What I've Been Listening To This Week

Third Reich & Roll is a cracking three part documentary from Radio 2.

Stephen Fry narrates this story about how Nazi technology helped develop tape recording technology, and then the post-war development of multi-track technologies and stereo.

Part 2 is available until Monday and details what kind of technologies various classic albums used, from the fact that The Beatles were limited to no more than eight tracks - sometimes using two four-track devices in parrallel to achieve this - to the incredible tape layering required by Queen to achieve Bohemian Rhapsody.

I suspect that this Monday's final episode will get into the digital realm where tracks are now limitless.

Thanks to Speechification for the heads-up.

David Mitchell's The Unbelievable Truth is back for a third series this week. Not to be confused with the not-at-all-the-same yet not-all-that-different-either Would I Lie To You on TV, it's another Monday night comedy panel game.

From a few weeks ago, the Radio 4 book of the week was The Decisive Moment. This shouldn't really still be available on the iPlayer, but epsiode 3 is strangely still there. Anyway, it's quite an interesting listen, and no doubt a good read. That said, I thought that it jumped around a little bit, and I'm always a tad suspicious of the science in books like this. It always feels like someone has tried to retro-actively fit a bit of science around an otherwise interesting story. That might be the serviceman who decided that a radar blip was a missile rather than friendly plane, or the fireman who came up with a life-saving wildfire survival technique in a moment which was otherwise counter-intuitive.

And our very own Frank Skinner podcast is doing quite nicely in the suspicious iTunes podcast charts (Suspicious because it's never entirely clear how they're generated).

Still to listen to: William Boyd on Raymond Chandler on this week's Open Book.