February 2011
I am not a big fan of music. I can take it or leave it; as evidenced by the contents of my iTunes library which chronicles the music industry from June 1979 all the way through to September 1979.
In deference to my offspring, who have failed to be impressed by Golden Earing’s “Radar Love” and Focus’s “Hocus Pocus”, I have added “Mike’s Modern Mix” as a Playlist to my iPhone which includes a good number of what I am admonished for calling “tunes” but which are (mainly) “tracks” from this century; albeit with a slightly worrying amount of Take-That which continues to wind my lads up nicely.
When travelling, I tended to listen to the radio in the car but, when flying, I was always stuck as to what to listen to. I tried "Talking Books" for a while. But as I have grown older, I have found it easier to fall asleep on a plane (pretty much anywhere actually).
Falling asleep whilst listening to a Talking Book is not recommended. Mainly because I tend to drift in and out of sleep on a plane without really realising it. The result being, that I can miss whole chapters and then find I am listening to some new character in a completely new situation. I then have to re-wind to where I thought I had nodded off which can be very confusing.
In one case I was two-thirds of the way through a book when I realised I knew who the killer was, how he was caught and why he did it. This was very strange until I realised I must have listened to most of the book before, including the ending, on a previous long-haul flight. It was a very bizarre and intense feeling of déjà vu.
As an aside, it’s worth mentioning here, that having Talking Books in your iTunes library on your iPad, Pod or Phone is not good practice. This is because individual chapters on talking books are treated by iTunes just like a “tune” - sorry - a “track”.
Consequently, when listening to music on “shuffle”, it is very possible to move seamlessly from Dido’s “Life for Rent” to Chapter 14 of Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” and just as you are getting absorbed in the book, you are whisked off to Take That’s “Shine”. This does not make for stress-free travelling.
So, what should I listen to on the radio?
Well, I have tried most things. I started originally, I think, with Radio Caroline and the “Sunsilk Shampoo” Top 20 countdown on a Sunday evening whilst in my weekly bath. Bloody hell we must have been smelly in the 70’s - just one bath per week!
I listened to Radio 1 for a while but more for the fun of Noel Edmonds (which now sounds something of an oxymoron). I remember feeling very mature and grown-up when I migrated to Radio 4 and thinking what decent chaps Brians Redhead and Perkins were.
When Radio 5 live started, I transferred my affections there. A little less stuffy and a nice mixture of sport and news. I used to enjoy listening to Julian Worricker in the mornings and I thought I had found my “place”.
And then Worricker moved and Nicky bloody Campbell arrived. Good grief he gets me riled. Never before has anyone been quite so far up himself in my opinion. And never has anyone tried so hard to find a news story where no news story exists whilst at the same time managing to be so condescending. Although, I think Jeremy Vine is not far behind.
I blame the advent of 24-hour news programmes for the rise of such annoying presenters.
Messr’s Perkins and Redhead used to just report the news. In the words of Dragnet’s Joe Friday “Just the facts ma’am just the facts”. They did not endlessly speculate on “what ifs?” and the type of crap you hear now that is a result of trying to fill a 24 hours news programme with just 1 hour of actual news.
It struck me this morning as I was reading our local newspaper “The Echo” that my neighbour and I used to laugh at the contents of such papers: “Thieves stole a tube of Trebor Mints from a Ford Escort on Wednesday evening”, “Residents are Up-in-Arms at council’s new wheelie bin policy” but, it would appear that local newspapers are one of the last remaining bastions of straight-forward news reporting.
So what do I listen to now? Thank goodness for podcasts that automatically download and are there to listen to when you want to listen to them.