Richard Glover: Why is the humble radio so resilient?

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This was published 6 years ago

Richard Glover: Why is the humble radio so resilient?

By Richard Glover

According to reports from the UK this week, radio is in rude good health. Despite years of dire predictions, there are rising audiences for almost every breakfast program, both BBC and commercial. In Australia, too, radio listening is resilient: on average, we now spend two hours, 10 minutes, listening to live radio, up on a year ago.

The analysts scratch their heads and wonder how this can be so. The whole world has been disrupted by digital technology; how could humble radio have escaped?

Why is radio so resilient? Those of us who work in the medium have an answer: radio has the best pictures.

Why is radio so resilient? Those of us who work in the medium have an answer: radio has the best pictures. Credit: Nick Walker

Adding to the mystery: radio has experienced this Lazarus moment many times before. The "talkies" were meant to wipe out radio in the 1930s. TV arrived in the 1950s with the same dire prediction. Next up: cassette decks in cars.

So many expected deaths. So many moments of miraculous survival.

Fairfax Media columnist and radio host Richard Glover.

Fairfax Media columnist and radio host Richard Glover. Credit: Marco Del Grande

Why is radio so resilient? Those of us who work in the medium have an answer: radio has the best pictures. There's a vivid verbal description, sometimes teamed with background noise, and the listener does the rest.

The projector plays behind your eyes, not in front of them. The listener provides the details: filling the role of cinematographer, sound recordist, set decorator and costume designer. It's why radio moments are often so memorable. We made the film.

Weirdly, you – or maybe it's just me – can often remember the precise location at which the audio was heard.

The death of Princess Diana? For me, that straight stretch on the Hume Highway heading back into Sydney, just before you are funnelled onto the M5. Doug Mulray and Andrew Denton being hilarious on Triple M? Getting dressed for work in a Kings Cross flat in about 1983. John Pearce doing early talk-back on 2GB in 1969? In the kitchen, with my mother, having breakfast.

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It's part of the intimacy of the medium. As the veteran radio critic Gillian Reynolds pointed out this week, there's a reason we all occasionally shout at the radio – "oh, get on with it"; "slow down when you read the traffic". On radio, you are being addressed individually, so it's only fair that you should respond in kind.

Digital disruption happens when the new product is an improvement on what went before. Television is the obvious example. Aside from live events – sport, news, talent shows – the streaming platforms offer a better experience than traditional viewing. You chose when to watch. You can binge if in the mood. You can pause, fetch tea, then again press "play".

Radio is different. It still has a unique offering. True, a Spotify account means who can choose your own playlist for the car trip to work. And, true, a podcast – perfectly matching your interests – can be bliss. (Tip: Great Lives, BBC 4).

Neither, though, can offer the mix of live radio: the sense of the city around you, your neighbours waking up and ringing in, the serve of fresh news, the traffic snarl that will impede your journey, the issue on which everyone seems to have an opinion, and for which you will also now have an opinion by the time you get to work.

Imagine if podcasts had been invented first – sometime in the 1930s. You can imagine the excitement that, seven or eight decades later, would have greeted the new medium called radio: "We've invented this system in which a live stream is sent into people's cars and kitchens. It requires no cables or Wi-Fi connections: a couple of batteries will make it work for months. Oh, and listeners can interact with the device, asking questions and making comments, which are then immediately broadcast to other users, providing a kind of town square in which the issues of the day are discussed, and not just within a limited, self-selected community."

Now that is a disruptive technology.

The participation of listeners can, I realise, be annoying if focused only on people's opinions. But what about when it's focused on people's experiences?

Newspaper reporters spend days trying to locate somebody who can tell us about the realities of life – someone who is neither connected with a lobby group or served up by a government media officer. They want the real thing: a person at the coalface.

On radio, we just read out our number. Have you dealt with Centrelink in the last month? If you've swapped to the NBN, is it better or worse? Does your kid have red hair? Do they think "ginger" is a slur or is it OK?

A few years ago, talking about the Granville train disaster, a nurse rang in and talked about the many months she'd spent at the bedside of a badly injured woman. The two women, nurse and patient, were the same age – 26, I seem to remember – so it preyed on her mind. How had the woman, who had been close to death so many times, managed after she left hospital? Had she gone on to have children, a career?

I'm sure you know what happened next. The woman who'd been nursed by my caller rang in. It was "yes" to both a career and children. There was a tearful reunion, live, on air.

And some people say it's strange that radio manages to survive.

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