Opinion

RADIO THERAPY

This year’s centenary of the BBC reminds me how much I love radio. These days it’s a ubiquitous presence yet still somehow an old-school relic in a world obsessed by the shiny and the new. It’s accessible absolutely everywhere via a dizzying range of gadgets with vacuous phone-ins offering refuge for the perpetually offended, while a million pop stations cater for those who confuse music with sound. Trendy hipster types can choose from 120 channels received in hidefinition on their digital nose-ring while they scream “LET’S GO PELOTON!” at each other on Zoom. Or something. In absurd contrast, the first receiver I remember from childhood stood with regal formality in the corner of our front room, the one we were only allowed in at Christmas. It was an enormous rosewood cabinet, the size of a skip, with an illuminated dial listing mysterious names like Paris, Munich and Prague. A window to the world. Moving the needle along (when our parents weren’t around) brought faraway voices in strange languages plus the caterwauling soprano who popped up all over the place. In those days, we had the BBC Light Programme, the forerunner of today’s Radio 2, featuring shows like “Music While You Work” and the patronisingly titled “Housewives’ Choice”. Sunday lunchtime in our house consisted of “TwoWay Family Favourites”, the appalling “Billy Cotton Band Show” and mint sauce. Later in the afternoon, every kid was glued to “Pick of the Pops” with Alan Freeman and the tingling excitement of the countdown to that week’s Number 1. All this makes me sound ancient, I realise, although I do recall it improved greatly after the Boer War. Whereas television demands our full attention (“stop what you’re doing and watch me!”), radio is an amiable companion where audio-only conversation sharpens our focus. A great example is the 1960 US Presidential election debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the first such event to be televised. Polled afterwards, TV viewers voted that Kennedy’s suave confidence had won the day over the sweaty, ‘needs-ashave’ Nixon. Interestingly, though, a poll of listeners to the radio broadcast, undistracted by the visuals, firmly gave the opposite verdict. Breaking news events can also carry a greater heft when heard rather than watched. I still remember the physical jolt one December morning in 1980 when, instead of the usual political headline, the 7am radio news opened with, “The former Beatle, John Lennon . . .” Inevitably, radio’s immense reach can be a double-edged sword. During WW2, William Joyce (“Lord Haw-Haw”) broadcast pro-Nazi messages to the UK from Germany to undermine British morale. A group of Japanese women, known collectively as “Tokyo Rose”, did the same job against American forces in the Pacific and the later “Voice of America” broadcasts during the Cold War aimed Western propaganda at the Soviet Union. On the flipside, it’s said that during his 22-year tenure as the BBC’s India Correspondent, Mark Tully was so trusted that tens of millions of people refused to believe any news story until they heard him confirm it on the World Service. But it’s radio’s unique intimacy which threads through my life, particularly – and predictably – with music. Hearing “Wonderful Land” by The Shadows when I was young, (courtesy of the peerless Mr Freeman again), was my first encounter with the power of an instrumental record. Another example: one winter evening in 2011 after visiting my father in the hospice, I was sitting in the car, numb and unable to simply drive away. At some point I must have switched on BBC Radio 3 from where Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 enveloped me like a consoling hug. It felt almost physical. These days France Musique FM is our home companion, a satisfying blend of classical favourites, rewarding new discoveries, some excellent jazz and the

Radio is an amiable occasional ‘what-the-hell-is-that?’ oddity, companion where audio- (I doff my cap to “Symphonic Poem for only conversation 100 Metronomes”). sharpens our focus Radio is a sprawling landscape, far too vast to properly cover here. In fact, despite having presented radio jazz programmes in the past, I’m actually clueless how broadcasting works. But it’s a miraculous medium in which many of its greatest programmes down the years would be unthinkable if transferred to television, relying, as they do, on the power of our imagination. The revered broadcaster Alistair Cooke, whose incomparable “Letter from America”, ran on BBC radio for 58 years, once captured its appeal perfectly: “I prefer radio to TV”, he said, “because the pictures are better”. To which I can only add – of course “Hear . . . hear”.

Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars