Selection of China Features ’84-’86

On this page, I’ll list clickable links to a selection of serious, heavyweight, and very much less so, radio features from the first couple of years in Beijing, when I was trying to capture the normality of Chinese life.

It all went down rather well with Radio Four, and especially the Today Programme, which – as I recall – broadcast pretty much every one of the features I sent in.

After all, in those days I was one of the very, very few foreign correspondents actually filing fully-fledged audio packages for radio, with underlay sound and complex mixing (the latter done on my behalf, in the absence of computers and audio software, by good colleagues in London – so as you listen to the audio, try to imagine it all joined up as it would have been ultimately broadcast…)

I wasn’t, however, routinely taking photographs, so sadly there’s very little to illustrate most of these features – with the exception of the Sichuan material.

I was ahead of the multimedia game in some ways, but as nothing compared with what my successors now take for granted a quarter century on.

The titles below, in no particular order, speak for themselves, and as with other postings, several of these are in their constituent, unmixed form.

China Reforms 1984

Travelling to Chongqing 1984

Chongqing Sichuan reforms 1984

Sounds of Sichuan

Matchmaking 1984

Fast Food 1984

Biking in Peking 1984

Birding in Peking 1984

Sex Education March 1 1985

Deng Pufanfg and Disability 02’85

Guitars make comeback in China March 10 1985

China’s Children April 1985 World Tonight Radio 4

Peking’s English Corner, April 1985

Wham in Peking 1985

Buses in Peking Dec 12 1985

Steel bands in China

Shakespeare Festival Beijing  April 18 1986

Steam Engines in China March 28 1986

Stamp Collecting

Advertising in China

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