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.