I was asked to be a guest of the inimitable Eric Doyle on The Crux Cast which is streamed live on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. If you’re interested in what makes me tick – and fancy a bit of a hoot – here’s an insight into my lifelong passion for words. Pull up a beanbag, pour yourself a drink….
Category: Podcasts
Lost in the woods – a Catholic shrine
This is a story that resonates with what is happening today. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio Norfolk and features an interview with my good friend and former BBC colleague Conal O’Donnell.
It’s the extraordinary story of Paul Hoda’c who fled to the UK during World War Two after his native Czechoslovakia was overrun by the Nazis. He settled here and as reminder of both his faith and the forests of his native country he built a Roman Catholic shrine near Dereham in Norfolk.
Here Conal explains how his own family is connected to the strange story of the shrine in the woods.
A Shropshire Symphony – winter
Taking pictures forces you to look at the world more carefully. You see things through the viewfinder that you might miss with the naked eye. And yet more detail resolves itself in the taken image.
So it is with recording sounds. You hear things through the headphones that might otherwise be lost in the background noise. The squeak of freshly fallen snow under foot. The scrunch of that same snow after a hard frost. The splashing of drips. Drips becoming trickles. Trickles becoming streams. Melt water tumbling over stones. And listening back, the source of each sound can be clearly “seen.”
Ears have eyes.
Ridiculously pretentious I know, but like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, The Shropshire Symphony will eventually have four movements. You can listen here to the Spring movement I recorded during the first lockdown in April 2020.
A Shropshire Symphony – spring
From early morning geese to late night owls via a blackbird serenading from his perch in our cherry tree, all these natural sounds were recorded over the four days of Easter in our garden near Ludlow.
To my way of thinking there is little or no separation between sounds and words. The best words are visual – in the sense that they readily conjure up a mental image. Sounds do the same. So I hope you can “see” the source of the sounds in this composition with your ears with the same vibrancy I first saw them with my eyes.
When madmen sailed the world
How accurately will The Mercy portray Donald Crowhurst, the British yachtsman who disappeared while taking part in the Sunday Times Golden Globe race? By all accounts Colin Firth plays the leading role with his usual understated flair and captures the descent into madness that we can only really extrapolate from Crowhurst’s log entries and radio broadcasts.
I didn’t have any more than Firth to work on when I made this radio documentary about Crowhurst and his fellow competitors Robin Knox-Johnson (the eventual winner), John Ridgway and Chay Blyth. So mine is necessarily an interpretation of limited facts mixed with dramatic licence, just like the Hollywood film version.
The lines between fact and fiction have always been blurred. Be fascinating nonetheless to compare and contrast the two. Do bear in mind I had a fraction of the budget (under £3k as I recall)!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:00 — 25.7MB)
Please note that this programmes was produced for and first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As a result it may contain copyright material so it is strictly for personal listening and must not be used for commercial gain without permission in writing. Please contact me if you’d like to obtain a licence.
Clever Trees – Westonbirt
In the last of his current series celebrating Clever Trees Richard Uridge visits the National Arboretum at Westonbirt in Gloucestershire, England.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:02 — 13.0MB)
Please note that this and other programmes in the Clever Trees series were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As a result they contain copyright material so they are strictly for personal use and must not be used for commercial gain withour our express permission in writing. Please contact me if you’d like to obtain a licence.
Clever Trees – Heligan
In the penultimate programme of his five part series on Clever Trees, Richard Uridge finds a headache-inducing specimen in the Lost Gardens of Heligan.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:02 — 12.9MB)
Please note that this and other programmes in the Clever Trees series were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As a result they contain copyright material so they are strictly for personal use and must not be used for commercial gain withour our express permission in writing. Please contact me if you’d like to obtain a licence.
Clever Trees – Australia
In the second of his programmes celebrating clever trees, Richard Uridge travels to Australia to investigate two apparent paradoxes: the tree that’s wet when it’s dry; and the clever idiot tree.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:04 — 13.0MB)
Please note that this and other programmes in the Clever Trees series were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As a result they contain copyright material so they are strictly for personal use and must not be used for commercial gain withour our express permission in writing. Please contact me if you’d like to obtain a licence.
Clever Trees – Malaysia
Of all the clever things that trees can do telling the time has to be one of the smartest. In this episode Richard Uridge travels to Malaysia in search of the Simpoh, a tree which, according to legend, flowers at precisely the same time every day.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:04 — 13.0MB)
Please note that this and other programmes in the Clever Trees series were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As a result they contain copyright material so they are strictly for personal use and must not be used for commercial gain withour our express permission in writing. Please contact me if you’d like to obtain a licence.
Clever Trees – Washington
In the first of five programmes on arboreal “intelligence” Richard Uridge visits George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon to meet two conjoined holly trees.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:04 — 13.0MB)
Please note that this and other programmes in the Clever Trees series were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As a result they contain copyright material so they are strictly for personal use and must not be used for commercial gain withour our express permission in writing. Please contact me if you’d like to obtain a licence.