I originally drafted this post towards the end of September. However just as I was adding a few links to it events led me to think
twice about hitting the ‘publish’ button, namely the media ‘revelations’ about Jimmy Savile’s ‘private life’.

I don’t particularly wish to make this into a comment piece about Savile’s actions in the past, however it did make me feel a little uneasy pointing readers towards examples of his work. So here we go with a slightly re-worked version of the piece I wrote several weeks ago:

 

Things I’ve been listening to:

I’ve noticed that Guardian Podcasts, or at least Media Talk, which I subscribe to to, have started placing ‘adverts’ on the front of their podcasts which tease to another advert tagged on the end of the podcast. Thought this was quite a neat idea – keeps the ‘interruption’ at the start nice and short, encouraging people to keep listening and possibly also encourage you to listen to the end.

Classic FM celebrated 20 years on-air. Which makes me want to highlight not so much things they’ve done to celebrate the anniversary, but make me think “was it really 20 years ago” when I discovered the now famous “bird song” broadcast on the radio in the music room at school one lunch time.

 

Things I’ve been watching:

Just the one interesting BBC Four documentary to note, The Age of the Train, which I’d recorded a little while ago, so won’t be on iPlayer any more. You can read the info yourself on the BBC Programme information page, but other than being a fascinating story in itself, it also highlighted the deceptively simple advertising campaign, fronted by Jimmy Savile using the phrase ‘The Age of the Train’. There was a particularly nice production effect used on some of these adverts, which used a sung “this is the age..”, with Savile speaking the ending “of the train”. The key thing being the delivery of Savile’s line. I don’t know if there was any radio spots in this British Rail campaign – but this would have worked well as a radio piece. There are several examples of the BR Age of the train adverts you can find on YouTube. I’ve decided I won’t link to these from here, which does rather limit the value of these observations when they lack the example, I’ll leave it up to you to look them up yourself if you want.