The unique Charlie Gillett
This week's Over To You is dominated by your reactions to the death of the unique World Service broadcaster, Charlie Gillett. As your comments to us show, Charlie held a special place in the hearts of music lovers all over the world during the ten years he presented the show "World of Music".
Charlie enjoyed an illustrious career as a writer, musicologist, record label owner and DJ. In many ways he was the last man standing, as the World Service drifted away from music broadcasting towards a more speech-oriented diet. Mr Gillett and his show, though, were indispensable.
I have special personal reason to be grateful to Charlie.
Like many bands and artists around the globe, I once submitted a track from my group's new album, a vinyl LP (yes it was that far back!) to Charlie when he presented a previous Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú show - hoping against hope he would play a track from it. Let me assure you that nothing matches the pleasure of hearing those silky rich tones introducing your song on the radio!
Imagine my delight when I met him shortly after, and then again a few more times over the years - most recently, last spring when I went to his house in South London to interview him for Over To You.
I was met by a gentle man with his trademark shock of grey hair, and taken downstairs to a large room crammed with vinyl, cds and various world music bric a brac. As ever he was courteous to a fault, generous with his time, curious about others and passionate about the music he loved.
Life before the internet
But there are other things in this week's programme. We've covered several aspects of the Superpower season recently on Over To You, and this week we've changed the perspective a bit, in response to an email from Chegun Ayadi, a listener in Nigeria who asked how the internet has changed the workings of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú.
Our reporter Penny Vine has been investigating, and she came up with some interesting findings - not least the picture of what life was like before the internet. She talked, among others, to one of the senior newsroom editors, Nigel Margerison, and to former North America editor, Justin Webb, both of whom reminisced about life before the internet, as you can hear in her report.
Nigel described a noisy newsroom full of typewriters, teleprinters and masses of paper news copy. For Justin it was a memory of recording everything on to tape, which was then hard to transmit back to London.
In contrast was the picture of the present and the vision of the future put forward by producer Simon Pitts. His view is that broadcasters are more accountable now that they don't just make radio programmes - a challenging enough task in its own right. But these days of course they also write blogs, provide website content, update facebook pages and so on and so on.
Simon has just overseen the My World project part of the Superpower season. Members of the audience were asked to send in short films which encapsulated their world.
Simon feels that in future, as broadcasters invite their audiences to supply stories like this, organisations such as the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú could become curators as much as originators of material. Plenty of food for thought here - I wonder what you feel about it?
Rajan Datar is the Presenter, Over To You
Over To You is your chance to have your say about the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú World Service and
its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and atÌý02:40 on Sunday (GMT).Ìý
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