The BBC Radio segment aired on their Tuesday morning -- the "Pods & Blogs" segment on Five Live.

In terms of interviewers, I was actually quite disappointed in them. In fact, of all the radio shows I've been on, BBC Radio was clearly the worst, which surprised and saddened me, since I'd thought better of BBC.

Their producer initially contacted me about doing a segment with James Sanborn on Friday afternoon. They scheduled a time, but ended up calling us late, and then when we went on the air, we each got to say just one or two sentences, and then the interviewer interrupted us with, "Sorry, out of time, and I'm not understanding this anyway," and they cut us off and ended the segment rather suddenly.

To the producer's credit, he sent me a letter of apology later in the day. And for what it's worth, I was able to learn from the mistakes of the BBC segment, in order to make the later NPR segment even better, so I thanked the BBC producer for that, and he offered to try again on Monday, with what was implied to be a longer segment about my book (which is coming out in the UK on Thursday).

So I agreed to the second segment, but again, they ran late with previous programming, kept sending me emails saying, "Just a few more minutes", and then when they *did* call, I found out that it was going to be for a pre-recorded segment instead of live. Further, I found out that they now wanted me to be the caller in a two-DJ "make fun of the caller" segment. But I adapted to that and we managed to have a more or less fun time with it.

Then when I asked them when the segment was going to air, they said, "In a couple hours" and that they'd contact me and tell me when, but they never did (I found out after the fact that it aired several hours after we recorded it). So then I went looking for it on the BBC website to find out if I could listen to the recording, but couldn't find any audio file, and their site looks weeks out of date.

So I wrote to the producer, and he apologized and sent me a link of where the show could be found. The audio file is there, but there's no program description so it's not searchable. Further, I'm told that it's only going to be there for a week, and then it's going to be deleted!

So, I had a big "thumbs down" for BBC at the moment. But, the segment came out okay, if you don't mind the silly humor and them mispronouncing my name. And they did at least mention my book.

For anyone who wants to listen to it before it gets deleted, go to this link, click on "Latest Pods & Blogs", and that should start up the BBC Radio Player on the lefthand side. If you're using a compatible browser (IE yes, Firefox probably not, and not sure about Mac), you can use the arrows to fast forward to just past the "18:10" mark, to listen to the 10-minute Kryptos segment.

And if BBC Radio ever calls and asks you to be on one of their programs, be warned.

(2-May-2006 update: The stream is now offline, but a mirror can be located here)

BBC Radio: Pods & Blogs (and Kryptos, oh my!)