Abstract
Available in paperback, hardback and electronic editions, this 208-page book by the former radio practitioner and now academic Andrew Dubber situates the author right at the centre of a journey. It is a journey which for him began in Auckland, New Zealand, in an age in which schoolchildren were taught how to listen to the radio and interact with it in class. Radio was for him – just as it was for many of us – an important fixture in daily and even annual routines, characterised by then-familiar patterns of listening at various points in the day which were disrupted and reconfigured by family holidays that brought new listening opportunities and greater variety to this diet of both speech and music radio. Eager to experience more of the medium, Dubber discovered the short wave band and began to explore radio programming from further afield. It is clear that he has a vast knowledge of and great affection for radio, which does not, however, preclude him from posing – and often answering – difficult questions about the medium. In doing so, he also casts a critical eye over some of the growing body of literature in the developing field of radio studies, and it is in this partial review that readers may find some of the book’s biggest surprises. Among them is an almost forensic deconstruction in the opening of the first chapter, provocatively titled ‘What is radio?’, of a seminal claim by my former colleague Andrew Crisell around ‘blindness’ being an ‘essential characteristic’ of the medium that ‘strikes everyone’. What is most hotly contested here is not the issue of blindness as an essential characteristic but that it should immediately strike everyone, when to question such an assertion is perhaps more pedantic than illuminating. Yet, even more striking in this new book is Dubber’s own assertion that radio does not have any essential characteristics, which is followed by the articulation of ‘ten categories of discursive frame’ that he suggests might at least be a useful starting point in answering his own question on the nature of radio.
At this point, it might be worth noting that the current practice of adding optional images and text on line, for example, does not in itself change radio into something else, any more than a publicity picture for a radio programme printed in a programme guide 90 years ago or the interactivity implied by the setting up of a listeners’ club in 1935 to promote Radio Luxembourg’s Ovaltineys and the milky drink made by its sponsors might realistically have been said at the time to transform radio into any kind of new or hybrid medium. Even though radio has also been on a journey, it is still overwhelmingly consumed as a linear stream of audio content that may be listened to while performing other, perhaps ‘primary’ tasks, as was noted by Crisell and others when radio studies was first emerging as an academic field. Its output is organised within (and is recognisable to many listeners by) a wide range of genres that exploit codes and conventions whose commonalities travel freely across geographical and cultural boundaries. So, the question ‘what is radio?’ may not be quite as problematic as this new book suggests. Nevertheless, it does represent a valuable contribution to the academic literature on radio, and it is not really overly pedantic to dwell at length on how radio might be more fully defined and what precisely (or perhaps imprecisely because Dubber’s conclusions are not incontrovertible) might today be considered to be ‘radio’, given the new diversities of production and distribution practice and technology which he explores expansively in later chapters. If the term ‘radio’ had only ever referred to the wireless AM and FM receivers through which it could initially only be heard, then it might make sense to suggest that a growing number of devices becoming available that are capable of turning its output into sound could disrupt its definition. However, the notion of ‘listening to the radio’ always meant something more than merely listening to the sound made by the receiver because otherwise any extraneous sounds the receiver might have made would have been of interest to its listeners, from interference marring reception of distant stations and the jarring crackle caused by switching on and off nearby electrical appliances in the days before suppression circuitry eliminated it, to the clatter it might make if accidentally knocked to the floor. Similarly, the reference to something being ‘on’ the radio rarely referred to an object physically placed upon the receiver. Perhaps, it is more of a cause for celebration that ‘the radio’ might now be listened to via a mobile phone, a tablet or even a watch, than a reason to succumb, however, reluctantly, to the technological determinism which the cover blurb of this book promises to avoid. This same blurb does, however, suggest that radio will be presented as a series of practices and phenomena, a principle with which we can probably agree.
This book is undoubtedly a good read – although perhaps not for everyone. It is certainly written in an accessible style, and it covers a lot of ground that is relevant to radio that will be of interest to readers drawn to it by the inclusion of the word ‘radio’ in the title. However, it is unclear in many places at whom it is pitched, beyond the obvious criterion of someone who is interested in the medium. I say this because of the way examples are often cited in passing, rather than with any explanation, however brief. So, for instance, the early reminiscences about classic BBC comedies make appropriate benchmark references for those readers who recognise them, but risk leaving some – probably younger – audiences wondering innocently what delights might have lain within such programmes as The Navy Lark, Dad’s Army, Round the Horne, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and The Goons. Sentences such as ‘I learned to play cribbage while laughing at Eccles and Bluebottle in a small, slopey-floored wooden house by the sea, as the rain came down outside’ add to this feeling that this is at least in part a personal account of a journey through different historical contexts (‘ages’) which reflects on the author’s experiences of radio along the way and then also examines the state of the medium in a present that can reasonably be described as the ‘digital age’. Eccles and Bluebottle were – I almost said ‘of course’, but to some readers of this journal, this will not seem so inevitable – just two of the zany characters conjured up by comedians Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Spike Milligan, who were collectively known as the Goons in several series of anarchic half-hour comedies made by the BBC between 1951 and 1960.
Given Dubber’s great affection for radio, it is not surprising he made it his career. This means, as he observes with justifiable certainty, that he is now one of those academics studying the field who are able to bring to both teaching and research the inside knowledge and appreciation of the industry of a practitioner. This is undoubtedly also an advantage when it comes to writing such a book as this, and he has taken care to update these perspectives since refocusing his career upon pedagogies around not only radio but also the music industry, for example, by visiting radio studios and observing today’s practitioners at work. What, then, of the ‘digital age’ to which we have all now journeyed? This is where the greatest contradictions around radio lie today, in that public awareness of a digital ‘switchover’ in television may be high because television sets now provide access to far more channels than they did just a few years ago, together with programme information, electronic programme guides and differing levels of interactivity accessed, for example, by a remote-control handset red button. However, in most countries, radio is far from being subject to wholesale migration of its transmission systems from analogue to digital, yet much of the production technology used to create its content has long been digital. Now websites are commonly considered to be key elements of stations’ communication strategies and useful parallel platforms for extended, additional and timeshifted content, while social networking is at the heart of audience interaction as much as letters and telephones once were. Audio capture and manipulation in production and post-production processes are now overwhelmingly digital, as are various other behind-the-scenes practices, such as playout, automation, scheduling and billing advertisers, so the radio industry in most countries is more digital than the means by which its audiences predominantly consume its output might suggest. Consequently, we now live in an ‘age’ in which it is widely expected that the sum of radio’s parts should be substantially greater than in its entirely analogue past – but it is largely still radio as we have always known it, except when any accompanying pictures become so elaborate that it begins to look like cheap television. Because of such blurring of boundaries, the definition and situation of radio in this ‘digital age’ just got more interesting and so provide a natural focus for the majority of Andrew Dubber’s book.