Back in the nineteen-twenties this nation went mad about radio. In 1922 there were about 100,000 domestic radios in use, and thirty broadcasting stations. By 1924 there were half a million radio sets and over five hundred stations. Radio just kept on growing from there.
Most people over the age of sixty grew up with radio as their main home entertainment. Those generations remember the so called golden age, when plays, soap operas, comedies, classical music, and serious documentaries could be found all over the dial. There was plenty of stuff for kids, too. I was captivated by a radio serial called Dick Barton, Special Agent, and by The Goon Show - a wonderfully anarchic British radio comedy that turned some kids quite peculiar, although fortunately it had no effect on me. My mother and grandmother were addicted to a ghastly soap opera called "Mrs. Dale's Diary." Everything in the house had to stop, when that came on.
American kids had their radio heroes too - The Shadow, Buck Rogers, The Green Hornet. Parents in those days worried about kids listening to radio too much, just as they worry now about the effects of TV and videogames. But with hindsight, we know that they needn't have worried, because radio develops the imagination instead of anaesthetizing it. It allows every listener to create the action and the characters in his or her own mind, just like reading a book, For thousands of years before print came along, the human voice telling stories and reciting poems was the only form of public entertainment, apart from the occasional tribal war.
When television arrived in the 1940s, Gracie Allen said sadly: "It seems like nobody watches the radio anymore," and she was right. For a while, radio was in danger of being wiped out entirely by television. Commercial radio stations scrambled to survive by switching to simplified, low-cost programming. That’s why the FM band today is mostly pop songs, and the AM band is mostly traffic and weather, tabloid-style news, and nasty call-in shows full of spite and envy. You get what you pay for – or rather you get what the advertisers are willing to pay for.
Sometimes we forget what we almost lost. Quality radio in America was rescued from oblivion by the establishment of National Public Radio in 1970. That’s why we can still hear storytellers like Bailey White and Garrison Keillor, unique commentators like Andrei Codrescu and Frank Deford, unclassifiable radio talents like Ira Glass, and all kinds of good music, and comprehensive news. We old-time radio addicts remember it well, because it’s still here.
You may be driving, or on the beach, or in the kitchen, or even in the shower, and programs like these come to you out of thin air, or so it seems. Who knows where they come from, or how they’re paid for?
Many European countries have excellent radio because it’s paid for by – guess what? – a tax. Everybody must pay whether they listen or not. We have an altogether more democratic system, an honor system. Those who choose to listen choose to pay. It just goes to show what farsighted, fair minded, and honest people we are.
Copyright: David Bouchie
