´óÏó´«Ã½

Very engaging response to the place of religion in the US election from . Her new book, only published in the US at the moment, tries to challenge the conventional wisdom that evangelical Christians are all Republicans.

As she says in an , she was inspired by an incident in church when the pastor said his congregation would have to vote Republican "to be in line with God's wishes." As a Democrat, and a believing Christian, she felt hijacked.

Benazir Bhutto felt her Islamic faith was being hijacked by extremists, too, as we heard a few days ago from her co-author.

It would be intriguing to hear from the 'hijackers' how they are getting such precise instructions from their heavenly HQ.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Sometimes I'm too polite.

This week, I interviewed the man who wants to be the resident Barack Obama impersonator on Saturday Night Live - they're auditioning.

His name is and he's an actor with some network TV and movie work behind him.

Naturally, I asked him to give us a flavour of him being Obama.

It wasn't convincing, to put it politely. Having explained how well he understood the varying accents used by the Democratic hopeful, Ron then did some wordy speechifying - but as far as I could tell it was still the original Ron, nothing like Mr. Obama.

I wimped out - I really didn't feel I could tell an American he couldn't do an American accent.

So I thanked Ron effusively. After the programme the team said I should have told Ron bluntly what I thought. But I'm such a coward.

Anyway, he's already performed as Barack in a breakdance competition against a Hillary lookalike, so who am I to tell him he's not very good.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

In the spring of 1989, I sat at a pavement cafe in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, eating ice cream and watching a policeman in a tin hat stopping cars to search them for weapons.

I had arrived there after the most astonishing road trip in the small red van I had bought to carry my camera equipment, thinking it would be tough enough for most roads in the region. I hadn't factored in the mountains of Kosovo.

As soon as I came over the border from Montenegro, it wasn't really a road at all. For much of the route down to the first major town, Pec or Peje, I was driving along a boulder-strewn river bed, sometimes with flowing water, sometimes not.

Halfway down, I was flagged down by a group of people cradling a boy aged about 7. (In 1989, stopping seemed safe enough - a few years later I would probably have been much more cautious.)

I had no Albanian and they had no English. But it wasn't hard to understand that they wanted me to help get the boy down to the town for treatment. The boy and his father squashed into the passenger seat, bringing with them the not unpleasant smell of sheep - I guessed that most of their lives and luxuries were associated with the sheep on the hillsides.

It was an unusual introduction to a people I always found friendly and genuine. And my favourite Kosovar is Violeta Redzepagic, who once was a punk singer of Eurovision songs and later accompanied me to Baghdad during the 1991 war - but that's a different and much longer story.

Violeta introduced me to historians and writers who told me the story of the Kosovar people. It's complex, sometimes bizarre and rarely shows their neighbours in a good light. In 1913, after Serbia occupied the territory, the Serb parliament debated what to do with it. As , a Serb historian explains,

"...government officials insisted that the inhabitants of those territories were not sufficiently civilised, that they were not sufficiently politically mature, and that the Serbian democratic constitution could not be extended to those lands because their inhabitants would not know what to do with the rights it granted. "

So they sent in the Serb army to run Kosovo.

It wasn't a great start and we have just seen the latest result.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

One of the skills broadcasters who 'go live' tend to polish and pride themselves on is talking to time - whether it's DJs speaking over the introductory bars of a song and stopping just as the singer gets going or hitting the top of the minute so the news starts on time, as we have to at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ World Service.

I'm not sure if there have been some spectacular failures so the technicians thought we needed help, but there is now a very clever new clock on our desk in Studio S39, where many of the programmes like World Update come from.

I don't think it's really a clock at all - it's a computer pretending to be a clock. Because it not only offers analogue ticking hands and green digital timekeeping, it also gives you a bit of script you can read to get the time exactly right.

How long can it be before it actually does the whole job and makes the announcement? As a crusty old radio hand once warned me at his retirement party: "All they need is the voiceprint, son, and you're history..."

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is by definition not afraid of what you might call social engineering. The organisation was founded on the idea that 'we know best' - in the nicest possible way, of course: Lord Reith's plan for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ when he became the first Director General was to "educate, inform and entertain". In that order.

You can see why the organisation became known as Auntie...

In 1982, it launched the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Micro, an affordable computer which "was the starting block for many of today's highly-paid programmers."

Now the public service remit is giving the ´óÏó´«Ã½ charge of the future again, at least in Britain. I'm referring to the future of broadcasting, because two items of news today prove that, right or wrong, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is shaping the future of media because it's big enough to do so and because commercial concerns find it hard.

So, our Head of Future Media & Technology (whose enthusiastic department has helped relaunch this blog so you won't hear anything bad about him from me) has announced a move away from tape in television to recording on memory card - those thin little chips you put in your MP3 player and digital camera.

Auntie's buying power and creative power means that technology companies will get a boost from this decision, putting even more effort into researching and developing devices that will make the most of the digitization of media of all kinds. I think this means some exciting integration of different media disciplines and hope I can get my head round the possibilities.

The other important decision announced today was taken by a commercial company, the radio network GCap Media. Their new chief executive has decided that too few people are listening on digital radio, DAB here and HD radio in the US, for there to be any profit in it. And so two of GCap's digital only stations, The Jazz and PlanetRock, are to close. The ´óÏó´«Ã½, on the other hand, is doing well with digital radio and plans to continue supporting the new technology.

And how new is it, anyway? It's been around for something like a decade and while the receivers were rare and expensive three years ago they now sell in supermarkets for a few pounds. As a former presenter on the forerunner to The Jazz, JazzFM, which itself was closed because it was said to be 'uncommercial', I am sad that what is a very important music form is once again to be relegated to a few hours a week on the ´óÏó´«Ã½.

Or maybe Auntie will take that task on too? There may not be a lot of jazz fans but they're a passionate and well-heeled bunch so they will lobby hard for their own full time station.

Some of ou listening to World Update use HD radio - in Washington DC you have no choice at the moment. If you're in that situation, please use the comments box to let me know about your technical and listening experience.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

A few years ago, when I hosted a nightly phone-in (or talk show) on London's commercial news station, if we were ever short of calls there was one subject guaranteed to light up the lines. That subject was (to put it politely) dog muck.

Mention that we'd had more complaints about irresponsible dog owners and hundreds of people would queue up to tell us their smelly tale (tail?) of treading in something unpleasant.

I'm talking about a few years back, when the dangers to children of diseases spread by dogs were beginning to be recognised. It seemed to me then that Londoners were so angry, they would rise up in a massacre of mutts, rather like the in pre-Revolutionary Paris.

And at the time, I agreed with them. As a frequent jogger around London's streets, I had to contend with a number of vicious dogs over the years - I've still got a scar on my knee where one bit me in an unprovoked attack. (As I sat in the Accident and Emergency waiting room at Greenwich Hospital, the police persuaded me not to 'press charges' because the dog was the only friend of an old man living in a homeless hospital - would they show the same compassion today, I wonder?)

But now, we have a dog in the city. Here she is:

She's a Welsh Terrier and we got her for lots of reason. One was my youngest son's nervousness with dogs which was becoming a real problem for him. We couldn't go to the park without him anxiously mentioning that there was a dog in the far distance. His twin sister would excitedly exclaim "Yes, there is a dog!" and rush towards it arms out for a hug. Twins are confusing sometimes.

We hoped that if he got to know a dog from puppyhood, he would realise that they can be friendly. Luckily it worked and he now pats well-behaved dogs without a second thought.

So I thought I would ask for your views - are dogs suited to cities? Or are they an unfortunate form of pollution? Are urban dog owners irresponsible and slightly weird? Or are they strengthening humanity's relationship with the planet by talking to the animals?

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

A few years ago, when I hosted a nightly phone-in (or talk show) on London's commercial news station, if we were ever short of calls there was one subject guaranteed to light up the lines. That subject was (to put it politely) dog muck.

Mention that we'd had more complaints about irresponsible dog owners and hundreds of people would queue up to tell us their smelly tale (tail?) of treading in something unpleasant.

I'm talking about a few years back, when the dangers to children of diseases spread by dogs were beginning to be recognised. It seemed to me then that Londoners were so angry, they would rise up in a massacre of mutts, rather like the in pre-Revolutionary Paris.

And at the time, I agreed with them. As a frequent jogger around London's streets, I had to contend with a number of vicious dogs over the years - I've still got a scar on my knee where one bit me in an unprovoked attack. (As I sat in the Accident and Emergency waiting room at Greenwich Hospital, the police persuaded me not to 'press charges' because the dog was the only friend of an old man living in a homeless hospital - would they show the same compassion today, I wonder?)

But now, we have a dog in the city. Here she is:

She's a Welsh Terrier and we got her for lots of reason. One was my youngest son's nervousness with dogs which was becoming a real problem for him. We couldn't go to the park without him anxiously mentioning that there was a dog in the far distance. His twin sister would excitedly exclaim "Yes, there is a dog!" and rush towards it arms out for a hug. Twins are confusing sometimes.

We hoped that if he got to know a dog from puppyhood, he would realise that they can be friendly. Luckily it worked and he now pats well-behaved dogs without a second thought.

So I thought I would ask for your views - are dogs suited to cities? Or are they an unfortunate form of pollution? Are urban dog owners irresponsible and slightly weird? Or are they strengthening humanity's relationship with the planet by talking to the animals?

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

A few years ago, when I hosted a nightly phone-in (or talk show) on London's commercial news station, if we were ever short of calls there was one subject guaranteed to light up the lines. That subject was (to put it politely) dog muck.

Mention that we'd had more complaints about irresponsible dog owners and hundreds of people would queue up to tell us their smelly tale (tail?) of treading in something unpleasant.

I'm talking about a few years back, when the dangers to children of diseases spread by dogs were beginning to be recognised. It seemed to me then that Londoners were so angry, they would rise up in a massacre of mutts, rather like the in pre-Revolutionary Paris.

And at the time, I agreed with them. As a frequent jogger around London's streets, I had to contend with a number of vicious dogs over the years - I've still got a scar on my knee where one bit me in an unprovoked attack. (As I sat in the Accident and Emergency waiting room at Greenwich Hospital, the police persuaded me not to 'press charges' because the dog was the only friend of an old man living in a homeless hospital - would they show the same compassion today, I wonder?)

But now, we have a dog in the city. Here she is:

She's a Welsh Terrier and we got her for lots of reasons. One was my youngest son's nervousness with dogs which was becoming a real problem for him. We couldn't go to the park without him anxiously mentioning that there was a dog in the far distance. His twin sister would excitedly exclaim "Yes, there is a dog!" and rush towards it arms out for a hug. Twins are confusing sometimes.

We hoped that if he got to know a dog from puppyhood, he would realise that they can be friendly. Luckily it worked and he now pats well-behaved dogs without a second thought.

So I thought I would ask for your views - are dogs suited to cities? Or are they an unfortunate form of pollution? Are urban dog owners irresponsible and slightly weird? Or are they strengthening humanity's relationship with the planet by talking to the animals?

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?