Short Wave Magazine - Radio Days

I'm sure Woody Allen won't mind if I borrow one of his film titles for this little piece.

Like Allen reflecting on his native New York, radio for me has always been a thing of wonder, mystery and magic. Something special, your closest friend and yet somehow out of reach. Growing up in a Midlands town, the first radio I can remember was out of reach. It was screwed to the ceiling.

To live in Derby in the early sixties meant that Dad was a Rolls Royce man, so could turn his hand to anything. We lived close enough to the engine test beds at Sinfin to have their constant roar as a backdrop to everything we did. Just as you were getting complacent, one of them would playfully fire a loose bolt through next-door's greenhouse. It kept you on your toes.

The radio had probably been a bargain. A marked cabinet, perhaps. For a few hours, the test beds came a poor second to the sound of manic carpentry from the pre-fab garage. The new cabinet had a front, but no sides. It was nothing more than a large baffle board the width of the back door, a system of chains holding it at jaunty angle between the top of the door frame and the ceiling.

To this day I can't work out where it got its power from. All I can recall is that when Mum stood on a chair to switch it on, the reassuring glow of the station glass was followed by the strains of The West End Celebrity Orchestra with the theme to Housewive's Choice in the Light Programme of the BBC on fifteen hundred metres on the long-wave from Droitwich. Station names like Daventry, Warsaw and the other country that was West Region hold memories for all my generation, more so when to read them meant dragging the kitchen table, a vision in yellow Formica, over to the back door then, from a chair placed on top of it, listening could begin.

Minor adjustments could be made by leaning out fron the work surface, a route only attempted after scaling the north face of the Aga. What wonders were held frozen the station glass. Reading across you could find the results of early European Cup matches; Hilversum I, Sottens II, a sad day for Hilversum fading in extra time. I could find Prague in the school atlas, but where was Athlone?

Tuning to Saar-Louis only got me the news in Welsh, writing to the External Service of the BBC only got me a terse note from the Board of Trade telling a six-year-old that grant-in-aid funded broadcasts in the Empire Service are not for domestic consumption. Tell a boy he should not be listening and you have a listener for life.

As the family settled down with Perry Mason, the scaffolding would be erected in the kitchen for the evening session. News from Moscow had to wait until I knew the winner of Have A Go and the eight o'clock repeat of The Goon Show. Moscow and AFN played cat and mouse across the dial agreeing only when Cuba became the perfect holiday home for nuclear missiles. We stood at the brink of war, but as long as Sunday lunch brought me Round the Horne, The Navy Lark and in the grey afternoons of winter, The Clitheroe Kid, The Billy Cotton Band Show and Much Binding In The Marsh, that was a problem for the grown-ups.

My only problem then was Sam Costa. As the days went by he was getting fainter and fainter. Dad said one of his valves was going and we could sort it out at the weekend. This would mean missing Saturday Club but it would be worth it. The radio was taken down from the altar above the back door and dusted. Each valve was removed with a true sense of ceremony, wrapped in newspaper, its position noted on the back of a fag packet.

You had to queue in a radio shop in those days. An earnest young man in a white coat took our newspaper parcel into the back room. What ever he did in there, he had to do it alone. A man's relationship with his valve tester is a personal thing. The worst part is the waiting. After what seemed an age our hero returned and told me to be strong. "It's the rectifier. Gone low emission. I'm very sorry."

Not as sorry as Dad. A new 7Y4 would set him back fourteen shillings. On the journey back, he moaned about paying for new technology. These all-glass valves are bound to fail because you can't seal glass against the metal pins. They never had this problem with International Octal.

The new valve was fitted in an atmosphere of relief and resentment, depending on which one of us owned the wallet, normal service being resumed just in time for Two Way Family Favourites. After Dad had a chance to mourn the passing of fourteen bob, he decided to turn his loss to my educational gain by breaking the glass of the old valve to explain to me how it worked.

It was obvious to me it could never have worked. I'd been making circuits with batteries, bulbs and switches and had learned that if you want it to work, there must be a circuit across positive and negative. The bits inside the valve aren't connected to each other. No wonder it don't work. I know better now, of course.

As I finish this listening to Classic FM on a fully synthesised wireless, I realise just how far we have come. But where is the magic?