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Michael Rosen turned out to be a slightly older jumper-wearing Radio 4 man, not the sex photographer Google turns up as hit number one, which I’m sure was a relief to us all.

I’d been slotted in for a 4pm interview, five minutes walk from the office, so wandered slowly up through the wind-blasted streets to the Sound Gallery, a little complex of studios not far from Broadcasting House. It was a very funky place - lots of vivid colours, flowers with lights inside them, and the kind of big twisty handles on the studio doors that you’d get on a Smeg fridge.

Fortunately I’d done a lot of revising, so I was well clued up so the chat went well, and as with all of these things it was over in a zip.

We were talking about symbols and iconography, and I’d been digging around on line to come up with some interesting examples. Of them all, my favourite has to be the interrobang. It’s effectively a question mark and an exclamation mark, which is most often written as ?! or !?. This is ugly, though, so ad guru Martin K Speckter proposed they be overlaid as a single character ? in the copy his scribes wrote, as it looked a lot neater and more professional.

Remmington picked up on it in 1968 and produced a typewriter that had it on one of the keys, but that didn’t stop it falling into obscurity. It can still be found in the depths of the Arial and Wingdings fonts, though.

The show - Word of Mouth - goes out next week, I think. I’ll keep an eye on the schedules and find out.

They also got me to read some of this blog for another show, but I’m not sure when they’re using that one. Looks like I’ll have to listen to the whole series.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Journal, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.