I’m delighted by the wonderful news this week that Andy Kershaw will soon be back on our airwaves with an amazing new global music series called Music Planet. I, along with many others I’m sure, have sorely missed Andy’s adventurous spirit, mischievous sense of humour, brilliant observation, and exceedingly good musical taste.

It is so good to see him back on the rails. I can’t wait for the series to begin, for all the unexpected, undiscovered, sonic delights that will come our way, and to resume my aural education with Kershaw - a man who always stimulates my ears and mind.

In the meantime here he is telling it like it is in the Observer today.

Thanks to Jarvis Cocker for introducing me, via the medium of #BBC6Music, to Adam Curtis’s amazing BBC blog The medium and the Message. Adam takes material from the BBC archives, including wonderful videos and images (see above), to tell news stories from a different perspective. A great example of his fascinating storytelling is this recent post about the idealistic, and one could say slightly sinister, operation in Afghanistan called The Human Terrain System.

“The idea is simple. Instead of concentrating only on fighting on the “physical terrain” - the cities, deserts and mountains of Afghanistan - the aim is get inside the minds of the Afghan people  - the “human terrain” - to find out how they see the world, how they think and feel. And then, with that knowledge, to exploit and control this “human terrain”  by engineering new ways of thinking inside the minds of the Afghan people.”