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How BBC iPlayer and podcasts can mess with your mind

BBC Radio 4 logo
  • Posted at 5:00pm
  • 15 September 2008
  • by DavidBrown-RT
  • 5 comments

BBC iPlayer: it makes the unmissable, unmissable. Or in the case of BBC Radio 4's Quote Unquote, it makes the horrendous still tragically available. As a Radio 4 devotee, I have mixed feelings about the BBC's online catch-up service.

In Our Time has me sweating like a code-breaker at Bletchley Park hunched over an Enigma machine - I feel I'm only really understanding one word in four. So the opportunity to listen again or even download and take Melvyn on the Move gives me more chances to follow the argument. But breaking free of the Radio 4 schedule, instead of liberating me, has left my circadian rhythm with two left feet.

So much of the channel's output is tailored towards time slots and the peaks and troughs of daily life: Farming Today, The Friday Play and Book at Bedtime. To me, listening to Start the Week on a Wednesday lunchtime seems fraught with danger: will catching up during my dinner hour cause a rift in the space-time continuum? I once tempted fate by downloading Saturday Live the following Friday evening and ended up eating my breakfast 12 hours before I needed to. It was pandemonium.

To be reductionist about this, radio - being telly without the pictures - is all about doing something else while you listen. Cooking while The Archers is on and drowning out the plangent moans of Ruth with your electronic blender, throwing Cheerios at the stereo over breakfast when Thought for the Day starts. The routine of living sits comfortably alongside Radio 4.

And living is all to do with those fleeting moments that give you pleasure, the instances that sneak up on you unexpectedly, unplanned and life-affirming. Where were you when newsreader Charlotte Green got the giggles? OK, so it's not up there with JFK being assassinated or the moon landing, but I was making tea in the kitchen and as soon as poor Charlotte broke down uncontrollably, I was yelling up the stairs to my wife, "Oh, you've just missed something hilarious on the Today programme."

But of course, she hadn't missed it. Because there it was, half an hour later, ready to be added to MP3 players across the land as its own special podcast. Something being the preserve of those who just happened to be there to catch it has become an obsolete occurrence.

iPlayer has become the technological equivalent of catching flies in amber. But it all seems so effortless. I felt like a dedicated fan, hitting play and record to tape BBC Radio 1's The Mary Whitehouse Experience and then distributing black market cassettes in the school playground. Where's the fun now?

There's also the temptation of putting your life on hold - the I'll-just-get-it-online philosophy. But secretly you know you never will. I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to treat Radio 4 like I do my online shopping, putting two Front Rows and one Just a Minute in my imaginary basket before heading for the checkout. I'll continue to stumble around on the airwaves with all its many hesitations, repetitions and deviations. Even if I have to go by way of Quote Unquote.

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Comments

  • Posted on 03 October 2009
  • at 8:42pm
  • by Julian

well, serendipity on Radio 4 has been a thing of the past since they invented banding or whatever they call it. Now its the same kind of thing at the same time every day.

But surely if the effect of more channels and everything on demand is that we watch less telly and listen to less radio then we must be using our time for active pursuits. A good thing all round then.

  • Posted on 05 September 2009
  • at 8:20pm
  • by Adetheshades

I'm with you, David - I listen to the radio much less now that it is all availble on demand: part of the experience of (in particular Radio 4) was its serendipity: I would listen whenever I could because I never knew what gem would be there to discover, and in so doing I heard a host of things that were at the very least semi-precious and I would have never have spcifically tuned in for. At some some bizarrely subliminal level "listen again" is for me just another example of choice-inflation that is (arguably) one of the curses of our modern society. I just don't want the burden of having to decide what to listen to…

  • Posted on 21 September 2008
  • at 11:32am
  • by Helen

Without Radio 4 programmes available via podcast, I'd never be able to listen to them at all from the USA. In my opinion, that wonderful experience of reconnecting with the UK is more valuable than the fleeting opportunism of radio, where listening is once only.

  • Posted on 17 September 2008
  • at 6:01pm
  • by Ganglesprocket

The more the merrier surely? If it wasn't for podcasting and iplayer I'd never have heard Go4it's edition where children talked about their experiences of bereavement. It's a show I don't usually like but when I heard people raving about it after it went out I was delighted that I hadn't missed it. That's the real joy of the iplayer, you hear the good stuff without sitting through the dross.

  • Posted on 16 September 2008
  • at 2:10pm
  • by Dan

It's just nostalgia. Seriously, isn't it actually a great thing that everyone got to hear the Radio 4 giggler, via he iPlayer, a podcast or YouTube? In the old days, it would have just been and gone -- especially on radio. I also don't see the need for It'll Be Alright On The Night (which returns this Saturday) because outtakes are readily accessible to audiences minutes after they happen now. Denis Norden (or Griff Rhys Jones now) could fire his "team or researchers going through the tapes" and just spent 5-mins on YouTube looking for a few compilations! Yes, I have fond memories of recording stuff off radio/TV and gaining a bit of kudos at school, but I don't think kids these days would go back to how things were. I certainly wouldn't. Mind you, you were REALLY special if you had a pirated video of a film not released in the UK when I was at school. These days, any kid can queue up a torrent on their family PC and leave it running from 9am-4pm, before burning it to DVD.

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