Abstract
I wanted to like this book, I really did.
Connelly is a well-seasoned author – formerly writing on WG Grace, weather forecasters, and in sentimentally pleasant tone about the BBC shipping forecast. His introduction lays out the important facts about how “we are all radio people”, 90 per cent of adults tuning in one way or another every week, free.
Rightly, he points out that television ties us down in one place while radio sets us loose in space and in imagination. So he is clearly of my tribe as a listener. He has also written for radio and briefly – he makes much of this – once co-presented a holiday show with Fi Glover. He sets out here partly to dig up facts about radio from long before his birth, and to muse on his own emotional life growing up alongside it.
Connelly puts in a lot of looking-up and leg-work investigating radio's history and mystery, even making it in the end to Hilversum, that spot on the dial – it's in the Netherlands – which fascinated both our generations as we twiddled the hissing, crackling dial in childhood. He collects old radio sets with love, though seems to have no qualms about the threatened switchoff of the analogue signal or the management's footling new obsession with specially-made podcasts never to be broadcast but made only for “BBC Sounds”, inaccessible to those without good internet access.
There are nuggets of history –some well-aired, like Tommy Woodroffe's apparently drunken “The fleet's lit up!” broadcast in 1937 (he was so incoherent he was taken off air after a few minutes and suspended for a week by BBC director-general John Reith) and the US panic over Orson Welles’ live The War of the Worlds on the day before Hallowe'en in 1938.
He re-works in one chapter his earlier research on the shipping forecast and pays decent tribute to Guglielmo Marconi and to the World Service. He takes the trouble to visit Lord Reith's grave, though he clearly doesn't like him much, and makes modish comments about the first DG's emotionally deprived childhood.
He includes long, indeed heavily over-padded, fanboy interviews with various idols – Charlotte Green doing the football results, Dotun Adebayo of BBC Radio London, the World Service and 5 live, and Cerys Matthews. The latter, in a weird interview, says she thinks Radio 4 should lose all its drama and comedy and have more music, yet in the next sentence contradicts that idea by saying we mustn't “go down the American route where you have to have a different channel for everything”.
Connelly seems not to notice this, because he needs to describe her carrier bags full of books and CDs as they leave Wogan House, and the way she shakes his hand despite having a Sainsbury's bag on her forearm. He also follows Corrie Corfield through an announcing shift and feels that we too must share every step, “through the revolving doors … up in the lift and along a corridor..”.
Some will like it, or at least skim it; Connelly covers a lot of ground and provides a solid index, which some more entertaining and sharp-witted books about radio have failed to do. But goodness, it is a dull read, even for a radio anorak like me! The author is no Bryson, and wastes inordinate amounts of words on lacklustre descriptions of how he researched or visited buildings.
These drown his real flashes of passion and poetic understanding of the marvel that is broadcast radio. On the way to Britain's smallest commercial station, Gairloch, we have to trudge with him under a cloudless blue sky where the sun turns “the air itself a rich gold and paints the snow-sugared whiteness of mountains with a thin golden veneer”, then listen to a couple of local stories from the 1880s which have nothing whatever to do with his errand, which gets nowhere until he has been in a hotel and woken to “the blush light of a Scottish winter morning…”. All fine if you are Bill Bryson, or Rory Stewart hymning the Borders, but weirdly pointless if not.
Connelly also achieves the almost impossible by writing a terribly dull chapter about the development of radio comedy, with only one fleeting mention of the legendary Armando Iannucci. There is also, interestingly, not a word about Terry Wogan.
More dismayingly, he challenges almost nothing in the way BBC Radio is run and seems unaware that it is being systematically starved of funding, its drama budget slashed, its management overstuffed and producers hobbled by an anxious mantra about “compliance”.
He celebrates radio's bygone glories, without asking with any rigour what may happen next.