Heard it on the radio

Company, music, news and a glimpse of life beyond: the first form of home-based mass entertainment, radio quickly became the soundtrack to our lives and it isn't going anywhere, says Ben Lerwill

- Ben Lerwill

THERE'S something profoundly comforting about the sound of a radio. Its size or shape is irrelevant: it could be a vintage wireless, an in-car system or a smart speaker. It could be the faithful old set that has been standing in your kitchen since Nigel was still on The Archers. No matter. In all cases, a burbling radio has the power to create something companionable and immersive. 'I prefer radio to TV,' quipped the late writer and journalist Alistair Cooke, 'because the pictures are better.'

The versatility of the medium is boundless. It brings us dramas and documentaries, current affairs and cricket commentaries, piano concertos and Peel Sessions. It serves up breaking news and breakfast shows, chart rundowns and church services, late-night phone-ins and live comedy. For committed radio listeners, of which there are many millions in the UK, the notion of life without it is a barren one.

Yet there was—perish the thought—a time before its widescale adoption. Guglielmo Marconi famously used radio waves for communication back in the 1890s, but its potential as a form of entertainment lay dormant for some time. Then, things changed. Former BBC producer Beaty Rubens is the author of a new book, Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home, which focuses on the era in which radio morphed from being a novel form of technology into a mass-market phenomenon. ‘The term we would use today,’ she reflects, ‘is that radio went viral very quickly.’

Between 1922 and 1939, the UK was gripped by the so-called Radio Craze. Aided by the opening of the world’s first long-wave transmitter in 1925—in the Northamptonshire town of Daventry, no less—and boosted further by the availability of affordable sets, this was a revolution that reached into the houses of ordinary British people. In terms of our domestic lives, things would never be quite the same again.