On Go4it, Radio Four’s shortly to be axed Sunday-evening programme for children, we heard from children in Swaziland who have created their own radio station, Ses’khone Radio.
On Go4it, Radio Four’s shortly to be axed Sunday-evening programme for children, we heard from children in Swaziland who have created their own radio station, Ses’khone Radio. Their topic for the week was human rights, which for them meant having the opportunity ‘to speak our minds to adults’. Many of them are living as adults anyway, cooking for themselves and surviving independently because their parents and extended family have all been decimated by Aids (half the population of Swaziland is now under 21). It was a shock for the children back in London, in the Go4it studio, to hear their stories.
Radio has never been purely for entertainment, nor just a source of information. It gives people a voice, very often in circumstances where there is no other opportunity for them to have their opinions heard. And it allows those in very different circumstances to hear that voice in a very real, immediate way. That’s why it’s experiencing such a boom at the moment, in these topsy-turvy days when a pile of horse manure matters more than who’s bombing who in Afghanistan. The latest audience figures have revealed that more people than ever before are tuning in, 90.2 per cent of us (or 45.8 million), in search not of diversion but of an insight into alternative, but very real, lives.
Also on Go4it was a headmaster who had set up a radio station for the school. He explained how easy it is: all you need is a microphone, costing about £20, which can then be plugged into a computer, and you’re off. When his budding producers and presenters were asked what makes a good radio show, their reply was ‘real-life things’. We need to listen more to what children have to tell us.
One young boy had spent a few months on the Hebridean island of Colonsay, and had kept in touch with his friends by podcasting. But he didn’t just create a virtual diary, blogging away about his own experiences. He set about interviewing people on Colonsay with real stories to tell, such as the 86-year-old who grew up speaking nothing but Gaelic. There were no cars then, and little contact with the mainland. Now, of course, the plane from Oban takes just 20 minutes.
Over on Radio Three, Between the Ears (Saturday night) was back with an experimental portrait of Fair Isle, poised in the North Sea between the British mainland and Shetland. Empty Ocean (produced by Jessica Isaacs) was a collage of sounds — rushing water, blustery wind, the music of fiddle and accordion — evoking the experience of those who live there. They can never escape the sound or smell of the sea: ‘The sea around Fair Isle is very wide…You can hear it all the time — and it’s not a calm sea.’ Life there is changing, and very fast. The numbers of birds have drastically reduced so that it’s really noticeable how much quieter it has become without their raucous caws and squawks. Fishing, too, has been decimated. Where once the horizon was dotted with trawlers, fishing for haddock and herrings, halibut and hake, they’ve now become a rarity, the seas bled dry of fish and left empty.
In my mind I was there, watching the waves rushing in and feeling the wind on my face. On Tuesday you could instead have travelled into the mind of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) who in later life went blind. In Libraries and Labyrinths (Radio Four), Peter White, the In Touch presenter, took us to Buenos Aires and the national library where Borges worked and wrote many of his enigmatic short stories, in which nothing happens but everything is laid bare. Borges had that elusive gift — to look at the universe as if with the wondering eyes of a child, seeking the books yet unwritten that lie hidden on shelves in the furthest corners of the galaxy.
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