Listen with mother | 22 June 2017

This week’s column is dedicated to my mother who loved her radio and encouraged us to be listeners. Without her, I would not be qualified to do this. My earliest memories are of sitting under the table while my mother sewed and the theme tune of Listen with Mother echoed through the house. The radio, an old valve model which took a while to get going and whose half-moon dial promised to send us signals from Lahti and Motala as well as Reykj’vik and Kief, was switched on not all the time, that would have inured us to its pleasures, but on and off for a regular sequence of programmes, day by day. We read, of course we read, but it was radio that really lit up my imagination, stories of Roman soldiers transplanted to Northumberland, of the robin singing in a secret walled garden and the strange world that sickly Tom entered after the midnight bell had tolled.

My mother, meanwhile, listened to the Third Programme, avid for Bach and Beethoven, Delius and Dvorak, and to Mrs Dale’s Diary (she was never converted to those upstart Archers), Woman’s Hour and the plays that were a regular slot on Saturday nights. Radio was her entertainment, her companion (with young children, and a husband who worked all hours as a parish priest, her evenings could be long) and her education. Speech radio was lost to her for many years once she became too deaf to pick up voices, but until the end she never missed Choral Evensong, always her favourite because of the familiar patina of the service, the clarity of plainsong, the soaring, uplifting quality of the singing.

How will children now be inspired to become listeners in a world where radio is heard if at all mostly on the move and via visual tip-offs, where radio also has to compete with so many other kinds of stimulus, and where the BBC has shunted all children’s content off the standard networks and into that linguistic ghetto, CBeebies? There’s nothing on Radio 4, or Radio 3, for teenagers, let alone the under-teens.