Whistleblowers and always on the blower

Radio Review: When Craig Murray was appointed British ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2002 he was, at 29, his country's youngest ambassador. As the most promising diplomat of his generation, the stint in Tashkent was to be just another rung on a ladder right to the top.

He was pretty much expected to stay inside the walls of the diplomatic compound, maybe venturing out for a round of golf or two. Instead, only a year later his career was in tatters because he refused to turn a blind eye to the shocking human rights abuses he saw in a country that was selling itself to the world as a functioning democracy.

Uzbekistan was a member of "the coalition of the willing" in Iraq and, as it is immediately north of Afghanistan, its strategic value meant that the Karimov regime was supported both financially and politically by London and Washington. Murray was only weeks in the country when he discovered human rights abuse on "an industrial scale" - there were thousands of political and religious prisoners
held in old-style soviet gulags, and much of the "intelligence" being sent to the UK and the US was extracted through torture; boiling people alive was a particularly popular method.

His own government, he felt, was acting illegally and immorally in supporting such a regime. "The question was, could I live with that?" He started making noises. "I was aware that I was not doing what London wanted. I was told I was overfocused on human rights to the detriment of UK interests," he said, retelling his story in Alan Torney's excellent and thought-provoking new series, Whistleblowers (RTÉ Radio 1, Thursday).

It was a striking programme, with a music track subtly creating a sense of terror and foreboding, while Torney's perfectly-judged and spare interjections left Murray to tell how his whistleblowing cost him his career and - as the stress prompted a nervous breakdown - his health.
For his new series, The Communications Revolution (BBC World Service, Monday) Mark Williams has picked a subject that surely can't be contained in a four-part series of half-hour programmes - the pace of change is simply too enormous. This week's first programme looked at mobile phones - everyday devices that are now so advanced they're basically computers. "Convergence" is the buzz word in the industry - why have a separate MP3 player when you can have it, a video player and the internet all bundled together?

"It's the science fiction of my youth," remarked Williams, but as sci-fi writer William Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed". In Rwanda, Nokia's latest mobile phone would cost five years' salary, but the technology is catching on. Williams found a thriving business where customers can rent amobile phone - usually off-street vendors - for the duration of a single call.

Self-described "Treknologist" Chris Knowles researches the parallels between modern technology
and Star Trek, and finds that just about everything we have now was used on the starship Enterprise as far back as 1966 - from Lt Uhura's Bluetooth-like device to the video conferencing. (No talk of
Scotty and beaming up, though.)
Luke Clancy offered an equally nerdy but far more entertaining look at outer space and the sounds we associate it with in Sound Stories (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) - much of it Hollywoodgenerated: from ET's call to phone home, to the computer voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Broadcaster Tim Lehane's review of that timewarp piece of audio history, the Voyager Interstellar Record - a gold-coated record attached to the Voyager I craft to give inhabitants of other planets an idea what Earth sounds like - was a masterclass in how it should be done.

Fans of such things will know that X Factor is back on TV next week - the show where wannabe pop stars suffer under the caustic gaze of judges Simon Cowell, Sharon Osbourne and Louis Walsh. Cowell was in the more sedate surroundings of the BBC radio studios as this week's guest on Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4, Sunday). X Factor contestants currently choosing a song to impress the judges should know that Cowell's tongue-in-cheek choice included Bobby Darin's Mack the Knife (his desert island disc), Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers, Mr Bojangles and that old Charles  Aznavour schmatlzfest, She. For a book he'd bring Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins. Sue Lawley, in her humourless way, seemed blissfully unaware that the media maestro was playing to the gallery.
bharrison@irish-times.ie