Chanson d'automne Radio

Drôle de guerre (2008)

 

 

 

I'd like to start in 1940 before we rewind to 1866.  Radio Londres was a radio station broadcast from 1940 to 1944 by the BBC in London to Nazi-occupied France.  It broadcast entirely in French, and was for the most part, operated by escaped French nationals living in England. It's main purpose was to counter the propaganda broadcasts of the Vichy government's Radiodiffusion Nationale, and also the German-controlled Radio Paris. It's secondary, covert purpose was to send coded messages to the French Resistance.

As you'd expect, the Germans banned Radio Londres and did their best to jam it. Radio Paris had been broadcasting since 1922 and the Germans took it over in 1940. Radiodiffusion had only began broadcasting in July of 1939. It was nick-named Radio Vichy for it's studio location: Vichy Casino.

But the French collaborators were broadcasting essentially the same right-wing propaganda as Radio Paris: Philippe Henriot, Alain Laubreaux, Jean Hérold-Paquis, Paul Creysse, Lucien Rebatet, Marcel Déat to name a few. None of them would fare well after the war.

But back to those secret coded messages. It was routine to proadcast messages intended for French resistance cells. The best known today is probably the two part messages intended to cue operation Overlord. The first was to alert listeners that D-Day was imminent. The second indicated that specific, previously coordinated actions should be taken. These lines were taken from the Paul Verlaine poem Chanson d'automne.

The phrase "violins of autumn" indicated that Overlord was to start within two weeks. That was broadcast on on Thursday, June 1st, 1944. This was followed by the action order "Wound my heart with monotonous langor."  This quote meant that Overlord would start within 48 hours. The French resistance should begin sabotage operations. It was broadcast on Monday, June 5th, 1944. Verlaine had been dead for 48 years.

The poem Chanson d'automne ("Autumn Song") is a poem by the French poet Paul Verlaine. It was published in Verlaine's first collection, Poèmes Saturniens, in 1866. The poem forms part of the "Paysages tristes" ("Sad landscapes") section of the collection. Not everything on Radio Londres was so poetic. Other known coded messages include  "Jean has a long moustache" and "There is a fire at the insurance agency."

The text of the broadcast in that recording is as follows:

"This is London Calling the European News Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.  Here is the news. But first here are some messages for our friends in occupied countries: The Trojan war will not be held. John is growing a very long beard this week. The long sobs of the violins of autumn. Les sanglots longs des violons d'autumne. Wound my heart with a monotonous langour..."

Radio Burma

In the book Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin was a single passage about radio. [It's quite a good read by the way.]

"By far the most trusted source of news are the daily radio programmes broadcast to Burma by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Voice of America (VOA and the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB). To try to prevent people from listening to these, the government occasionally jams the signals. A few years ago a 70-year-old man was sentenced to two years in prison for listening to VOA in a tea shop."

Larkin's book was published in 2004 and the situation in Burma has changed significantly since then. But lets talk semantics. In 1989, the military government officially changed the English translations of many names dating back to Burma's colonial period or earlier, including that of the country itself: Burma became Myanmar. The renaming remains a contested issue nationally and internationally. More here.

Many opposition groups and countries continue to use "Burma" because they do not recognize the legitimacy of the ruling military government. So choosing to call it Burma or Myanmar is a political decision. I'll use the name Burma for consistency and as I too choose to see dictatorships and other authoritarian governments as inherently illegitimate. But the change occurred in 1989, and even the U.S. State Department's website lists the country as "Burma (Myanmar)".

The DVB started as a non-profit media organization operated by Burmese expatriates based in Oslo, Norway. They started the operation in 1992. It made radio and television broadcasts aimed at providing uncensored news and information about Burma. They operated in defiance of the authoritarian military government. The news outlet has long been one of the only credible sources of news from Myanmar.

The DVB brought a highly charged air of defiance to the country’s heavily censored media, with reports detailing human rights abuses, oppression, corruption, and the perspectives of ethnic rebel armies. DVB states that it has four primary goals:      

• The provision of accurate and unbiased news to the people of Burma.
• To promote understanding and cooperation among Burma's religious and ethnic populations.
• To encourage and sustain independent public opinion and to provide for social and political debate.
• To impart the ideals of democracy and human rights" to the Burmese people.

2012 was a pivotal year for the DVB. In 2010 Burma held it's first elections in 20 years. Following the election, the military government formally gave control of the administration to a quasi-civilian government. In March of 2011, Thein Sein, a retired senior general was sworn in as president. Somewhat unexpectedly the Thein Sein government scaled back other media restrictions even allowing privately owned newspapers to operate. DVB gradually moved back into Burma, where it became an independent media company operating openly. In March of 2018, DVB started broadcasting on digital terrestrial television.

Then came the coup of February 2021. Myanmar's military seized control,  declared the results of the last general election invalid and revoked the licenses of several media outlets... including DVB. Burma reverted to a pre-2012 state virtually overnight. More here.

The the arrests began. On the behest of Myanmar, the police in Thailand arrested three DVB journalists. They were trying to flee to Thailand. The group included Min Nyowho had been reporting on the coup. On May 9th, Thai authorities arrested more of Min Nyo’s DVB colleagues in Chang Mai. The group are being detained pending a court decision. More here.

Polari on BBC's Round the Horne

Round the Horne was a BBC Radio comedy program starring Kenneth Horne. The format was an old fashioned revue, mixing music and comedy. The BBC aired weekly episodes over 4 seasons from 1965 into 1968. Counting specials there were a total of 68 episodes. (Some sources list 71 inexplicably)  The series was created by Barry Took and Marty Feldman. The cast consisted of Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden and Bill Pertwee with writer Feldman alternately writing and/or performing in some seasons. [You may recognize Marty as Igor) The show's announcer Douglas Smith also appeared in some skits. More here.

Music was provided by the singing group the Fraser Hayes Four, backed by the BBC Radio Orchestra, but was billed as Edwin Braden and the Hornblowers. In the final season the Max Harris Group managed those duties. Round the Horne hit the air at the BBC at a time when television had already become the dominant broadcasting media. Nonetheless it pulled in a very respectable audience of 15 million listeners. Even in a 2019 poll in radio times, Round the Horne was voted the BBC's best radio comedy series ever.  Despite that, the series is totally unknown in the U.S. More here.

SERIES	EPISODES	START	YEAR
Series 1	16	March 7	1965
Series 2	13	March 13	1966
Series3	20	February 12	1967
Series4	16	February 25	1968
Special	1*	July 22	1966
Christmas	2**
TOTAL	68

*The special episode is a re-recording of The Man with the Golden Thunderball, with a slightly modified script. 

**Christmas episodes were aired on Dec 25th 1966 and Dec. 24th of 1967.

It's worth pointing out that the cast wasn't a group of randomly selected auteurs.  Kenneth Horne had previously been the host of a Saturday evening comedy and music radio show Variety Playhouse starting in January of 1957. Beyond that notoriety, there was a lot of continuity in the writers pool. Horne's next project Beyond our Ken, began with a pilot co-written with Variety Playhouse writers Eric Merriman and Barry Took. It's cast included Kenneth Williams, Ron Moody, Hugh Paddick and Betty Marsden. You might already recognize some names there. The music even included the Fraser Hayes Four. That was first broadcast in October of 1957. That troupe stayed together for 7 seasons even before starting Round the Horne.

SERIES	EPISODES	START	YEAR
Series 1	21	July 1	1958
Series 2	20	March 19	1959
Series 3	14	April 19	1960
Series 4	20	October 20	1960
Series 5	20	October 12	1961
Series 6	13	December 27	1962
Series 7	13	November 24	1963
Christmas	2**	1958 & 59
Pilot	1*	October 2	1957
TOTAL	124

 *The Pilot episode was recorded Oct. 1957

**Christmas episodes aired only with Series 1 & 2

But the writing for Round the Horne in the 1960s was different than Variety Playhouse  or Beyond our Ken. It's an over-used phrase, but it really pushed boundaries. The show endured regular scrutiny from BBC censors for its very naughty double entendres, but in 1965, having LGBT characters was genuinely risque. Homosexuality was not decriminalized in the UK until 1967. Gay and queer people obviously existed before then, but on the BBC, the closet door had to remain at least ostensibly shut. The series of skits with the characters Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, but written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman broke ground.

The characters Julian and Sandy were two cheerful but campy homosexual men. Their first appearance was in episode four of the first series, and they proved so popular that they appeared in every episode thereafter. The gag was that straight man (in both senses of the term) Kenneth Horne was oblivious to their increasingly gay innuendos. But interestingly he did sometimes pick up some of their Polari... More on Polari in a bit.

Their Julian & Sandy routine ultimately outlived Horne and his eponymous program. They published a book The Bona Book of Julian & Sandy: Leaves from their Round the Horne Journal, and an LP/Cassette released in 1976 The Bona Album of Julian and Sandy. The BBC repackaged that in multiple formats often with the title The Bona World of Julian and Sandy. In 1987 they revived the bit for an appearance on the Wogan program. Then in 2003 then Round the Horne... revisited aired on  BBC Four, the characters were revived by actors Nigel Harrison and Robin Sebastian. More here.

But a little more on Polari. It was quite literally a secret language (more property a creole) used by the gay community in the UK from at least 1890 into the 1970s. It was mostly a mixture of  Italian, Romani, and British slang. Julian & Sandy took that underground language of gay subculture, simplified it and exposed it to the mainstream. While they did provide relatively positive role models, and an archetype for innumerable other camp characters, they also inadvertently helped to kill off Polari through that very same exposure. (You can read more about the language in the book Fabulosa! The Story of Polari by Paul Baker.)  So how did all that "secret" Polari terminology make it into the scripts?  I don't think it was the writers. Some of the content was ad libbed, and both of the actors, Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams were gay. Sadly Williams killed himself in 1988 with an overdose of barbiturates. More here.

Kenneth Horne died in 1969 of a heart and the BBC decided that Round the Horne could not continue without him. A faith healer had convinced him to stop taking his blood thinners. He had already survived a similar to a brush with death in 1958. Horne had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed with a slight limp. His long recuperation from that stroke led to the BBC putting Beyond our Ken on hold. So in some ways Around the Horne was his swan song. He was 61. More here.

The Secret Life of Radio

 The Secret Life of Machines was an educational TV series presented by Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod. It aired on BBC Channel 4. The pair explain the invention and function of various common machines and electronic devices. In this episode they cover radio from Heinrich Hertz through Bakelite into the modern era.

The Baltic Chain and Radio

Today Hong Kong is trying to "unshackle" itself from China. On August 23rd in 2019 supporters of their pro-democracy movement linked hands across the island, creating human chains on both sides of the city's harbor that they stretched for almost 25 miles.

These protests were inspired a a similar, but much larger historic protest, in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. On Aug. 23, 1989 approximately two million people joined hands forming a chain 419 miles long. (some estimates say 1.5 M) It stretched from Tallinn in Estonia, through the Latvia capital Riga, to Vilnius in Lithuania.

The protest was referred to as the "Baltic Chain" or the "Baltic Way" or even the "Chain of Freedom."  The Soviets called it "nationalist hysteria" driven by "extremist elements" promoting anti-socialist and anti-soviet agendas. Were outsiders were exploiting nationalism with the goal of independence? Well that last bit turned out to be true.

Coordinating two million people is no small feat. They disseminated information through regional organizations like the Latvian Popular Front, the Reform Movement of Lithuania, and the Popular Front of Estonia and via clandestine broadcast services, like Radio Free Europe, VOA and the BBC despite Soviet jamming efforts.

President Gerald Ford strongly supported funding for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe in speeches in 1974. These broadcasts were elevated to a new status in November of 1983 when they were incorporated into a separate Baltic radio division called the Baltic States Service of Radio Liberty. For more on that please read Jonathan Conde's 2018 masters thesis [LINK].

The Baltics had largely industrialized Post-WWII under the Soviets. They post 1968 moved directly into commercialism. In 1967 the Estonia Stereo was developed at Tallinn Radio-Electronics. It was the first stereophonic radio set in the whole USSR, [model Estonia-005] and it was manufactured at the Red RET plant in Tallinn between 1969 and 1973.  Between 1971 and 1972 car sales in Estonia quintupled. But the media was still strictly controlled, and the internet was decades away.  As Peeter Vihalemm wrote in his paper Media Use in Estonia, "During the period of glasnost, when the multi-party system did not yet exist and the underground centers were weak, the media was the main mechanism of mass mobilization " [LINK].

The Book Estonia Life Stories by by Tiina Kirss and Rutt Hinrikus gives the story of Asta Luksepp. 

"Before leaving I stopped by at home and adjusted the radio to the right wavelegnth for my mother.  We gathered at the market square in Elva... Our assigned place in the chain was between Nuia and Viljandi. We kept driving toward Latvia until it was 7 o'clock. We stopped the buses and joined other folks from Vorumaa. There were so many people that we could not fit in one line, so we formed parallel chains. We were all moved to tears. We had radios along, and thus could follow the orders coming from Tallinn."

So what radio stations broadcast the signals and the events? According to Peeter Vihalemm, most of them.  "...the two-million-person demonstration “Baltic chain”, organised on 23 August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, was not only directly broadcast on all radio and TV channels in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but it was also organised and managed with the assistance of the media."  The weakness of the Soviets in this moment and the popularity of the independence movement is hard to overstate. The Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians expected reprisals and for the most part... they did not come, not that day anyway.

The reprisals came when Estonia made the big move for independence and started printing up their own Estonian Passports, then declared independence on August 20th 1991. Moscow sent in the tanks.  Thousands of citizens the Tallinn radio and TV tower to prevent it's use for Soviet propaganda. Radio operators jammed the elevator and threatened to turn on the oxygen-removing fire-suppression system on the soldiers. Bullet holes dating from the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 are still visible at the base of the tower.

While the people of Hong Hong fight their own fight, in Lithuania they commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Baltic Way with a radio art installation. It was conceived of by two young artists, Viaceslavas Mickevicius and Ieva Makauskaite who worked with Lithuanian national broadcaster LRT.
The radio installation, entitled "One Wave" is made up of more than 2,000 old radios that will play a trilingual song known to be the anthem of the Baltic Way entitled "The Baltics are waking up". According to EuroNews, Mickevicius, who was 5 years old in 1989, wondered how they managed to organise the protest. "It appeared that the main role was played by the radio. Special radio broadcasts helped to coordinate the rally," said Viaceslavas Mickevicius, one of the two artists.

LONDON BANDSCAN

I had the good fortune to have access to a decent radio while in London last Friday. What was remarkable to me was not just the number of pirates, but that in some cases I couldn't distinguish between pirates and commercial FM stations. Most pirates were broadcasting in stereo and some even with scrolling RDS! More here.

On the commercial side they brand a number of dance sub-genres which to me are indistinguishable: Acid Jazz, Breakbeat, Hardcore *and Breakbeat Hardcore) Funk, House, Liquid Funk, Techno, Drum ’n’ Bass, Basement (Bashment?) and a number of others. These flowed together into one continuous boom-chee, boom-chee, boom-chee, boom-chee... interrupted only by advertisements for Amazon Alexa, and the Euro-Millions lottery. This obviously popular UK format has no U.S. equivalent, as we have no more than nine "dance" formatted stations in the whole country. First skiffle, now this.

I noted some loud silent carrier signals that must be stations but were off air at about 8:00 PM GMT. I suspect those are pirates, as rube-goldberg automation often leads to dead air. But absent any programming it's hard to tell. Optimistically I tuned in nine pirates That's almost a third of the radio band

88.0  - Pulse88 (pirate)
88.8  - BBC Radio 2 
89.1  - BBC Radio 2 
*90.0 - Silent Carrier? (Pirate Hot FM aka Hot 90?)
90.2 - Point Blank FM (Pirate)
91.3 - BBC Radio 3
93.2 - BBC Radio 4
94.9 - BBC London
95.4 - UK Roots FM (Pirate)
95.8 - Capital FM
*96.1 - Silent Carrier? (Pirate S Dance?)
96.3 - Hot 96 (pirate)
96.9 - Capital XTRA
97.3 - LBC
97.9 - Divine (Pirate)
98.5 - BBC Radio 1
     James Brown - Get up Off A That Thang
100.0 - Kiss FM
100.6 - Classic FM
     Smooth Classics w/ Margherita Taylor
101.4 - Flex FM (Community station, former pirate)
*102.0 - Silent Carrier? (Pirate Conscious Radio)
102.2 - Smooth Radio
     Ad block: Euromillions
103.0 - LMW London Most Wanted (pirate)
103.3 - poor signal, London Greek Radio?
104.9 - XFM, Radio X
105.4 - Magic
     "Mellow Magic" tagline
105.8 - Absolute Radio
     Kasabian - Processed Beats
     Muse - Something Human (terrible BTW)
106.1 - Heart

Also managed to fit in a visit to the original Rough Trade record shop on Talbot Rd. While not technically the first store, it's as close as you can come today. The original opened at 202 Kensington Park Road in 1976, it later moved to Talbot Rd... close enough.  I also visited a dead-end alley called Savoy Steps, where Bob Dylan filmed the video for Subterranean Homesick Blues in 1967. More here. Also bought a heap of books at the Music & Goods Exchange near Portobellow Rd. and a couple gems from Black Gull Books at Camden Lock.

The Oldest Broadcaster In The Bahamas

1540 ZNS-AM is one of the oldest and strangest radio stations in the West. It is a 50,000 watt station based in the Bahamas, but has the protections of a Class A, clear channel station under NARBA. So it's audible throughout the Bahamas, most of Cuba, and even parts of southeastern Florida. It is the only clear channel station on an island and the only one in the whole Carribean. (Note: Cuba was going to have clear channel stations but they bailed on NARBA in 1959) Despite that Class-A status, ZNS shares a frequency with KXEL in Iowa. This may be a consequence of it operating at only 5,000 watts when NARBA was signed in 1947.

Today ZNS is part of a network is run by the Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas (BCB).  It consists of 1540 ZNS-1 AM (and its repeater on 104.5) 1240 ZNS-2 AM, which is simulcast on 107.9 in Nassau; and 810 ZNS-3 AM which simulcast on FM 104.5 in Freeport. Their TV network includes only 2 transmitters - serving Nassau and Freeport. ZNS published an excellent network history in 2006 on their 70th anniversary, 200+ pages [LINK]

ZNS stands for Zephyr Nassau Sunshine. Zephyr apparently means balmy breeze. The book Third World Mass Media and Their Search for Modernity by John Lent describes the station (in 1976) as being "...under the supervision of an independent five-man commission, under the consultation with the prime minister. Actually, however, the prime minister does the appointing of personnel to the Bahamas Broadcasting and Television Comission.  The commission itself is responsible to the minister for internal affairs. ZNS personnel think of the station as neither a public service department nor a public corporation, but something in between it's structures." He goes on to point out that ZNS receives no money from the public treasury... which was not exactly true. But more on that in a bit.

The Bahamas then colonial government launched ZNS as part of the Telegraph Department, just in time for the coronation of Britain’s King George V, on May 12, 1937. (Ham radio was active as early as 1932 ex. VIBAX)  ZNS's first studio location was in the Snappy Hat Shop. By about May of that year they installed a 500 watt transmitter and were broadcasting 2 hours a day. The population of the whole nation of islands was only 66,000. Their programming consisted of BBC news, news from local news papers and a bit of recorded music also from the BBC. Until 1950, ZNS was entirely funded by the government as a non-commercial service. More here.

Their TV service  started in Nassau in 1977, with no specific public charter. Their programming was for entertainment, education, and news. So their aired a mix of everything: music, sitcoms, sports, and dramas. Back then the Bahamanian government argued that it had to protect ZNS from competition and denied "numerous" radio applications to do so. In support of their TV outlet they blocked the deployment of cable television services until 1995! Some of this argument was cultural integrity, similar to Canada's content laws. But there seems a bit more to this.

 In 1992 the BCB tightened up the format to a more CBC, NPR or BBC-like news and public affairs format. But to the ire of Bahamanians, ZNS-TV in particular did little to promote Bahamian culture, but a great deal to promote Bahamian politicians. [I'm paraphrasing pundit Larry Smith there.] LINK ...And by 2006 it was costing the 13 million dollars a year to do so.

Consequently for decades the Bahamanian government and citizens have been at a loss what to do with the network. In 2009, the Bahamanian government slashed its funding by 50%. In 2010 Michael Moss of the BCB proposed they add a cable television fee to fund the station, specifically stating that "Creating a new funding system tied to specific legislated sources of revenue will reinforce ZNS’ autonomy as a public service broadcaster..." the news outlet Bahamas B2B called the plan "crazy" though the BBC is funded similarly.

The Nassau Guardian newspaper asked rhetorically in 2011 if the station should exist at all. [LINK] The URCA (Utilities Regulation & Competition Authority) proposed just days later that the government to put more money into the Broadcasting Corporation of The Bahamas if it is to fulfill its planned public service function. The problem gets lip service from politicians, but little more and the stalemate continues to this day. [LINK]

Husband Substitutes on Housewives' Choice

Let us open with a quote from Annie Nightingale, the legendary British pirate radio DJ. This time it was the the Telegraph [SOURCE] but back in 2015 the Guardian published the same quote [SOURCE] with the same headshot in another story.

"Even though I had contributed to Woman's Hour, one of the reasons that I, as a woman, was initially rejected as a potential Radio 1 DJ was that DJs were intended as “husband substitutes”. BBC exact words. I kid you not."

That line has been quoted and re-quoted in recent years, but wasn't the first time I had heard that BBC was quite so patronizing to the ladies. The 2004 text book Media Studies: The Essential Resource by Philip Rayner, Peter Wall and Stephen Kruger quote the same line from Ms. Annie and explain further the mindset of the time.

"...the male DJs functioned as 'husband substitutes' to the identified female listeners. From this idea, both BBC and commercial radio D|s built up a culture where is seemed the art or presentation was to flirt with the female listener who was characterized as 'Doreen' the housewife."

It's hard to picture this today, in a world where the hashtag #metoo is trending. But Housewives' Choice was a BBC radio record request program that broadcast every morning at 9:00 AM from 1946 to 1967 on the BBC Light Programme. (The program was cancelled when the Light Programme was replaced by BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2 in 1967.) The creator and producer was Pat Osborne. The program even then was a bit culturally tone deaf. But in an era of the BBC broadcasting monopoly, they could afford to be 20 years behind the times.

So when the BBC was husband shopping who did they buy?  They actually changed hosts every week or two so they had to replace their 'husbands' often. Who were those weekly 'Husband Substitutes'? In the end there were over 250 hosts... so it's a mixed bag. You can see a complete list here.  Presenters included:

Neal Arden - Born in London he moved to Southern Rhodesia in 1928 and served in the British South Africa Police. In 1930 he returned to England to pursue an acting career. His screen debut was in the 1934 film version of Princess Charming. In 2005 he published his autobiography, A Man of Many Parts.

Sam Gabriel Costa - He was a popular singer of the British dance band era and a voice actor on the show Much Binding in the Marsh.  His BBC radio career began with appearances on the It's That Man Again (ITMA) program. He also had an excellent mustache.

Kenneth Horne - Unlike most hosts Horne's bread and butter was comedy. He is perhaps best remembered for his work on three BBC Radio series: Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh (1944–54), Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) and Round the Horne (1965–68). Pre-war he was quizmaster on the bi-weekly BBC radio show Ack-Ack, Beer-Beer.

Roy Rich - Well known in the UK as one of Britain's first DJs,

Franklyn Engleman - A BBC radio personality popular in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly known as the host of Down Your Way and Gardeners' Question Time.

Bryan Michie - A BBC radio announcer and host of Gramophone Omnibus in 1940. He tried his hand at acting in the late 1930s to no avail. More here.

Godfrey Winn - A journalist and columnist for the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Express newspapers. He got into radio as a war correspondent 1939. His book Home From Sea published 1943 recounts his life in the Royal Navy. He frequently hosted the BBC Radio show, with David Jacobs

Bob Danvers Walker - An English radio and newsreel announcer best known as the off-screen voice of Pathe News cinema newsreels during World War II.

Robert MacDermot - Hosted the program in it's first week back in 1946.

George Elrick - Mr. Elrick probably hosted the program more often than any other host. Born in Aberdeen in 1903 he was a drummer and vocalist with one hit single "The Music goes Round and Round" back in 1937. In 1948 he was first invited to host the program. He published an autobiography, Housewives' Choice - The George Elrick Story in 1991.

Eamonn Andrews -  He began as an amateur boxer and became a sports commentator for Ireland's state broadcaster Radio Éireann. He later hosted the game show What's My Line? He later presented the long-running Sports Report on BBC's Light Programme.

Edmundo Ros - This Trinidadian-Venezuelan musician, vocalist, arranger and bandleader is better known for his tropical night club LPs than his radio career.

Despite the  branding, the program was very popular, receiving a reported 3,000 requests a week according to the 1950 BBC Year Book. Housewive's Choice was succeed by the short-lived show "Family Choice" which was carried on went both Radios 1 and 2. It was cancelled by 1970.  More here. It's worth nothing that four women did host Housewives' Choice. Of them, three were on the BBC staff. They all featured on the program in the late 1940s and all were also associated at one time or another with the show Woman's Hour.

Barbara McFadyean - She first presented a weekly program of "gramophone records of all kinds", in 1943 with announcer Joan Griffiths on the BBC Home Service.

Joan Griffiths - The original host of the Women's Hour was a man, Alan Ivimey.  Listeners complained for the first 3 months so he was fired. Joan was hired on to replace him. New topics included equal pay, menopause and the Lives of Famous Women Novelists.

Jeanne Heal - Before Housewives Choice she hosted Designed for Women. She later hosted her own talk program Meet Jeanne Heal. She went on to do documentaries for the BBC. More here.

Vera Lynn - Hosted the program three times and once for a month in 1963. She is alive today and 100 years old. [SOURCE] A vocalist who sold more than a million records by the age of 22, she performed often for the troops in WWII. In February 2017 she released her latest album, and holds the record for being the oldest living artist to achieve a top 20 UK album.

Alan Turing’s Radio Broadcasts

In May and June of 1951, The BBC broadcast lectures by five leading figures of British computing: Douglas Hartree, Max Newman, Alan Turing, Frederic ("Freddie") Williams, and Maurice Wilkes. Of these men, Turing has become the most famous. On May 15th of that year, the BBC broadcast his  short lecture, a riveting 8-page steamroller titled "Can Computers Think?"

It is one of the earliest written works intended for the general public that directly addressed the future of AI. He had written much "heavier" thesis on the topic Ex. Intelligent Machinery (1948).  If you want to get into the deep end, pick up a copy of Mechanical Intelligence, Volume 1 Collected Works of A.M. Turing

Unfortunately the recordings made by the BBC of these broadcasts no longer exist. However, the Turing archives at King’s College, Cambridge do contain Turing’s original radio script. You can read that script here complete with hand corrections.  Recently writer and mathematician James Grime re-recorded them and posted the audio on Youtube to benefit us all. To Mr. Grime we give our thanks.

Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays

Samuel Beckett was born in 1906, lived most of his early life in Ireland, with stops in London and a long well-hidden stay in the South of France in WWII, before settling in Paris. He is remembered best for his avant-garde fiction, and in particular an absurd play titled Waiting for Godot. (But if you think that was absurd you should read How It Is.) Beckett is not remembered for his works written for radio, but there were several and all worthy of note. Some of his radio plays are not considered  to be radio plays in formal bibliographies on dubious grounds. I'll explain. More here.

• All That Fall (broadcast 1957) 
• From an Abandoned Work (broadcast 1957) 
• Molloy (broadcast 1957) 
• Embers (broadcast 1959) 
• Words and Music (broadcast 1962) 
• Cascando (broadcast:1963)
• Krapp's Last Tape: 1972
• Rough for Radio I (published 1976) 
• Rough for Radio II (published 1976) 

In 1955 the BBC saw some appeal in the then young playwright, Samuel Beckett was getting for his new play Waiting for Godot.  At the BBC he was championed by Donald McWhinnie, Barbara Bray, Martin Esslin, and John Morris. The BBC invited Beckett to write a radio play to be broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. Beckett was hesitant, but wrote to his friend Nancy Cunard:

"Never thought about radio play technique but in the dead of t’other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging of feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something."

Over the next 20 years, his cartwheels ultimately led to five plays specifically intended for radio, and arguably a few others.  His radio debut was in 1956 All That Fall. You can hear it here. The play was written in English, specially for the BBC well after he began to write primarily in French. The piece was directed by his drinking buddy, Don McWhinnie. This is well described in the book Directing Beckett by Lois Oppenheim. It was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, January 13th of 1957, It featured actors Mary O'Farrell and J. G. Devlin. Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran had minor parts. (It was later broadcast as Tous ceux qui tombent on RTF/ORTF in Paris, on February 25th, 1963.) A "modernized version" was broadcast on June 4th, 1972. Directed by Donald McWhinnie.

That play was followed by From An Abandoned Work, which had been previously published in the Trinity News, June 7th 1956. [SOURCE] The play began as a novel he started in 1954 but had abandoned.  It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Third Programme on December 14th, 1957 together with a selection from his 1951 novel Malloy.  The first person narrative was delivered by Patrick MacGee, directed by McWhinnie. In later listening to a rebroadcast, Beckett was so taken with MacGee's performance that it inspired him to write what he then called "MacGee's Monologue". This later became the play Krapp’s Last Tape, a work sometimes even described as a "meditation for radio." Inexplicably, most bibliographies do not consider Krapp's Last Tape to have been a radio play. This is likely because it debuted in Theater, then moved to BBC2 television.

Also written in 1957 was Embers, but it wasn't broadcast until June of 1959. McWhinnie directed again and the protagonist was played by Jack MacGowran, for whom the play was specially written. Supporting case included Kathleen Michael and Patrick Magee. It was First broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on June 24th, 1959. You can hear it here. The play won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year.

A decade passed before Beckett returned to the radio medium.  Rough for Radio I is a short radio play written in in French in 1961 as as Esquisse Radiophonique and first published in Minuit, issue 5 in September 1973. Its first English publication as Sketch for Radio Play was in 'Stereo Headphones' issue 7, in spring 1976. Plans for a BBC production, with Humphrey Searle providing the music amounted to nothing in the 1960s, but a French version was produced by ORTF in 1962.

Rough for Radio II was also first published in Minuit, this time issue 16, November 1975. It was written in French in 1961 as Pochade Radiophonique and published in Minuit 16, November 1975. The BBC beat RTE to it this time and Beckett translated the work into English for its debut broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on April 13th, 1976, his birthday The program also included Dante and the Lobster from his collection of short prose More Pricks than Kicks and a variety of live recordings from the National Theatre: From an Abandoned Work, Malone Dies, Murphy, Watt, Malloy, Still, The Unnamable, Cascando, First Love, Texts for Nothing and a selection of his poems.

Also written in the 1960s was his radio play, Words and Music assumed to have been written between November and December of 1961. It was recorded and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 13 November 1962. It was acted by Patrick Magee and Felix Felton. His cousin, John S. Beckett provided
music.

Most lists completely exclude The Old Tune from Becketts radio resume. After Embers, but before Rough for Radio, Beckett translated and re-wrote Robert Pinget’s 1960 play La Manivelle for the BBC. Its first radio broadcast was August 23rd, 1960. Barbara Bray directed and actors Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee voice the parts. It's worth noting, as his interest in radio came in distinct phases. The lone exception being a 1972 recording of selections from How It Is, probably taped  at the same time as the Krapp’s Last Tape BBC sessions. It was released as a 7-Inch by J&B Recordings.

His last work for radio was Cascando, a radio playwritten in French in December of 1961. It is subtitled 'Invention radiophonique pour musique et voix.' It was first broadcast on France Culture (RDF) on October 13th 1963 with actors Roger Blin and Jean Martin. The first English-language production was on October 6th, 1964 on BBC Radio 3 with Denys Hawthorne and Patrick Magee (of course).

Shortly before his death in 1989, the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, including productions of all of Beckett's extant plays for radio, was recorded and produced at the BBC Studios, London on January 1988. It was distributed  in the U.S. by APR (American Public Media). It was intended to be broadcast in it's entirely on his 80th birthday, April 13th 1989. It was carried on NPR, Pacifica,  RIAS, ZDF and  other networks. Hopefully the life-long, iconic pessimist was at least moderately pleased.

The year 2006 was the 100-year anniversary of Beckett's birth. A complete run of all Beckett’s radio plays was presented by RTE Radio 1. Also notably BBC Radio 3 revisited Krapps Last Tape, and then Embers in 2006 with a new cast under director Stephen Rea. The productions were rebroadcast on BBC Radio 3 on May 16th 2010 as part of a double bill.

The question remains why are his radio works so obscure?  In Katherine Worth's essay, 'Beckett and the Radio Medium' she explains "The plays Beckett wrote for radio have had considerably less attention than his stage plays. No doubt this is largely as Martin Esslin suggests, because there have been few opportunities to hear them." The book Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio by David Addyman, Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning goes a step further quoting a 'tirade' by Beckett himself "If we can't keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down."

Reggae Radio in the UK

The book Cut 'N' Mix by Dick Hebdige was first published in 1987, making it out of date now, but very contemporary for early land-based pirate broadcaster in the UK. Today the maritime pirate broadcasters are more famous: Radio Caroline, Radio Laser, and Radio London is even the topic of a feature film.   But in the early 1980s terrestrial pirate radio exploded onto the mainland. There are several reasons but lets start with a quote from Mr. Hebdige.

"Land based pirate stations have mushroomed in Britain in the last few years. In May, 1985, John Hind and Stephen Mosco managed to locate 140 stations, though not all of them broadcast music. And there were many more that they didn't manage to contact. In their list, London alone was host to sixty stations."

There are three primary reasons this was a time of pirate radio expansion  in Britain.

1. Historical: BBC Radio was state run
2. Demographic: The "Windrush generation"
3. Technological: The advent of cheap solid state electronics

The BBC was founded in 1913 by a decree of the General post Office. It was initially funded by the sale of receiving sets. This was received poorly by listeners who subsequently made their own sets, or bought competing units. It was unde-funded initially but grew into an institutional and inflexible agency. They failed to learn the lesson from it's founding funding problems. By the 1960s it's failure to reflect popular tastes [again] had given birth to a generation of maritime pirate radio: Radio Caroline, Radio Laser, Radio London and others. More here.

As a result of the population losses (~450k) during the WWII, the British government began encouraging mass immigration from their colonies. The ship MV Empire Windrush brought the first group mostly Jamaican, African-Caribbean migrants to England in June of 1948. This Windrush generation grew into a permanent population today of  almost 6 million. Three generations later, almost 350 thousand of these people now call London home. They brought with them a musical tradition completely unlike British pop music and in 1980 they had almost zero representation on the airwaves. So being from a poor country, they applied their own tradition of making due and took to the airwaves themselves.  I'll quote Mr. Hebdige on the advent of cheap electronics.

"...the real breakthrough in radio piracy occurred when cheap portable transmitters came on the market. By the mid-1980s you could by an (illegal) 50-watt transmitter for around £200 or build one yourself for less. Soul and Reggae enthusiasts began to plug the gap in the airwaves playing solid funk, soul, and dub. All they needed was a good quality cassette recorder, a transmitter and a high roof."

The first appearance of reggae on British airwaves legally was on the program "Reggae Time" hosted by Steve Barnards which first aired in 1971. It aired on Sunday nights from the BBC Radio London. More here. Tony Williams later took over that program in 1978 and continued for a decade. More here and here. He alternated with David Rodigan who permanent slot at Capital Radio in 1979 to present another reggae program "Roots Rockers", which ran for 11 years. He left in 1990.

But by then and land-based pirates were in full swing.  Radio Invicta was broadcasting R&B, Soul, Funk, Gospel, Jazz and Electro Funk. London Weekend Radio (LWR) broadcast mostly New York hip-hop from South London and Jackie FM (JFM) broadcast Soul from Kingston upon Thames. More here. Dread Broadcast Corporation (DBC) was more dub and reggae-centric and broadcast starting in 1981 from West London. Uniquely DBC was black-run and is often credited as Britain's first black music radio station. The DBC and many others were raided and shut down following the passage of  the Telecommuncations Act in 1984.

BBC Christmas Ghost Stories

It seems like an odd mix: the Christmas holiday and ghost stories. In America the holiday is awash in cloying animated cartoons and schmaltzy family-friendly movies. Our classic films are somehow even more cloying and schmaltzy despite the black and white format... But the British has had ghost stories in the Christmas radio broadcasts since at least 1923. [LINK]

But for decades in the UK, Christopher Lee sat there in front of a roaring fire reading the bone-chilling stories of  Montague R. James. [LINK] It all aired originally in the 1970s but continues to be re-run for the holidays. So here this British tradition seems incongruous. Perhaps it's those pagan Saturnalia origins of Christmas. More here. But on a website dedicated to James, they even notes:

 "Many of M.R. James's ghost stories were written to be read aloud as Christmas Eve entertainment to select gatherings of friends at Cambridge." 

So those M.R. James short stories, written largely before 1920... were intended for Christmas. Then there is A Christmas Carol, published in 1843 Perhaps this dates back quite a ways. "A Ghost Story for Christmas" is a strand of annual British short television films originally broadcast on BBC One between 1971 and 1978, and revived in 2005 on BBC Four. 

BBC Radio Scotland has separately aired Ghost Stories At Christmas. Alison Moore's ghost stories have been published in Best British Short Stories anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra. [LINK] The New Stateman referred to all this gothic hubub as "Perfect for Brexit Christmas."

In 2016 they failed to air James, or Moore and the Express Newspaper wrote up a comment "Haunted Christmas: Bring back the tradition of Christmas ghost stories" Radio Editor Jane Anderson once wrote it’s not a proper Christmas without a ghost story. She was praising the program Between the Ears: The Shepherd which aired Christmas Eve at 9.15 PM on BBC Radio 3 in 2013. The Washington Post even commented on this cultural difference in 2014. [LINK] Derek Johnson pointed out Dickens again:

"Dickens was a strong supporter of the Christmas ghost story, reminiscing in his 1850 essay A Christmas Tree about childhood Christmases spent 'telling Winter Stories – Ghost Stories, or more shame for us – round the Christmas fire.' Dickens also encouraged other writers to produce Christmas ghost stories for the annual festive editions of his magazines Household Words and All the Year Round."

Johnson supposes that the split relates to Guy Fawkes Day. Halloween in England was never extensively celebrated and was supplanted by Guy Fawkes Night in the early 17th century. So in England the ghost stories remained connected to Xmas, and elsewhere in the Western world, they moved to Halloween.

The Clitheroe Kid

It was the longest running sitcom on British radio. The Clitheroe Kid was a BBC radio comedy program. the protagonist was a irreverent but mostly wholesome schoolboy in a northern England town. Including the pilot episode and 17 seasons, it totaled 290 episodes in all. It aired for 15 years without interruption: 1957 through 1972. It's still regularly re-run on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

The "Kid" was played by James Robinson "Jimmy" Clitheroe. He was kind of a British Mickey Rooney; comic and tragic. He was only 4'3" tall but had a solid career as a comic in film, TV and radio. [LINK] He was born on Christmas Eve in 1921 in the town of Clitheroe, England. His early work was in comedy troupes and film, even pantomime. In 1936 he was touring England with the Winstanley Babes. It was an almost all-girl troupe, he was the only male. There he did comedy, played xylophone, piano accordion and clarinet.

He moved into radio in the mid 1950s. His earliest known appearance was on comedian Jimmy James’s show The Mayor’s Parlour.  Clitheroe soon had his own series, "Call Boy." that aired on the BBC Light Programme in 1957. Later that year The Clitheroe Kid debuted. The show was all schtick and catch phrases. Clitheroe referred to his sister and his teachers by nicknames such as Scraggy-neck, Sparrow-legs, Umm-ya Pete and Tick Tock Tillie. The English writers also took the time to mock the Scots. The Kid had a Scottish grandfather, whose ancestry was endlessly mocked, with talk of beer, haggises and bagpipes. More here.


Though already 35 years old, Clitheroe played an 11-year old boy.  The British papers called him "the Peter Pan of Show business." It was nicer than the things they wrote about Mickey Rooney. In the 1960s Clitheroe broke into television, but he stuck with the sitcom season after season. He died in 1973 from an accidental overdose of barbiturates. More here.

Its That Man Again (ITMA)

It's That Man Again (ITMA) was a BBC radio comedy show that ran from 1939 to 1949.Despite it's popularity, and it's wartime verve, US networks never carried the program. However, the 1943 film interpretation starring Tommy Handley did see U.S. distribution. But the radio shows were only heard over the BBC network.

The title of the program refers to a the contemporary phrase concerning the increasingly frequent WWII headlines regarding a certain German Führer. The phrase actually originated in a headline in the Daily Express written by Herbert Smith Gunn. One of the show's many running gags was the re-purposing of this phrase to refer to Tommy Handley. The show was a meme-generator. It created numerous short lived catch-phrases including the ironically intended "It's being so cheerful that keeps me going." The character Colonel Humphrey Chinstrap had his own catchphrase "I don't mind if I do." which lived on as well.

The programs sense of humor was sublimely British, possibly the only cultural microcosm more British than Chap-hop, except possibly Douglas Adams.  The scripts were written by the prolific Ted Kavanagh. Kavanagh had been writing for Handley since 1924. They were both longtime BBC contributors, and both had been script-writers. But Kavanagh was the better writer, and Kavanagh knew how to write for Handley.

The program debuted with the cast in the setting of a "pirate" commercial station and kept that for the first 4 episodes from that location. After war broke out the program found new life and relocated to the Office of Twerps, with Handley in the role of "Minister of Aggravation." In 1941 the setting moved to a seedy beach resort and the show name was changed to "It's That Sand Again."The didn't jump the shark, and instead returned to the studio setting. Post-war the program changed settings regularly mostly to absurd ends.


ITMA is remembered as a comedy program that was good for war-time morale on home front.The program came to an end January 6th 1949. Handley was to die just three days later of a brain hemorrhage. Kavanagh published Handleys biography that same year.

London Calling

Joe strummer is dead. He passed in 2002. His musical resume is without peer: he was the guitarist for the Clash, the Pogues, and the Mescaleros among others. The Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame wasted no time and inducted him with the Clash in 2003.  Born John Graham Mellor, Strummer, was also a free-form radio DJ on the BBC. Who knew? The British knew. It only seems to have been a secret in the USA.

Strummer spun whatever he wanted— a mish-mosh of the classic punk and rare punk tracks you'd expect, but also jazz, hip-hop, reggae, folk, ethnic obscurities and classic rock. The show began with static, and the sounds of an old radio dial then the narration "This is Joe Strummer's London Calling." Sometimes he was a bit animated but typically he had as much inflection as the traffic guy on NPR. His delivery was flat, sometimes even disinterested especially when playing his own material. It reminds me that he was once quoted as saying

"If I had five million pounds I'd start a radio station because something needs to be done. It would be nice to turn on the radio and hear something that didn't make you feel like smashing up the kitchen and strangling the cat."

But some music just seemed to pluck at his strings. Reggae artist Johnny Clarke, Lee Hazelwood, and Jimi Hendrix, but also totally obscure African music. It's hard to imagine a 50-year old man rocking out to censored  versions of white label rap 12-inches but he did. I can say that the program never had a feeling of being pretentious. This wasn't High Fidelity. Strummer was sharing his favorite sides. Josh Jones at Open Culture described the variety thus:

"But aside from the expected punk and reggae, there was no telling what he might cue up next; from the Balkan Folk of Emir Kusturica and The No Smoking Orchestra to the new wave rhumba of Zaire’s Thu-Zahina, Strummer had one hell of an eclectic collection..."

Joe Strummers' London Calling ran for a short stretch on the BBC World Service in August of 199 as an 8-part series. Then he came back to in 2000-2001.  The BBC re-ran some of the programs in 2002 and 2007, 2012. Starting in 2009 the re-broadcasts were editing to include an introduction by Jon Langford of the Mekons. Strummers popularity has been so enduring it's clear he could have continued broadcasting had he lived.  More here.

I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue

Humphrey Lyttelton was one of those golden people who seemed to strike lucky in everything he did. He was a cartoonist for the Daily Mail Newspaper in 1949. He was a trumpet player active in the British jazz revival and played  traditional and dixieland Jazz with greats like Sidney Bechet, Big Joe Turner and Vic Dickenson. Lyttelton his big radio hit "Bad Penny Blues" in 1956, a single produced by Joe Meek. It was on the charts for 6 weeks. It wasn't a career, but it got him on the BBC where he began doing big band broadcasts. [Side note: he became more versatile as a trumpeter and moved onto bebop, rock and even once recorded with Radiohead.]

In 1967 he began hosting his own jazz program,The Best of Jazz on BBC Radio 2.  The program is everything you'd expect of jazz on the BBC in the 1960s, stiff delivery and a varied playlist. Btu that show didn't make his career either. It was another strange break 5 years later which took his deadpan delivery and put him in the position of host wrangling a cast of hyperactive comedians through a chaotic panel program. That comedy show was the British radio comedy institution "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" (ISIHAC).  I believe it was because of it's iconic success, that his jazz program lasted for 40 years.


The BBC describes ISIHAC as "The long-running, self-styled antidote to panel games."  I use the word institution because it was on from 1972 until his death in 2009 — a run of 37 years. The BBC rebooted the show in 2009 with Lyttelton being replaced by a three rotating hosts: Stephen Fry, Jack Dee and Rob Brydo. We all know Stephen Fry but I don't know the other two blokes at all. Ultimately jack Dee inherited the podium.

The show actually spring form another show called "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again" which was a familiar looking sketch comedy program among whose writers was John Cleese. The BBC had already broken ground on quiz shows with no competition or winner. The show was voted the second funniest radio program ever; beaten out only by The Goon Show. More here.

The Nature of The Universe

For Fred Hoyle the term "Big Bang" was one of derision. Hoyle proposed a theory that the universe didn't have a beginning, it just always had been.  He called it the "Steady State Theory. " In 1948 he, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold espoused their idea that the universe is always expanding but maintaining an average constant density, because matter is being continuously created to form new stars and galaxies at the same rate that others become too distant to observe. As it turns out, this was completely wrong, but it was a dominant theme until about 1960. But how does this relate to radio?  Despite the intuitively gaping problems in the theory Hoyle manged to advance it through the use of radio.

In 1947 Hoyle was a lecturer at St John's College in Cambridge.  Despite the day job Hoyle's finances were stretched. So when the BBC offered Hoyle a payday as a radio lecturer, he took it. 1948 was a year of solar maximum, and BBC hired him to lecture on sunspots based on a paper he wrote. So on New Years eve he recorded his first radio program. It was broadcast January 8th, 1948 on the program Science Notebook.  The gig went so well that BBC producer Dr. Archie Clow asked him to expound on the talk for the BBC Third Programme. That revamp was broadcast live on February 12th, 1948. It went so well that he was still answering letters from the listeners of the BBC overseas service in July. (There was some delay translating letters from listeners writing in foreign languages)

Clow asked Hoyle again to lecture in March of 1949. This deal was agreed to by BBC Producer Peter Laslett. This time he was invited to lecture on the latest developments in 20th century cosmology."  Hoyle chose a topic had helped originate: the Steady State Theory.  The introduction to the program started with “In this talk Fred Hoyle gives his reasons for thinking that matter is being created all the time, so that the universe must have had an infinite past and will have an infinite future." The scientific establishment went apeshit.

The BBC received letters from esteemed and respected scientific and academics who demanded (politely) that the BBC air a lecture posing a competing view. The BBC froze in a convulsion of excessive politeness and fear. Nobody wanted to go out on a limb and make a decision. If they said yes then that would allow the guest lecturer to contradict Hoyle. If Hoyle was perceived to be wrong then that meant that BBC was also discredited by proxy.  But if they refused then it was possible that they would undermine Hoyle's argument causing the same problem. Hoyle made a weak argument that that a rebuttal would be too technical and boring. In the end Laslett in the end heeded the advice of Sir Harold Spencer Jones of the Royal Observatory. Sir Jones suggested that since the lecture had been prefaced as the views of Hoyle, that it required no rebuttal program. Thus Hoyle could be wrong on his own and the BBC have no stake in it. With guilt now politely reassigned to Hoyle the BBC proceeded to ignore the situation.However this did leave the BBC's science program more-or-less vested in the steady state theory being fact. More here.

Despite the vigorous exchange of letters, the public accepted Hoyle as a voice of authority on matters of science. In 1950, the BBC decided to air science lectures every Saturday evening, to which Hoyle contributed five lectures. The series was called “The Nature of the Universe.”  These were collected in the book The Nature of the Universe. Hoyle did little more in radio, but his academic career had benefited. In 1967, he became the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy. But in 1965 the tide started to turn against his ideas. That year discoveries based in radiation measurements by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs which supported the big bang theory.  Hoyle retreated into writing science fiction.

Hoyle was knighted in 1972 and resigned his professorship and began writing books.  He even wrote a science fiction book called "the Black Cloud" which he later worked into a BBC television series co-written with John Elliot. But behind him the dominance of the Big Bang seemed to grow. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the noble prize for their discoveries. Hoyle fumed.

But by 1993 he backpedaled slightly with a new clunky theory called quasi-steady state cosmology which was utter bunkum.  In 1997, while hiking in West Yorkshire, Hoyle fell down into a steep ravine and lay there injured for 12 hours. He was found by a search dogs but was hospitalized for two months with hypothermia, pneumonia and shoulder injuries related to the fall.  It was said that he didn't mentally recover. He died in 2001 following a series of strokes.

The Goon Show

Here's another BBC radio program you just have to see. It was a comedy program that ran from 1951 to 1960 on the BBC Home service. It was a big influence on Monty Python and you can tell. It has also been cited as an influence on the Firesign Theatre which stands to reason. They just don't make radio like this anymore.

PART 1


PART 2


PART 3


*Credit to Veg for discovery

The binaural Emory Cook

For a number of years, Emory Cook was considered a truly exceptional audio engineer. He was born and raised in Albany, NY and attended Cornell University. He worked for the Audio Engineering Department at Western Electric. He was a strong proponent of binaural sound, an inventor and audiophile. He once described binaural sound thusly:

"Stereophonic recording differs from Binaural in that the microphone placements are selected for loudspeaker reproduction. Binaural properly applies to a two-channel system designed for headphone reproduction. It thus requires the use of two channels fed by microphones spaced about seven inches apart."

Those magic 7 inches represent the average distance between a pair of normal human ears. it's the founding idea behind binaural sound. It is supposed to put the listeners perspective sonically where the sounds on the recording or broadcast originated. I consider it a subtype of stereo sound. Stereo sounds being if nothing else.. at least less specific. More here.

It's strange, but binaural sound actually predates stereo. In 1881 Clement Ader installed pairs of carbon mics on a Paris opera stage for telephone subscribers to listen in. How is this separate from the evolution of stereo? It's not. They're inextricably linked. Every step in the evolution of stereo sound can also be claimed by the evolution of binaural sound. The only difference is snobbery. There is a gri-gri quality to binaural sound that stereo lacks. But let's get back to Emory. There was a lot of gri-gri to him as well.

Emory created a record player with two needles meant to play records with two parallel grooves. He founded Cook records in 1949 and eventually put out more than a hundred binaural LPs. His plant was based in Stamford Connecticut. Emory was using his personal brand recognition to hype a series of binaural LPs: Sounds of the Sea, Nightmare in the Mosque, Speed the Parting Guest. He demonstrated them at the Worlds Fair. They're all over eBay now for the kitsch.

But there were also radio broadcasts were live like Toscanini, WQXR string quartet and the Godina opera hour. But this was 1952. stereo sound was entirely new in broadcasting. WQXR was achieving "stereo" by using it's using its AM and FM stations towers as separate Left and Right audio channels. Was it stereo, was it binaural? I don't distinguish a difference. Binaural enthusiast will tell you this was the first binaural broadcast. I think it's bunk. In 1925, on 5XX the BBC had broadcast stereo with the Left channel on medium wave and the right channel on long wave. That's 27 years before WQXR. WGN-AM and WGNB-FM did the same thing in 1952 just a few months before WQXR. All they're beating their chests over is microphone positioning in the source audio. It's bunk; clever bunk, but bunk nonetheless.
The irony is that in the process of supporting the bunk idea of binaural audio the very educated and clever Cook actually made other developments. He made microphone and amplifier improvements that made it possible to record audio above 20,000 cycles, he even developed a process to press vinyl in a powdered form to reduce surface noise. Previous to this they were always pressed starting with a preheated puck of vinyl, a technique based on shellac 78s. He called the new technique “microfusion.” Sadly it didn't catch on.

Emory Cook died in 2002 at the age of 89. Emory donated his master tapes, patents, and papers to the Smithsonian Institution in 1990. Obit here.