Tag: BBC

Assault
Lustige Blätter, Berlin, January 1941: similar sentiments.
Assault on Winston Churchill, 2018: A Reader’s Guide

Assault on Winston Churchill, 2018: A Reader’s Guide

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Assault and battery… Since I am los­ing track, I thought it would be con­ve­nient to cre­ate an index to the assault on Win­ston Churchill prompt­ed by Gary Oldman’s splen­did per­for­mance in the movie Dark­est Hour. The read­er will note the sim­i­lar­i­ty of top­ics. Many of these writ­ers feed off each oth­er, repeat­ing the same dis­proven argu­ments, with­out ever trou­bling indi­vid­u­al­ly to check their often-trun­cat­ed Churchill quotes or The Churchill Doc­u­ments which prove them irre­triev­ably, shock­ing­ly, wrong. The order is most recent first. I have missed any, please advise. . The noise is like­ly to go on for awhile.…

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Churchill on the Broadcast

Churchill on the Broadcast

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The ques­tion aris­es, has any­thing been writ­ten on Churchill’s radio tech­nique? Did he treat radio dif­fer­ent­ly from oth­er kinds of pub­lic speak­ing? How quick­ly did he take to the broad­cast?

“The Art of the Microphone” (BBC pho­to­graph)

An excel­lent piece on this sub­ject was by Richard Dim­ble­by (1913-1965), the BBC’s first war cor­re­spon­dent and lat­er its lead­ing TV news com­men­ta­tor. His “Churchill the Broad­cast­er” is in Charles Eade, ed., Churchill by his Con­tem­po­raries (Lon­don: Hutchin­son, 1953). Old as it is, the book remains a com­pre­hen­sive set of essays of the many spe­cial­ized attrib­ut­es of WSC.

Dim­ble­by offers four areas of dis­cus­sion: the tech­ni­cal back­ground, the dra­ma of World War II, the fac­tu­al mate­r­i­al, and Churchill’s meth­ods of deliv­ery.…

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The Problem with Speech Recordings

The Problem with Speech Recordings

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I’m cur­rent­ly analysing a few of Churchill’s speeces for an aca­d­e­m­ic paper. After lis­ten­ing to the audio files and read­ing along I found a lot of para­graphs which were left out in the radio speech­es. It’s espe­cial­ly evi­dent in “Their Finest Hour” from June 18th, 1940 where only a fifth of the text made it to the radio. At one point it sounds like the audio file has been edit­ed. Were the audio files full radio speech­es or just excerpts? —N.K., Copen­hagen

What you are lis­ten­ing to is like­ly a post­war record­ing of speech­es Churchill made for HMV/Decca, which were edit­ed and trun­cat­ed in lat­er ver­sions.…

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