Between the Ears: Brighstone 428 Radio 3
Remember the landline?
Yes, we still have one but use it less and less often.
I have to declare a personal interest – my father was a telephone engineer and my mother worked as a telephone operator.
That was in the days of yore when you could, for fun, connect two of your friends and let them chat to each other for a while before one asks “Why did you ring me?”and the other protests: “No, no, it was you who rang me.”
Remember the telephone operator?
I do. There was a particular kind one when I was a young, homesick student in Dublin. You put in your money, pressed Button A and were connected to home.
Then, a very generous hour later – you’d only paid for ten minutes - he’d say: “Okay caller time to finish. Now, don’t you feel better? Everybody at home is fine.”
Artist Graeme Miller has hours of tape of birds on telegraph wires... they make music with “their little dinosaur feet”.
He tells us about recording three pigeons or two doves sitting on the wire on a far off isle.
He tells us about sitting on the stairs, listening to his mum on the phone: she keeps saying “Oh dear oh dear”, as she doodles on a pad. And when she is finished, the pad is filled with sketches of faces.
He is captivated by the sound of dialling, chit chat and different phones.
This was sound music for the ears.
It spanned a whole century of the landline, ringing phones in hallways - the colours of the old telephone – green plastic, avocado.
We visited far off worlds - the engineer atop of the telegraph pole, the village operator, the underwater cables going all the way to America.
We heard the distinct trills of the phone – from that early ring to the more computerised trill that sounded so modern back then.
We heard those plummy voices: “Brighstone 428”.
When you answered the telephone, you always gave your number – of course you did. That was only polite.
This was a soundscape of bird song and disjointed voices in the ether. It was Ingrid Bergman and Sylvia’s Mother and Wichita Linesman and crossed lines.
It was the worried voice: “Are you still there?”
And there was a hint of preoccupations that have long since disappeared... like the fear of running out of change for the phonebox.
