Now here’s a series that would make a brilliant podcast but is also classic Radio 4 — they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, why can’t podcasts be more like Radio 4? Programmes where the presenter’s role is to draw out the knowledge of experts, and the pace is measured, allowing the fascination of what’s being revealed to make an impact before leaping on, and where there’s no background music except when it adds to the timbre, the meaning, the purpose. Each episode of Classified Britain (produced by John Forsyth) is only 15 minutes long, so not too demanding of one’s time, and yet a lot of information is packed into that slot without it seeming too hectic or over-enthusiastic.
It takes us back to the days when news could only be gleaned from the newspapers and to advertise meant taking out space on the front page of the local rag. As James Naughtie reveals, these classified ads brought together the whole of human life, get-rich-quick schemes in one column, bankruptcy notices in the next. They were how the papers were sold; the news could only be found inside. This week he focused on a single edition of the Newcastle Journal from 1 October 1842. On that front page, more than 100 ads were squeezed into six tightly set columns, offering for sale 420 dozen smoked ox tongues just arrived on Tyneside from Archangel in Russia, alongside two handsome greyhounds, a steam engine, and embroidered waistcoats that could be made up for you in less than five hours.
Here’s paper proof of Newcastle’s boom time at the heart of the industrial revolution. Not just a commercial centre, though. Also advertised was a course of lectures in chemistry at the Literary and Philosophical Society, designed not just for self-improvement but also the dissemination of new ideas.
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