Life

Radio review: Audiophile examines a love of radio

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

Audiophile Radio 4

The peculiar thing about radio is how special people find it, said radio critic Gillian Reynolds who has had a love affair with the radio spanning over 50 years.

It’s a glory of the new media age under its new name “audio”, she said.

Audiophile – she really wanted to call her programme Wireless Woman – was a love song to radio going back over 50 years.

Her first memories were of hearing the opera, Madame Butterfly, as she ate breakfast in a council house at the age of three in the last 1930s.

There was a lady singing on the radio. Her mother explained the story which sounded so sad that she shouted: “Stop, stop, I’m crying on her sausage”.

It was a little turquoise wireless that cemented her love for the medium. Her friends in university bought it as a present and it proved “a wonderful companion” when she was “hard up and lonely”.

The eerie wonder of radio was captured in the sirens in the background as news of World War II is announced.

You could imagine families and neighbours and friends gathered around the wireless set, breath held, absorbed in what was happening.

You’d come home from the air raid shelter in the war and turn on the radio to hear the reassuring voice from that “safe place where posh people lived”, she said.

Her programme featured clips-a-plenty and many voices that we know well.

“It’s a unique relationship, it’s such a one-to-one relationship that you have with radio,” said Jenny Abramsky.

Sue MacGregor was “a real child of radio”, rushing back from school in South Africa to hear Superman on the radio.

It was part of her DNA. She began as a secretary at the BBC, rising through the ranks to host Today, the on to the wonderful Reunion and A Good Read.

She loved cricket and, some years back, was looking forward to interviewing Geoff Boycott but he refused because she was a woman.

There’s laughter now at the very thought.

And it takes a poet to hail the wonder of radio – Reynolds chose to end with Seamus Heaney reading his poem that rang through the silence... a true and haunting hymn.