remaining.
The good thing about BBC Radio 4 is that you can switch it on at random and get half an hour of intelligent, engaging spoken word radio about an unexpected subject. The bad thing is that you can switch it on and get a middle-class actor tapping a teaspoon and talking to their cat about divorce. Radio 4b solves this problem by playing a string of random programmes from Radio 4's factual archive. You might get the last thirty seconds of an episode of the Archers, but that's all.
We automatically filter out You and Yours and Money Box Live, because there's so much of it archived, and Woman's Hour, because it contains a drama segment. If there's anything you want to filter manually - maybe Front Row isn't worth the risk of catching the end of The Archers, and you never want to hear Farming Today - you can add exceptions to the page URL (eg. ?butnot=front+row,farming+today). Excluding colons is a rough way to only play one-off documentaries. You can use "?butonly=" to stream a single show or keyword, or both at once to define a clearer set.
Radio 4b was built by Kevan Davis (@kevan) in March 2011. It's not affiliated with the BBC.
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Click any programme to play it in this browser; Radio 4b will revert to random play afterwards.