Understanding Radio

Andrew Crisell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134850396
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

'... a highly imaginative and often very entertaining book ... which ... probably says more than any other available text about the limitations and possibilities of present forms of radio.' Professor Laurie Taylor on the first edition of Understanding Radio

Understanding Radio is a fully revised edition of a key radio textbook. Andrew Crisell explores how radio processes genres such as news, drama and comedy in highly distinctive ways, and how the listener's use of the medium has important implications for audience studies. He explains why the sound medium, even more than television, has played such a crucial role in the development of modern popular culture.

The book also introduces students to the broadcasting landscape in a time of great change for national and local radio provision. Understanding Radio will be essential reading both to students of media and to those with a practical involvement in programme production. This new edition includes:

a revised history of radio bringing the reader right up to date

a brand new chapter on 'talk-and-music' radio, the format adopted by many of the new stations.

Andrew Crisell

lectures in communication and media studies at the University of Sunderland. He has written widely on radio and co-founded Wear FM, winner of the 1992 Sony 'Radio Station of the Year' award.

Part I

The medium

Chapter 1

Characteristics of radio

When you ask some people if they listen to the radio, they say, ‘No’.Then you ask them if they drive to work and they say, ‘Yes’. Then you ask them if they drive to work with the radio on and they say, ‘Yes’. They don’t listen to it, they sit in it.

(Tony Schwartz, US advertising executive)

What strikes everyone, broadcasters and listeners alike, as significant about radio is that it is a blind medium. We cannot see its messages, they consist only of noise and silence, and it is from the sole fact of its blindness that all radio’s other distinctive qualities – the nature of its language, its jokes, the way in which its audiences use it – ultimately derive. We can get a clearer idea of radio’s characteristics by comparing it with other modes of communication.

The commonest, most basic mode can be described as interpersonal, in which the sender of the message and the receiver of it are physically close to and within sight of each other. The contact between them is oral and visual, perhaps even tactile. The primary code, or system of signs by which they communicate, is linguistic, that of speech, but likely to be aided by various ‘presentational codes’ of a paralinguistic nature – facial expressions, gestures, bodily movements and postures, and so on (Fiske 1990: 66–70). The context to which the message refers and which enables it to ‘make sense’ is likely to be understood by both sender and receiver because of its physical proximity or because of their shared background or experience. But in addition lots of ‘phatic’ remarks are possible to check that the contact is working (‘How are you?’, and so on), and lots of ‘metalingual’ remarks to check that the code is being understood (‘Understand?’). And both kinds of remark prompt feedback – the (in this mode) easily possible transmission of the receiver’s reaction to the sender. Hence the message has every chance of being accurately ‘decoded’, or made sense of.

The obvious advantages of modes of mass communication are that the sender can communicate with multitudes of receivers at the same time and at distances beyond that achievable by interpersonal communication. But the contact becomes impersonal and the risk of ambiguity and misunderstanding much greater. Feedback is an impossibility because thousands or millions of receivers cannot simultaneously transmit their varying reactions back to the sender: and because the sender cannot simultaneously present herself in person to each member of the audience she must send a representative of herself – an independent, often visible message in the form of a text (as in books and newspapers) or an image (as in film and television).

But since the sender and receivers are remote from each other this message has to carry a heavy freight. In varying degrees it has to create the context to which it refers; the sender herself, who is present only within the message, does not effectively exist outside it; and the receivers for whom the message is intended. On the other hand since, as we have seen, feedback is an impossibility in mass communication, there is no genuine facility of metalingual or phatic communication: the sender cannot check that the code or contact is working. For all these reasons it is of considerable advantage that the message should in some way or other be visual.

The oldest mode of mass communication is that of written characters – literature in its widest sense of ‘writing, written language’. The code, a printed text, may be supplemented by other codes – numbers, drawings, photographs, diagrams: but the permanence of the contact compensates for its impersonality. Bereft of the presence of the sender, the receivers may read and re-read her message at leisure: decoding does not have to be instantaneous. In film and television, modes of mass communication whose message is in the form of an image, decoding does have to be instantaneous. There is no single, static text which can be perused at leisure. But this is offset by the fact that in film and television the conditions of interpersonal communication are partly re-created. The receivers can see and hear the sender: the primary code in which she communicates – speech – is supplemented by various presentational codes. And/or they can hear her while seeing by means of other images, which may include an image of writing, the context to which her message refers.

How, then, is radio distinguishable from these other modes of mass communication? Very largely in ways which seem to redound to its disadvantage. There is no image and no text. The contact, or medium as I will now term it, is utterly non-visual: the receivers, who are listeners, or collectively an audience, cannot see the sender or broadcaster as they can on television or film; nor are they offered the compensation of a visible and lasting message as they are in literature. Radio’s codes are purely auditory, consisting of speech, music, sounds and silence, and since, as we shall see, the ear is not the most ‘intelligent’ of our sense organs their deployment has to be relatively simple. The risks of ambiguity or complete communication failure are high, and so in all kinds of radio much effort is expended on overcoming the limitations of the medium, on establishing the different kinds of context which we would generally be able to see for ourselves.

First, there is the context to which the message refers – a context which most interpersonal communication can take for granted. Physical objects or processes which are normally self-evident have to be described: ‘Tell the listeners what you are doing’, ‘Can you describe this object to us?’ Second and more literally, there is the context of the message itself – the surrounding ‘messages’ (items or programmes) which also help the listener to make sense of what he hears. The description of the object may reveal that it is a fire-dog, but he will have no idea why a fire-dog is being described to him unless he has gleaned from the other messages he has heard that the programme is about antiques. One way of conveying context on the radio is by what is sometimes known as ‘sign-posting’: for example, ‘Later in the programme we’ll be talking about the Budget to the Leader of the Opposition’. By indicating the programme’s shape or structure, signposting enables the listener to know whether he wishes to keep listening. In purely visual media such as books and newspapers – media whose messages exist in space rather than in time – this kind of context is immediately apparent. In a newspaper we can see at a glance what paragraphs or stories surround the one we are presently reading, and in a book or magazine we can flick through the adjacent pages or turn to the table of contents.

But of course not all visual media exist purely in space: television, film and theatre are partly characterized by movement and (in common with radio) sound, which exist primarily in time. In film and theatre, however, the need to establish this kind of context is much less since their messages normally consist of a single plot which the spectators have been following throughout, rather than a number of discrete items which they are at liberty to dip into and out of. Like radio, television often solves the problem of context by signposting, but being a visual medium it has other resources too: images of programmes or items which will be shown later, split-screen techniques, captions superimposed upon images, even images consisting only of printed words. Radio has nothing but different kinds of sounds, some of which it uses to establish the beginnings and ends of programmes for us by what are variously described as ‘frame’ conventions (Goffman 1980: 162–5) or ‘boundary rituals’ (Fiske and Hartley 1978: 166–7) – ways of telling us that what we are about to hear is a play and not a continuation of the news bulletin we have just been listening to. This is sometimes done by a silence (which in these circumstances is a sort of negative form of sound) or by a signature- or themetune and/or an announcement: ‘And now The Archers. Mike Tucker’s milk-round hasn’t got off to a very good start’ (two contexts are established here: that of the programme itself, a drama serial which is following the 7 o’clock news, and that of the point in the story which the serial has reached).

But messages in radio consist primarily of speech, and speech consists not just of words, as writing does, but always and indissolubly of words expressed in voices. Hence a third kind of context which often needs to be established is the reality of the radio station and the broadcasters themselves, even when they are not the subject of the programme. In a discussion programme like Start the Week (BBC Radio 4) the presenter might, for example, introduce one of his guests with some such remark as ‘Glad you managed to beat that hold-up on the M4 and get here on time!’ Remarks of this kind are seldom heard on the television, where we can see the presenter, the guests and the studio that surrounds them; but they are common on the radio where their purpose is to locate the station within the solid, workaday world of motorways and indicate that the broadcasters are not just ‘voices in the ether’ but people like us who are liable to get stuck in traffic jams and miss their appointments.

Hence the constraints imposed by radio’s blindness are severe and were underlined by television, which with its growth in popularity during the 1950s was thought to be about to supersede radio altogether. I shall return shortly to the problems which the blindness of the medium can create, but want first to stress that blindness is also the source of some real advantages which radio possesses over other media.

The most famous of these is its appeal to the imagination. Because radio offers sound-only instead of sound and vision the listener is compelled to ‘supply’ the visual data for himself. The details are described, or they may suggest themselves through sound, but they are not ‘pictured’ for him; he must picture them for himself, and he may, indeed, use them as a basis for picturing further details which are not described. Moreover as we all know, the scope of the imagination is virtually limitless: we may picture not only lifelike objects but the fantastical, impossible scenes of an experimental play.

This appeal to the imagination gives radio an apparent advantage over film and television, but we must beware of exaggerating the differences between the visual and non-visual media: because film and television audiences can see, it is often assumed that they are not obliged to use their imagination. However, the imagination is more than a merely visual faculty. It can re-create abstract qualities and processes, as when the viewer imagines the inner thoughts or feelings of a character in a film merely by observing the expression on her face.

Nevertheless the imagination does seem to be mainly preoccupied with re-creating the physical, material world; yet even here its role is not always visual or pictorial. When watching a film of bacon and eggs cooking in a pan we imagine the smell they give off; when we read a description of a fun-fair we imagine among other things the noise of the crowds and the blare of the roundabout organ. How, then, does the imagination deal with the physical world?

Its workings are various and obscure, but we might make the preliminary suggestion that it is the faculty by which we re-create for ourselves any impressions that we would experience at first hand through one, some or all of our five senses. Since the greatest number of senses through which any of the mass media can communicate to us is two (sight and hearing), it follows that all the media, and not just radio, will invoke the imagination to compensate for their various deficiencies. Nevertheless it would seem that the primary and dominant function of the imagination is visual, as its derivation from ‘image’ suggests; for in replicating the functions of our senses it seems also to replicate the hierarchy into which they appear to arrange themselves, with sight at the top: in our ordinary deployment of our sensory faculties our primary means of understanding or interpreting the world seems to be visual. We may hear, smell or touch an object, but it is not until we have seen it that we feel we really ‘know’ it.

The faculty of sight, then, seems to be a kind of epistemological yardstick which determines how we make sense of the outside world and what credence we attach to our other sensory faculties. Once we have seen the filmic image of the bacon and eggs we can imagine their smell, and once we have pictured our fun-fair we can imagine the noise of the crowds and the organ. But for most of us at least, it would seem to be extremely hard to imagine even that unique and wonderful aroma without some previous or accompanying image, whether literal or figurative and however momentary, of the bacon and eggs themselves or of the situation (for example, the breakfast table) in which they would be encountered in ordinary life. In other words, the first impulse of the imagination seems to be to visualize, even in the case of non-visual sensations such as sounds or smells: but once we have an actual or figurative picture of what approximates to the source or habitation of these sounds or smells our imagination will be able to move down the sensory hierarchy and replicate the subordinate impressions of sound, smell, taste, and so on.

But we must not assume that when we are watching a play or a film or a television programme we never have the need to picture or visualize physical phenomena. On these occasions, as in ordinary life, not only are we capable of looking and visualizing simultaneously, we do it all the time: it is simply that when we have the power of vision we are less aware that we visualize. This means that our imagination is much more active when we watch the visual media than the champions of radio claim, for not everything they deal with is visible. When, for instance, a comedian tells a funny story we watch him, but even as we do so we picture – or imagine – the characters and events of his story. And even at the level of the physical reality that is displayed to us not everything can be seen, for it implies a contextual world which is off-stage or ‘outside the picture’ and which we will also have to imagine – a fact often exploited by horror films in which the menace lurks just off the screen, so that all we can see is the terrified expression of the character who is being menaced! Nevertheless it seems undeniable that radio will invoke the audience’s imagination much more than film, theatre or television, since nothing that it deals with is visible. We must imagine not only a character’s thoughts and feelings but also her expression, total appearance, physical situation, and so on.

However, two other important points must be made about the role of the imagination. The first is that radio is not the only medium which makes such extensive use of it. It is every bit as active when we read a book, and indeed reading and listening are rather similar in the sense that within the broad limits set by language both reader and listener can – must – form a mental picture of what is being described. But whereas literature’s ‘pictures’ are entirely an effect of language, radio’s are also suggested by the sound of voices and of other phenomena which imply the existence of a material world we cannot find in books but can see in theatre, film and television.

Hence the distinctiveness of radio is not that it involves the imagination while the other media do not, but that it involves it to a different extent. In literature everything must be imagined since nothing can be seen except printed words, nor can anything be heard. In the visual media many things can be seen and heard and proportionately less is left to the imagination. In radio many things can be heard, and this direct intimation of the material world is perhaps why, in its drama productions at least, its verbal descriptions of a physical setting or of a person’s thoughts or appearance are generally much more economical than those of literature and closer to those of theatre, film and television. Moreover the fact that its codes are auditory and therefore exist in time explains the greater sense of ‘liveness’ that we get from radio (and the visual media) than we do from literature; for when we start to read a book we know that the last page has already been written. But radio, even when its programmes are pre-recorded, seems to be a ‘present-tense’ medium, offering experiences whose outcome lies in an unknown future. Like theatre, film and television, then, it seems to be an account of what is happening rather than a record of what has happened. But the fact that nothing can be seen on the medium means that the demands which it makes upon the imagination are much greater than those made by the visual media and almost as great as those made by literature.

The second important point which we must keep in mind is that the imagination is not confined to matters of fiction or make-believe. When listening to the radio we are obliged to imagine not only the world of a play or story but the real world of news, weather reports and current affairs. Indeed, although it is dangerous to be dogmatic in these matters, it seems likely that codes in any medium which refer to any physical thing which we cannot actually see – whether they be words, sounds, or other kinds of symbols and whether they refer to listeners’ requests, hobgoblins or stocks and shares – will automatically create pictures in our minds, that we cannot actually ‘make sense’ of these codes without at some stage and in some measure forming images of what they refer to.

It is largely upon the listener’s ability to imagine matters of fact that radio’s distinctive and much-vaunted sense of personal companionship seems to depend, for we hear not only the descriptions and sounds of real or imaginary worlds but also the voice of the person who is describing them and we therefore form a picture of her too. As is the case with readers of books and viewers of films or television, the pleasure the listener gains from the company of those whom he ‘meets’ on the medium is bound up with the sense of his own anonymity, of freedom from ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General editor’s preface
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The medium
• Part II The world outside
• Part III The imagination
• Part IV The listener
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index