The Microphone in the Street

The transfers are rough — most of these survive at low bitrates from disc — and it does not matter in the slightest, because what you are hearing is ordinary people in the 1930s and 1940s speaking at length, unedited, about work, money and the war. There is almost nothing else like it in the sound record.

As entertainment it is loose and often awkward. That awkwardness is the value: the interviewer loses control, someone answers the wrong question, an accent turns up that no drama series would ever have cast.

Come to it as a historian rather than a listener and you will not leave for hours.