Sometimes Radio 3 tries to be too clever by half

Why are we still listening to the radio in 2013, to an outdated technology that has hardly changed in manufacture or output since it first appeared in the 1920s? How come TV did not wipe it out, as CDs wiped out the cassette and DVDs put paid to video? My guess is that it’s because sound was more important to us when we first came into the world and our eyes were still too blurry to take in much of what was going on. Our ears, though, were straightaway alert. Listening now, making connections through sound, keeps us in touch with that first consciousness, that initial awareness. It takes us back to the womb, to the prenatal state of hearing our mother’s heartbeat long before we could actually see her. If I listen to a news bulletin, I remember far more of it than from watching the news on screen. The TV images might stay with me, but the details, have much more impact if taken in by ear and processed in the brain. Through sound, we can learn how to see the world.

That’s why, from Tesla and Marconi onwards, radio producers have tried to recreate in sound not just how we talk, what we sound like, but also how we think, what’s going on inside. On the page, only writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have come anywhere close to making sense of our interminable threads of thought as they veer wildly from the mundane to the weird and fantastic, from the vital facts we need to remember to get through the day to the uncalled-for memories that pop up inconsequentially and leave us feeling dizzy. But in these post-Crash times, on the BBC at least, there’s not much scope for real thought-world experimentation and precious little funding for what might be called ‘creative radio’.