‘Never did the thrill fade – neither the pleasure of going live nor the fascination of editing’

ON MY windowsill is a statue of Guglielmo Marconi, a miniature of the life-size one in Chelmsford commemorating the “Father of Wireless”. His outflung arm hurls a lightning bolt into the air. I would pair it with a head of the dour Lord Reith if I could get one.

He was the first director of the BBC in the early 1920s, the man who said its job was to “inform, educate and entertain” and relieve a double loneliness, “isolation of place and of the spirit”.

There were high minds at work then – we still laugh about their dinner-jacketed radio announcers and the ban on divorced singers – but there is inspiration too.

When I was writing my book, Radio: A True Love Story, I adored the line from Reith’s deputy CA Lewis that aerials were like spears against the sky in the fight against ignorance.

His poetic idea was that music and ideas were carried “along the roadsides, over the hills, through towns, brushed by trees, soaked by rain, swayed by gales”. He continued “the shepherd on the downs, the lonely crofter in the farthest Hebrides… the labourer in his squalid tenement, equally the lonely invalid on her monotonous couch, may all in spirit sit side-by-side with the patrons of the stalls and hear some of the best performances in the world”.

Soon it will be 100 years since those first listeners wound coils of wire round bottles or pieced together crystal sets, 60 years since I excitedly “sent away” for a build-yourown-transistor set and begged for my own soldering iron.

I yearned to carry a world in my pocket, and eventually did: the Goons, the news, the Glum family with a young June Whitfield moaning “Ooohhhh Ron!” Later, pop from forbidden Radio Luxembourg in a tent in the garden. I was a radio addict, still am.

My first job in radio was technical, winding back vinyl records one-third of a turn so the turntable got up to speed in time and twirling Bakelite faders. Next on to local radio, with the dizzy pleasure of sending out our pulse-tone at dawn to wake up the Beckley transmitter and say the first Good Mornings to Oxfordshire.

Then to London as reporter and Today presenter for nearly four years, followed by 34 more on the Midweek talk show and making documentaries.

NEVER did the thrill fade – neither the pleasure of going live nor the fascination of editing, getting close to a human voice, tidying its “ums” and “ers”, appreciating the cadences and character a voice alone can show, helping it to make its point.

So it’s fascinating and worrying to watch the age of internet access superseding the old broadcast miracle. Especially at the BBC, which is still the principal home of well-built, edited, thoughtful speech radio. (Nothing against the newcomers, but few of them have the resources to craft careful documentaries and wellcreated drama.)

The BBC’s management has many oddities, but one of the most baffling is that in underfunding it forgets that its

USP – unique selling point – is quality speech and classical music radio (remember the Proms!).

Other broadcasters now provide TV drama, events and comedies, and play pop and host phone-ins on radio.

LBC, Absolute and Capital have boomed, poaching top presenters such as Eddie Mair and John Humphrys. But nobody else does

FAMILY LISTENING: Tuning in to a ‘wireless’ programme anything like Radio 3 or 4. There are independent podcasts, some excellent but many overblown, in the same way as unedited wittering blogs. When a podcast begins with a lot of inconsequential self-promoting chat, I grit my teeth and reflect that the old studio clock had a function: “You could have started in 10 seconds, not two minutes!”

When a drama podcast drags it out, I sigh and drift off. Oddly, slow overblown TV doesn’t bother me as much. My theory is that TV viewers are sitting down with all the blood running to their bum, whereas radio listeners are moving around, and pay more attention.

An idiot on telly is just someone in a box. On the radio he or she is in your head.

But BBC managers see the new habits of 16 to 24-year-olds and panic about what they condemn as “linear” radio, founding

BBC Sounds (at some radio budget and jobs).

They feel that the future needs no “table d’hôte” or even brief menu, but a vast running buffet of every possible “sound”, especially those deemed to attract the young: true crime, sport, music mixes, girly chatter, promotional shrieks like “Obsessed with Killing Eve”, stuff you’d rarely broadcast on-air.

Podcasts work, up cost to to

athe normal point, and