Thoughts on Radio, from a friend

From my friend Julian, a long post worth the read:

To take it back half a step, radio is still a fundamentally viable form even in these internet days. People still like listening to human voices, and people still like listening to music. And, beyond that, I think that it’s sort of an important piece of our popular culture, and one worth saving. We’ve sort of touched upon some of the things that good radio traditionally can/does do, but there is plenty of room for expansion within the form, and we can perhaps draw some inspiration from our cousins over in the UK, where the BBC is alive and well (another indication of radio’s fundamental viability as a technology). According to a pretty good article in the LA Times about a year ago, there is still a huge audience for radio in BBC-land, partly derived from a radio-listening culture (one interviewee had a radio for every room, I believe, and left them on in the way that Americans leave televisions on), but also from a great deal of excellent programming. Because radio is still respected, and because the BBC is state-run and therefore beholden to nobody, the money to produce quality programming can meet the quality talent required, creating a number of excellent shows. Plays are serialized, new works commissioned expressly for radio, esteemed commentators are heard nationally, and yes, they have a pretty thriving music show lineup too (Mark Lamar’s show God’s Jukebox is quite nice). The moral is many-fold: an expansion of public radio would greatly enhance our national culture, as we’d be able to support no-strings attached works of critical radio excellence; we should be so lucky as to have the same intellectual-respecting and cross-media popular culture as there is in the UK (where dudes like Stephen Fry can show up basically anywhere and say insightful things, and get listened to!); and the only limitation on radio is that it’s a purely auditory medium.