A week or two ago I learned that Radio Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand had been continuously broadcasting for one hundred years and in fact reports with pride that as an uninterrupted broadcast network it is five weeks older than the BBC!
When I first came to New
Zealand in the early nineteen seventies, one of the things that impressed me
was how advanced radio appeared to be when compared with England. Every town seemed to have its own radio
station and cities like Auckland boasted a number of choices with miniscule
operations in surprising suburbs, all heavy on providing advertising
opportunities for local businesses.
Talk radio was alive and well and very nearly an institution after a
decade of development and it immediately became my number one listening choice. And back then I quickly turned into a
contributor, phoning in regularly and giving my views on a variety of subjects.
I was delighted to
partake of radio on any level. It has
always been a familiar medium to me. Listening
to the BBC with my mother is one of the enduring memories of my earliest years because
in our house The Wireless was always on, down low for Workers’ Playtime and
Forces’ Favourites, the volume increased for Children’s Hour and definitely for
The News. One way or another we listened
to everything, news, entertainment, music, plays, recipes, health advice and
always to Winston Churchill and the terrifying Lord Haw-Haw broadcasting ominously
from Germany. Via The Wireless we were
thrust through a number of emotions beginning with the jollity and jauntiness
of ITMA and Variety Bandbox and concluding with the horror and disbelief conveyed
by Richard Dimbleby when describing Belsen Concentration Camp. Through good times and bad The Wireless was a
reliable source of information and companionship and what we would have done
without it I dread to think.
Years later as an
impressionable young adult my inherent trust in all things to do with broadcasting
led to an exciting relationship with those setting up pirate radio on a Dutch ship
in the North Sea, Radio Veronica.
Dazzled by the excitement of it all I totally failed to see that the
Technical Director I admired so much was actually embezzling money from the company
which rapidly led to its collapse almost before it began. Just a handful of years later commercial
radio took off properly via yet another pirate ship and Britain edged just a
little bit away from the total control of the BBC. Meanwhile it would seem that in New Zealand it
had long since stopped being embryonic and was well established throughout the
country and that was probably so in Australia, Canada and undoubtedly the USA.
As a small child I don’t
remember programming that could be described as Soap operas but I do have
memories of my mother and aunts waxing lyrical about something called Arnold
Grimm’s Daughter which apparently was broadcast from the mid 1930s until
1942. And of course by 1948 we had Mrs
Dale’s Diary which was still going strong in the 1960s though it never had much
appeal to me.
One of my first
significant purchases when I became a wage earner was a transistor radio called
Pam and I think, produced by Pye. Pam
shared my bed every night and I was blissfully able to listen to Top Of The
Pops until it finished at midnight followed by The Shipping Forecast which to
me seemed to be a bridge between nostalgic poetry and a hint of longed for travel
to romantic places. Other listening
favourites were The Goon Show, Hancock’s Half Hour, In Town Tonight, Letter
From America, Any Questions, and A Book At Bedtime.
Contemplating those years
that followed WW2, two absolutely first class stand-out programmes spring to
mind almost immediately and I associate both of them with the early 1950s. To my mind where radio always had the edge on
television as far as youth was concerned, what it was able to do deftly, was amplify
the magic of any story by allowing the visual images to spring from the listener’s
own imagination.
The Box of Delights I
associate most particularly with those weeks leading up to Christmas. The book was written in 1935 by John
Masefield as a sequel to his earlier novel, The Midnight Folk. It told the story of a boy called Kay Harker
played by Patricia Hayes whose chance meeting with Cole Hawlings, a
Punch-and-Judy man, leads him into a world where almost anything is possible. The story captures the true spirit of
Christmas better than any other similar drama and I might still shudder on
hearing the Punch-and-Judy man proclaim his ominous warning that evil lurked
close by – The Wolves Are Running! Hawlings
is the keeper of the elixir of life and the custodian of a magic box that he is
so anxious to keep out of the hands of wrongdoers he has been on the run for seven
hundred years. To say I was transfixed
by this early evening tale does not adequately describe my fascination and my
young brother was equally engrossed.
And while we hunched beneath the wireless, barely daring to breathe, my
mother boiled eggs and made toast and a coal fire burned snugly and brightly
and we could almost smell the tangerines and taste the marzipan treats that
heralded the coming festivities.
Completely different, Journey
Into Space was a BBC Radio science fiction programme written by producer
Charles Chilton. In 1953 it attracted a
bigger evening audience than the up-to-the-minute TV sets that people were beginning to buy. Several series were produced, then translated
into seventeen languages and broadcast worldwide. It would be true to say that it enthralled the
nation, nearly every one of us tuning in on Monday evenings at 7.30pm happily
abandoning Robin Hood & His Merry Men, Kaleidescope and even The Quatermass
Experiment. No such decision had to be
made by us as we did not become TV owners for several more years.
Operation Luna, the first
totally gripping tale was set in the far flung future of 1965 and concerned the
conquest of the Moon. Andrew Faulds
played Captain Jet Morgan and David Kossoff played an amiable character called Lemmy
and I seem to also remember Alfie Bass, David Williams and David Jacobs. The second series was called The Red Planet
and the final was The World In Peril. Charles Chilton became a household name so
when I came across him many years later working as an occasional guide for
London Walks I was definitely impressed. Retired from the BBC, he was in his late
seventies and seemed bewildered when shown the admiration and regard accorded
him by so many of his walking clientele.
I had by then discovered that he had also written a radio programme called Oh What A Lovely War
which led to the musical and the film.
A Kings Cross lad from a very poor home he had joined the BBC as a 14
year old messenger boy and was later to be described as `the one true genius
the BBC ever produced’.
Destined to remain in our
lives as a viable and essential piece of technology eventually The Wireless had
to relinquish a great many of the gripping stories that had so entertained us as
one by one they vanished from the air waves and were claimed by
television. But many of us maintained
that they were destined never to be quite the same and failed to enthuse and
energise us or create the same magic as the originals.
The Wireless had always
been a force in our lives but it was a force that had never needed our full
attention at all times and we had always been able to cook, clean and carry out
a host of other tasks whilst listening. By the 1960s fuller attention was being given
to the no longer new-fangled television sets and The Wireless half returned to
its original position in the background of our lives. And as it did so local commercial radio
stations were finally taking off in the UK and were firmly established in places
like New Zealand.
Today radio holds its
place as an important source of information and a venue for the exchange of
ideas. When I was in London for several
months this year I listened a great deal and in general as a vehicle for the
dissemination of news, knowledge and analysis radio broadcasting takes some
beating. For the insomniacs among us it’s
invaluable. Radio flings you face to
face with a range of ideas you may not like very much and forces you to examine
bigotry. Whether you like it or not you
find yourself listening to the reasons why a section of society takes on a
cause or an individual sees themselves as a warrior for social justice. And from time to time it becomes apparent that your own thinking is taking a different
path. No matter how incomprehensible or
nonsensical some ideas you stumble across may seem at the time, every bit of
information provides part of a patchwork of data that accurately reflects what is
actually taking place within a society and may very well form stability for the
future.
All ideas have value but
some have an obvious significance that can be all too easily overlooked. One of the stories told about the great
Charles Chilton is that he was the very first British DJ and as such had
recorded a number of programmes in the 1930s for jazz enthusiasts. However at a time when Received Pronunciation
was the order of the day when his cockney accent reached the ears of the great
Lord Reith then Director General of the BBC he pulled him from the programme
very fast indeed asking ‘what kind of accent do you call that?’ to which
Charles rapidly responded, ‘It’s the accent of the capital of the British
Empire’ which left Reith flummoxed.
However, he still pulled him off the air and I cannot help wondering
what he would have thought of some of the accents happily accepted without
comment today.
Times change and whether
we like it or not, we change with it.
