I really enjoy good speech radio. Notably, I love news radio – whether fast and snappy, or in depth. Things to make me listen and think.

There’s precious little of this type of radio in the UK. BBC Radio 5 Live comes close, but is too often filled with the “live sport” bit rather than the rather better “live news” bit, particularly when I want to listen. I find BBC Radio 4 a little of a curate’s egg – good in parts, but sometimes you happen upon some pieces of things that are less good. BBC World Service, available in the UK on digital radio, is much more pacy and interesting than before, but still a moderately pedestrian listen.

Now that Global Radio have senselessly stripped LBC News 1152 down to the bare minimum required by their licence, LBC 97.3 remains the only commercial radio speech station available in London. This, too, is a curate’s egg of sorts – if you’re lucky, you’ll get the excellent Nick Ferrari, James O’Brien and James Whale – but others are less good, and the sports bug hits this station too. And it only works in some parts of the UK – not where I was.

Driving home from Dover today, I tried an experiment. I used Stitcher, a free iPhone app which does a seemingly very simple thing – it plays podcasts. But, in this case, it plays podcasts continuously from a personalisable genre listing – so I can hit “technology” and hear podcasts about technology (I did), or hit “Short attention span” and get lots of podcasts that are less than three minutes. Crucially, the application downloads the podcasts as they play, so the mobile network can be as patchy as it likes: as long as the podcasts dowload faster than real time (they all do), I can listen without any buffering or gaps. It’s a splendid thing.

As a result, I enjoyed a ton of speech radio on the way – from CNN Radio to a rather good tech podcast from the Wall Street Journal. News was up to date; content was variable but mostly pretty good; and unlike internet radio on the mobile, it worked flawlessly.

I can now enjoy comedy, tech news, and much more – all on the move without any complicated synching or waiting for downloads, and all nearly live (the oldest I heard was three days old), and all offering me something that broadcast radio can’t: the stuff I want, right here, right now.

I’ve never considered an iPhone an adequate replacement for music radio. I do, though, now consider it an adequate replacement for speech radio. Should we be alarmed?

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