On Friday, I went uptown to see John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programmebeing recorded at BBC Broadcasting House. I thought y’all might like to see some photos from the experience. This is old Broadcasting House:
Next to it is the new building, completed in the past couple of years:
Want to know what you can see inside? I’ll give you a clue: cough, cough, Doctor Who, cough, cough.
Follow me after the jump if you’ve managed to crack the code and are interested…
My lovely and esteemed wife has recently introduced me to the joys of Cabin Pressure, a Radio 4 comedy series set aboard the fictitious MJN (My Jet Now) Air, a tiny little outfit run by the crabby Carolyn Knapp-Shappey (Stephanie Cole from Waiting for God) that has only two pilots – the by-the-book captain Martin Crieff (Benedict Cumberbatch from Sherlock, Star Trek et al) and the ever-superior first officer Douglas Richardson (Roger Allam from The Thick Of It and Endeavour) – and an air steward, Cole’s simple but eternally upbeat son Arthur (John Finnemore, who also writes the show).
Featuring guest stars including John Sessions, Anthony Head (playing the fabulously named Hercules Shipwright), Prunella Scales and Alison Steadman, it’s an award-winning comedy with surprising depths that largely revolves around the games the pilots play to stave off boredom on long flights, the schemes they need to concoct to deal with difficult customers, mechanics and other airlines, and the tensions between Crieff and Richardson, Crieff always wanting to have been a pilot but having no real aptitude, while Richardson has never found anything hard but after a distinguished career, now finds himself first officer to Crieff at MJN thanks to his crossing certain legal lines at his previous job.
As well as being very funny, well written and well acted, it’s also capable of pathos and drama, so I recommend you catch up as best you can via Amazon, iTunes or other avenues.
The show is also a creator of some great memes. Here, for example, is the birth of the ‘Hey, Chief…’ meme, which my wife and I find a constant source of hilarity when we use it on each other (yes, we’re a fun pair):
If you’re a Cabin Pressure fan already, though, please enjoy the following encapsulation of a whole bunch of Cabin Pressure memes in a manner similar to the current Nikon ads. Do you recognise them all?
One of the most infamous and amazing events in US radio history was the reaction to Orson Welles’ 1938 dramatisation of HG Well’s War of the Worlds. Unaware that it was fiction, many listeners believed they were hearing a live radio broadcast of a Martian invasion of New Jersey, and panicked accordingly.
Since then, the events of that night have been dramatised on several occasions, including the 1975 TV movie The Night That Panicked America. It even featured in an episode of the TV show War of the Worlds, which argued that the Welles broadcast was a cover-up for an actual Martian invasion.
But the first and perhaps most interesting dramatisation is today’ Wednesday Play: an episode of Studio One called The Night America Trembled. It looks at the effect the broadcast had on various elements of society, including a group of card-playing frat boys, some policemen and, most poignantly, a young girl babysitting some children. As well as the hallowed and smileless newscaster Edward R Murrow popping up to narrate and put the play in its historical context, it also features numerous actors who would later go on to become famous: as well as Ed Asner and Warren Oates, James Coburn makes his television debut, John Astin appears uncredited as a reporter and in one of his earliest acting roles, Warren Beatty plays one of those card-playing frat boys.
Perhaps its most remarkable feature, though, is that not once does Orson Welles get name-checked. Apparently, people were still a little sore about the whole thing…
