Cultureshock

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Video transcript

Our family lived by the radio. It had seen them through the war with the news read in superior tones by Alvar Liddell and the billiards scores - usually Jo Davies winning by thousands of points.

"Music While You Work" an early version of muzak intended to increase factory output and "Workers Playtime" as sort of ENSA for people in factories at lunchtime with jokes and references I did not understand.

I remember listening to ITMA and being shocked by the following announcement - that the star Tommy Handley had died in his dressing room after the show. 

The set was a square brown wooden box with a couple of dials and a cloth grid over the speaker. It lived on a shelf by the kitchen door. It was basic a bit like the old radios on the shelves at Beamish.

I will pass over the hours we spent encouraging Dick Barton Special Agent, in thwarting some foreign-accented villain or the silence after Phil announced the death of Grace rescuing her horse Midnight from the stable's fire, or the cut-glass accents of the BBC Drama Repertory Company as Edmond Dantes escaped from the Chateau D'if and set out to wreak his revenge.

A whole new era opened up when we acquired somehow from somewhere a Bush radio. This was large, heavy, shiny, solid with worldwide wavelengths on a glass screen which lit up accessed by ivory push-in buttons.

The insides resembled a small power station with rows of glowing valves miles of contorted wire and soldered terminals. Now we had the whole world at our fingertips.

When my dad took the fancy he would (what we would now call) "surf" the air waves; picking up strange foreign voices, or music from Bonn, Paris, Hilversun or the morse code bleeps of ships at sea communicating.  "Listen, that's off Labrador.  That one's in the North Sea", he would say. 

One evening I was doing my own bit of surfing standing on the table in stockinged feet manoevering the dials when I heard a broadcast from the surface of the moon.

"Don't be silly, boy" said a stern voice, that sounded hollow, as if coming from a dustbin (in fact it was).  "No one will ever land on the moon" "But sir...", "No, Morgan, stop this nonsense now." This was the first moments of my hearing "Journey into Space".  I was hooked, for this programme tied into the whole zeitgeist of the 50's.  Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future and his batman from Wigan.  "Ea, bah gum", Digby, the New Elizabethan Age of exploration, the UFO-like 'Dome of Discovery', the delicate rocket shape of the 'Skylon' held up by the thinnest of wires, were icons of the Festival of Britain.

New shapes in the sky.  Javelin, Delta, twin boom Vampires, world speed record breaking Hunters.  New car shapes on the road in new pastel colours.  The Eagle centre spread cutaways, and a whole series of UFO sightings with Adamski's meeting an alien book.  The Family followed Jet, Doc, Mitch, Lemmy - (the necessary ordinary Cockney underling) - as they faced the problems of leaving the moon and overcoming a hostile entity in the two expeditions to Mars.  The family listened again to the Sunday afternoon repeats and we had all done our basic space training for the arrival of the much grimmer "Quatermass Experiment" on TV, which we saw on Saturday night at a friend's house.

Yes, TV was just around the corner as the popular medium and the days of the Light programme, Home Service programme and Radio Luxembourg, 208 metres Medium Wave, 110 metres Short Wave, were fading.  We would no longer wait till Sunday midnight to discover if Marty Wilde and 'Endless Sleep' was top of the Top 20, or decide to Open the Box or Take the Money with the audience. Or no longer hear the voices DJ Geoffrey Everitt, Valentine Dyall, or deep throated Orson Welles with another Black Museum horror.

It all vanished utterly into the ether but in the 40's and 50's the whole country was tuned in. We were all children of the Radio Age.