2 posts tagged “bbc”
I'm hopelessly addicted to Radio 4 - I can neither sleep nor work without it droning away in the background, and there are radios in every room of the house, all permanently tuned to that station.
But, as Gareth Maclean pointed out the other day, its schedules are packed with unlistenable drivel - You And Yours, all the drama, almost all the comedy - and I often have to resort to listening to podcasted episodes of In Our Time or FOOC which I've already heard to fill the gaps.
So, to make it possible to instantly switch away from Radio 4 the second it goes shite to the other acceptable radio station (the World Service), I bought Airfoil, a little application that will beam audio to my Airport Express from any application, instead of just iTunes.
Obviously, actually going to the trouble of opening Airfoil, and navigating to the BBC Radio player thingy is way too much faff, so here's a wee AppleScript to start beaming radio to Airport Express:
tell application "RealPlayer"
set player volume of player 0 to 100
set is muted of player 0 to false
open clip player 0 with URL "rtsp://rmlivev8bb.bbc.net.uk/farm/*/ev7/live24/radio4/live/r4_dsat_g2.ra"
end tell
tell application "RealPlayer" to play
tell application "Airfoil"
set pathToApp to (POSIX path of (path to application "RealPlayer"))
set newSource to make new application source
set application file of newSource to pathToApp
set (current audio source) to newSource
set (volume of every speaker) to 0.5
connect to every speaker
end tell
(The URL in the example above is for Radio 4's live stream, but you can get URLs for every other BBC station at Dave's handy page.)
That's still not handy enough, though. Enter Quicksilver triggers, which let me run the Applescript by pressing a couple of keys - ctrl+Command+4 launches Radio 4, ctrl+Command+W launches the World Service, and so on.
I will never have to listen to even a millisecond of Quote Un-fucking-quote again! Er, as long as I'm in the office when it comes on.
Look at this, the BBC have censored my pal Innes Smith's new radio show:
A COMEDY radio series that portrays Rolf Harris supposedly drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad has been shelved by the BBC.
Executives pulled the prime-time series only a week before it was due to air amid "anxieties over taste and decency".
The Franz Kafka Big Band was billed as "sure to surprise even the most unshockable" by BBC Radio Scotland when the Glasgow-based troupe's second series was commissioned.
But a segment called Rolf's Blasphemous Cartoon Time, in which the television favourite is portrayed as drawing images of deities such as the Prophet Muhammad and Buddha, worried BBC officials.
The decision to pull the series comes in the wake of controversy over cartoons of Muhammad being published in a Danish newspaper which sparked riots and protests around the world earlier this year.
So, the BBC commissioned a show on the basis that it will be 'shocking', then took it off the air for being 'shocking'. Ridiculous.
Since I have a CD of the entire series, I intend to ceremonially listen to each episode as it doesn't air.
I've only listened to the first episode so far, and it's good, silly stuff: 9/11 with cows instead of 'planes crashing into the twin towers, the film Hoots, Mon! is a blaxploitation flick about a pimp who whores out a flock of owls, a public relations campaign by the Taliban involving jihad-themed show tunes. Ironically enough, at one point the show is interrupted by an announcer because of supposed listener complaints about blasphemy!
