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Apr. 21st, 2016 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsBefore starting in on the backlog of books I read while traveling and ... from before then (SO MANY), I probably should take the opportunity to mention This Is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine, which I read towards the end of last year.
This is one of those nonfiction books for which the title is a lot more lyrical and evocative than most of the actual text -- the book is a history of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, which the BBC ran from 1936 up to the 1948 war, but unfortunately there does ... not appear to be a ton of information available to build a really compelling history of the other PBS. So the book is quite dry, and spends a great deal of time doing deep textual analysis on, for example, ads for radios in Arabic-language newspapers. Not that this isn't interesting in and of itself! Especially if you happen to be interested in/invested in the history of public broadcasting and telecommunications, which I do in fact happen to be, professionally. But grippingly readable it is not exactly.
The book is significantly more interested in the Arabic-language broadcasts than the Hebrew- and English-language broadcasts, which is a little too bad, because I'm quite curious about all three. It's arguing that the decisions that the BBC made to split off and separate out departments focused on Arabic-language programming and Hebrew-language programming contributed in part to the increasingly sharpening divides between those communities, which ... is probably not entirely untrue, although, I mean, if I were designing a radio station for three different linguistic communities I would probably be tempted to make a significant number of my programming decisions around language as well. Anyway I wouldn't say it was my most compelling nonfiction read of 2015 but I learned some things, though there is still much more that I would be happy to know about the Palestine Broadcasting Service.
(Also, as always, history like this makes me want more spec-fic and historical fiction and adventure stories about broadcasting and radio and pirate radio. Such a rich vein, so little mined! Voices in the dark!)
This is one of those nonfiction books for which the title is a lot more lyrical and evocative than most of the actual text -- the book is a history of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, which the BBC ran from 1936 up to the 1948 war, but unfortunately there does ... not appear to be a ton of information available to build a really compelling history of the other PBS. So the book is quite dry, and spends a great deal of time doing deep textual analysis on, for example, ads for radios in Arabic-language newspapers. Not that this isn't interesting in and of itself! Especially if you happen to be interested in/invested in the history of public broadcasting and telecommunications, which I do in fact happen to be, professionally. But grippingly readable it is not exactly.
The book is significantly more interested in the Arabic-language broadcasts than the Hebrew- and English-language broadcasts, which is a little too bad, because I'm quite curious about all three. It's arguing that the decisions that the BBC made to split off and separate out departments focused on Arabic-language programming and Hebrew-language programming contributed in part to the increasingly sharpening divides between those communities, which ... is probably not entirely untrue, although, I mean, if I were designing a radio station for three different linguistic communities I would probably be tempted to make a significant number of my programming decisions around language as well. Anyway I wouldn't say it was my most compelling nonfiction read of 2015 but I learned some things, though there is still much more that I would be happy to know about the Palestine Broadcasting Service.
(Also, as always, history like this makes me want more spec-fic and historical fiction and adventure stories about broadcasting and radio and pirate radio. Such a rich vein, so little mined! Voices in the dark!)
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Date: 2016-04-25 04:04 am (UTC)If it hasn't yet come up, I strongly recommend Cabin Pressure (2008–2013), a BBC radio comedy series starring Stephanie Cole, Roger Allam, Benedict Cumberbatch, and John Finnemore, who was also the writer, with a prominent recurring character played by Anthony Stewart Head, who I always like. The plot concerns the (mis)adventures of the world's tiniest airline—they have one plane; "it's more of an airdot, really"—and the series is pretty much the only thing in which I have unequivocally liked Cumberbatch, partly because he's playing a nebbish. There are twenty-seven episodes, each named after a city beginning with a different letter of the alphabet; the finale is a two-parter. It is very funny and stray lines have worked their way into my household slang with