Just finding that hat I don't put on much, that labelled 'Defender Of The BBC And Cultural Programming'.

Georgina described only the very beginning of this post-WW2 broadcasting. It continued with Peter Kennedy's highly acclaimed and popular As I Roved Out source recordings on a Sunday morning which everyone at my kindergarten listened to and regurgitated on Monday. Later, all children took part in the schools radio programmes Singing Together, Time & Tune and Music & Movement, which was for many their first and only introduction to both formal music teaching as well as their cultural heritage. Songs were culled largely from The National Song Book, every bit as awful as Rise Up Singing, but nevertheless, a starting point.

While I was bunking off school prep and sneaking, very much under age, into High Level Ranters sessions, the BBC were running a programme known unaffectionately as Country Swamps Folk which morphed eventually into the blessed Jim Lloyd's Folk On Friday. It's 1969, I'm working at C# House where Jim (who later became EFDSS Artistic Director) and the once blessed (before she was elevated to R2 supremo status) Frances Line were more or less in residence. This was the heart of the English revival. All the performers Steve names practically lived there too, with the addition of Ashley Hutchings and all the rest of Fairport who researched Liege & Lief, followed ever so rapidly by the embryo Steeleye Span who I think kept sleeping bags in the sound library. The other ventricle of the heart was Leader/Trailer records around the corner, which subsequently moved into the C# studio for a while before relocating to Halifax.

It was at this time that Louis Killen decided to emigrate to the US and clean up the Hudson River. Ever so worthy, I'm sure but now he's back in Gateshead he's taken to doing gigs based on his alternative Hank Williams/Willie Nelson stylee repertoire and needs Mike Waterson to keep him in order. However, I digress.

The 'second folk revival' in the UK was massive. One of my jobs was to produce the Folk Directory which entailed trekking for two years throughout the land to just about every venue. And it was at Ewan & Peggy's Singers' Club venue that more encouragement was meted out than at any other that I saw to English revival hopefuls to explore their own traditions. And that came from Peggy, an American. One of the jewels of our revival (which Steve imagines barely happened) was the first series of Radio Ballads produced for the BBC by Peggy, Ewan and Charles Parker. Charles ended up fired because they were considered too political. Not so the recent second series, but again, I digress.

The BBC has continued (after a fashion) to devote one hour a week to what it (sometimes surprisingly) calls 'English language f*lk'. While this is predominantly mainstream crap, there is nevertheless much on channels other than R2 which presents English trad in a more normalised setting (R3 Late Junction etc and R4 Factual Programmes in particular). All this is available on the replayer (when it's working). What is there, comparably, on US PSB radio?