Never mind moving the dial. Just find the off switch quickly, before it is too late

IS it my turn to speak now? Hello, I am Medders and I am an addict. I hope my recognising this fact is a first step towards rehabilitation. Maybe sharing it with you is the second step, though I realise that it will be a long road with many more steps to come. It all began innocently enough. People now laugh at me when I say I started with the ‘Glen Abbey Show’. Yeah, the ‘Glen Abbey Show’ was what I suppose would be called the ‘gateway’ these days. I was too young back then to see the dangers. That and the Walton show. Not the ‘Goodnight, Jim Bob’ Waltons. I was never into television all that much. Or check shirts. Or prairies. No, my thing was radio, always radio from the very outset. The big old Philips (or was it Pye?) valve radio, with its walnut veneer finish, was an ever-present feature of the living room as we grew up. It gave every sound which emerged from its single speaker a seductively mellow tone, whether on medium wave or on long, whether speech or music. The softly glowing light on this solid piece of furniture was alluring to a young chap, illuminating the promise of broadcasts from Hilversum, Warsaw, The Vatican and good old Athlone.

You could say, I suppose, that my mother was a recreational user, a housewife who found a small dose of Gay Byrne useful to help her relax in the mornings. But the Philips was also capable of picking up programmes coming from the UK. My sister and I found that we required our weekly Sunday evening injection of Alan Freeman with his top twenty pop. He pushed The Beach Boys and The Beatles and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band our way. That was our Swinging Sixties.

An intake of RTE sponsored shows along with the weekly chart on the BBC’s Light Programme hardly sounds like abuse. But I was one of a new generation who had access to transistor radios. The tranny brought radio from the living room into any and every other room in the house – most particularly the bedroom.

While my parents thought I was reading or sleeping, I was in fact more often listening. Had they known that I was tuned under the eiderdown to Radio Luxembourg or, worse still, to baseball commentaries on American Forces Network, then maybe they could have intervened. The AFN reception was appalling. I knew nothing of baseball and cared less. I just needed my fix. I even dabbled in short wave, occasionally picking up propaganda put out for English speaking audiences by state run stations in Russia or Albania. The thrill of it was never knowing quite what might be heard when the cloud cover was low and the aerial chanced to be pointing in the right direction.

The best ever was stumbling upon a French language sports commentary which was clearly about cycling, though the only two words I could make sense of were ‘Jean Kellee’. Jean Kellee, Jean Kellee repeated over and over. This had to be our own Seán Kelly making mincemeat of the peloton in some far off stage of some far off race – and it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

The habits of early years set the tone for the rest of my life to date, though I ditched most of the weird stuff and stuck largely to the mainstream. No more Radio Tirana. No more Boston Red Sox. I have immersed myself instead in RTE, BBC and more lately Newstalk too.

In middle age I find myself as reliant as ever - a hapless, unreconstructed, long term radio junkie. No journey is complete without Pat Kenny (though he talks far too much) perhaps or maybe John Creedon (though he also talks far too much), depending on time of day. I am up to take breakfast with ‘Morning Ireland’. I have radio news with lunch, music radio in the background with dinner, talk radio turned up loud while doing the dishes, and a radio book at bedtime to see me off to sleep.

The reason I come here to Radioheads Anonymous today, however, is that I fear I am about to succumb to the equivalent of crystal meth. Please, please help before internet radio, complete with all those seductive podcasts, sinks its hooks into me and cuts me off completely from reality. Please.