Radio's Legacy in Popular Culture

The Sounds of British Broadcasting over the Decades

Martin Cooper

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501360435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Radio

Examining work by novelists, filmmakers, TV producers and songwriters, this book uncovers the manner in which the radio – and the act of listening – has been written about for the past 100 years. Ever since the first public wireless broadcasts, people have been writing about the radio: often negatively, sometimes full of praise, but always with an eye and an ear to explain and offer an opinion about what they think they have heard. Novelists including Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh, and James Joyce wrote about characters listening to this new medium with mixtures of delight, frustration, and despair. Clint Eastwood frightened moviegoers half to death in Play Misty for Me, but Lou Reed's 'Rock & Roll' said listening to a New York station had saved Jenny's life. Frasier showed the urbane side of broadcasting, whilst Good Morning, Vietnam exploded from the cinema screen with a raw energy all of its own. Queen thought that all the audience heard was 'ga ga', even as The Buggles said video had killed the radio star and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers lamented 'The Last DJ'. This book explores the cultural fascination with radio; the act of listening as a cultural expression – focusing on fiction, films and songs about radio. Martin Cooper, a broadcaster and academic, uses these movies, TV shows, songs, novels and more to tell a story of listening to the radio – as created by these contemporary writers, filmmakers, and musicians.

1

Constructing a radio culture

The years up to 1922

It is 25 November 1976, Thanksgiving Day in San Francisco. A man from Belfast walks onto the stage at the Winterland Ballroom. He seems to be wearing a rhinestone-studded brushed-cotton purple two-piece consisting of a shapeless jacket and matching tight trousers, underpinned by a green T-shirt which is just a little too small. He looks somewhat tired and is heavy around the jowls. He glances nervously at the musicians. Taking a breath, he begins to mumble something about a caravan being on its way and some merry gypsies playing and listening to their radio set. Van Morrison is singing his signature show-stopping tune ‘Caravan’ for a movie directed by Martin Scorsese. It is a song that celebrates freedom, young love and the joy of listening to the wireless. Morrison calls on us, like an evangelical preacher, to turn up the volume of our transistor radio. He is quickly into his stride, unwinding the microphone from its stand (Figure 1) and urging us to understand that the radio has deep spiritual connections. Soon he is closing his eyes and feeling the emotion of the song; guitarist Robbie Robertson lets out a huge grin as he and The Band play along to Morrison’s call-and-response. This, they are saying, is what the soul of radio listening is all about. It is referred to again in Chapter 6, and this book sets out to document moments such as this. It explores the intersections between the sounds of the radio, and how they have been portrayed in literature, film, poetry and music. The assumption is this: to evoke the experience of listening to the radio, we can reasonably examine the words, music and pictures of artists, writers and directors – to hear and see what they have had to say about the subject. Radio has fascinated audiences for the past 100 years: it has sustained listeners through the Second World War; entertained baby boomers who danced in their bedrooms to the sounds of Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline; and it has intrigued new generations finding ways to use sound for online listening and podcasting.

Figure 1 Van Morrison sings about listening to the radio. The Last Waltz (1978), Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA: United Artists/MGM.

Radio features in creative works such as Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which has been a radio series, a TV show, a movie and a five-part trilogy of books) where, before his adventures, the hero Arthur Dent had worked for the BBC. Other examples include the movie Radio On, which featured a radio DJ looking for his brother’s killers, J. B. Morton’s ‘Beachcomber’ column in the Daily Express, which poked fun at the BBC, and Alice Oseman’s teen novel Radio Silence, which featured podcasting. There are tracks by Shakespears [sic] Sister, The Clash, Reba McEntire, George Harrison, Elvis Costello and Barry Manilow. There is also an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart wins an elephant in a radio competition. Each is a work of fiction that says something relatable and understandable about radio.

Writing a radio history

What follows is an account of how radio has appeared in literary and popular culture over the decades and an exploration of the enduring cultural fascination with the wireless – particularly in Britain. Around 300 novels, movies, songs, poems, works of art and TV shows are included in this book. As a body of creative work, they represent a consistent output of responses during the first 100 years of radio broadcasting, and it seems clear that artists felt they had something to say publicly about the medium during this long period. These works are treated as primary sources for evidence of attitudes towards radio; interpretations of what radio is and what it meant to the creator of the media form in question. They were chosen after sustained research in bibliographies, discographies and film and television programme databases, and I would welcome suggestions for examples to include in future editions of this book.

My approach is similar to that of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, who in 1979 examined nineteenth-century railway history by looking at sources such as fiction, travel writing and art to investigate how such a technology was assimilated into society. ¹ This way of considering cultural practices surrounding a specific technology also informed my 2011 study of the railway industry and rail preservation in Brazil by using movies, TV novelas, songs and novels. ² In a similar manner, music historians are developing ways to move beyond writing histories of popular music and instead to think about how to use music as history itself to create new narratives. ³ This is a technique I employ here when I seek evidence from the songs about radio across the decades. In the realm of media practice, Sarah Lonsdale has discussed the portrayal of journalists in British fiction – a profession linked to radio broadcasting from its early years. Indeed, there is a growing body of work which investigates media history through its representation in fictional forms. ⁴ Hence, this present book takes the cultural products made by radio listener s who also happen to be professional writers, musicians and moviemakers, and attempts to create a narrative of radio history from the early years of the twentieth century onwards.

How to read, watch and listen across the decades

There are two ways of thinking from the arena of French public intellectuals which are useful here. Firstly, Jacques Rancière has suggested that fiction can be a window to reality. This means that novels, for example, can offer some form of explanation, description and analysis of our daily worlds. He argues that each piece of fiction, by being somehow grounded in a reality by its author, can – after Aristotle’s Poetics – go beyond a basic historical narrative.

Hence, ‘the construction of a fictional plot [. . .] says how things can happen, how they happen as a consequence of their own possibility, where history only tells us how they arrive one after the other, in their empirical succession’. ⁵ The historian David Lowenthal took a similar position when he said about novels, ‘all fiction is partly true to the past’. ⁶ This way of thinking about such works means that they can be used to explore the world around us. Rancière uses the example of Madame Bovary, a novel in the realist vein by Gustave Flaubert that explored the moral problems faced by French provinciality, and he argues that because the story is laid out with recognizable emotions and events, it acts as a window onto that real world itself. ⁷ However, not all fiction is realist: and Rancière uses the example of crime fiction in which, even if it employs a narrative that suggests things are not what they seem, the plots themselves are grounded in a rationality which is recognizable as relating in some way to the real. ⁸ Such thinking allows me to take the creative works that follow here and use them to examine how radio was represented by, reasonably, assuming that their fictions indeed bear a strong relationship to perceived reality.

Further to this is the notion that when we read (or in our case, listen) we are ourselves creating a new meaning in a text. This brings together the links between language, reality and meaning and reflects ideas from previous generations of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Ferdinand de Saussure. Garry Potter summarized his own approach to this critical realism by saying, ‘The act of reading is an act of creation. Or, to express the same thought more precisely, it is an act of production.’ ⁹ However, I argue that this is not always instantaneous; it can sometimes be a whilst before a reading is turned into a creation and the act of ‘production’ is realized. In fact, the strongest example of how British writers and musicians pondered long and hard before responding to what they heard on the radio is to be found in the 1970s and is described in Chapter 6.

A second way of thinking about the mechanics of such responses therefore follows a heuristic developed by Michel de Certeau, who calls audiences ‘users’ as opposed to (in our case) listeners. He says our responses to culture are often fleeting, ‘struggles against oblivion’. ¹⁰ In his examples, he includes talking, reading, moving about, shopping and cookery, and to this list I add here listening to the radio. ¹¹ I argue that this is because a listener makes their own interpretation of what they hear. To continue with de Certeau’s logic, ‘He [the reader/listener] insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it’, and as this happens, ‘A different world (the reader’s) slips into the author’s place’. ¹² In other words, the act (here) of listening to the radio makes the programme, the show, the friendliness of the DJ or the music and news reports offered to the listener their own. Following de Certeau, the radio broadcasters are producers making ‘strategies’; and the listeners (‘consumers’) are responding with ‘tactics’. ¹³ To extend this point, this means that a small minority of listeners are responding with a tactic that involves making something fresh and public: perhaps a movie, or a novel, or a song or even another radio show. Each one has been prompted by listening to the radio; it has been a response (a ‘tactic’), which has been published and in turn has become a ‘strategy’ to be reconsumed by audiences. These latter items are the cultural products examined in this book.

One example illustrates this: the authorly responses to the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4. At the time of writing, it is broadcast four times each day on either or both the long wave and FM frequencies of the station. It is a service to seafarers in the British coastal waters and, in de Certeau’s wording, is a ‘strategy’ to give information to a section of the audience, but it has inspired many others (mostly non-mariners) to offer their reactions. There is a miscellany published by BBC Books and edited by Nic Compton – a writer with sailing experience – who describes the forecast as, ‘Utilitarian poetry, both in the beauty of its pared- back language and in its unique rhythms’. ¹⁴ Others who have found inspiration in this broadcast include poets such as Seamus Heaney, Carole Ann Duffy and Sean Street, as well as musicians ranging from Jethro Tull, Tears for Fears, The Prodigy, Radiohead and Blur. ¹⁵ Books have been produced too, including a humorous travelogue by Charlie Connelly (2004) and a volume mixing history and memoir by a former newsreader and announcer Peter Jefferson (2011). ¹⁶

The field of ‘fan writing’ could, in some respects, be regarded as analogous. The academic Henry Jenkins uses de Certeau’s ideas and examines fan culture of the late...