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A propos the recent discussion of a recording by Queen
Victoria, BBC Radio 4 will be webcasting an hour long program about early
British recordings, and the Queen will be among those mentioned. The
program is a regular one called The Archive Hour to which I often listen.
The webcast will be on Saturday June 28th at 3:00 pm EDT, and may be heard best
on Internet Explorer at
If you click on "Listen Live" a radio player appears, which uses Real
Player. The program is archived for a week at the same site, and can be heard at
your convenience by selecting "Listen Again,"
Here is a description of the program, from the "What's
On" part of the site.
The Archive Hour
How True? At the end of the 19th century, sound recording gave the world a new
resource of immense historical importance; the evidence of authentic witness -
or did it? The BBC has a handful of recordings of Gladstone, but each is
strangely different. Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria and Henry Irving are all in the
archive, but are these recordings actually them? Sean Street, Professor of Radio
at Bournemouth University, investigates these distant voices - and some more
recent such as Churchill's - revealing how true they are, how we know and if it
matters anyway. He questions too if, in our increasingly virtual world,
authenticity is possible at all.
Fred Lipsett
Ottawa
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