bragg. The archive (you may need a VPN outside the UK): https://www.bbc.co.uk/pr…
> the amazing resources of BBC radio (that precede all modern internet podcasts and the best of which still wipe the floor with most of them) are often forgotten I don't know, there are some definite bright spots like IOT but the typical output of Radio 4 is definitely not massively in advance of the big podcasts. The Rest Is History/Politics are clearly hugely popular inside the UK and basically constitute "the comp…
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I was a massive fan of TRIP at the start but these days I find it tedious to listen to sometimes.
TRIP was formed in the turbulence of the crashing conservative governerment and it was a breath of fresh air to have people close to the inside who were commenting on unfolding events nearly daily while also saying all the things that traditional media didn't. I looked forward to TRIP every time Boris blundered so that I could hear the guys disect it with a few personal anecdotes thrown in from their time in power. N…
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I was a massive fan of TRIP at the start but these days I find it tedious to listen to sometimes.
The News Agents has almost entirely replaced TRIP for me. I still like some of their Leading interviews but TRIP itself I've gone right off.
I fear Emily Maitlis will annoy me more than Alistair Darling does though. Can't win.
There's always The Rest Is History for neutral interesting information!
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I recently listened to the episode on The Antikythera Mechanism and found it quite fun - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024x0g Also, I wanted to mention something interesting - back when LLM-driven applications were just emerging, someone posted on Hacker News about how they categorized In Our Time episodes using the Dewey Decimal System with LLMs. Cool stuff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073603
I love this one and actually posted the wiki to the The Antikythera Mechanism here (although didn't get traction unfortunately).