Short changed

Was that it? Was that the sum total of 90 years of radio? Radio Reunited, the three-minute ‘celebration’ of the first BBC wireless broadcast in November 1922, was a very odd affair. Billed as a revolutionary simulcast to a ‘potential’ 120 million listeners round the world, playing out on all the BBC’s radio stations at the same time, it was so short, so compressed, you couldn’t take in the many layers of sound at once, or decipher what the different soundbites could possibly be, now, then, or from the future.

After about four or five listens, the babble of voices, Big Ben, Morse Code, birdsong and beeping did begin to clear so that keywords from the recorded messages from Listeners Anonymous cut through the background interference. But on the day, in the moment, it came across as a sound engineer desperately trying to make some kind of connection between two shorting wires.

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Damon Albarn was set an impossible task, to thread together a series of recorded comments about radio’s future with soundbites from wireless history. I just wish he’d been given 30, not three, minutes. We needed more airtime to settle into the groove, to begin listening, not just hearing, to take in what had been so carefully stitched together. When the child says, ‘I hope music still matters…in 90 years’ time…Without it there’s nothing. Just silence’ there was a momentary pause, as if to illustrate the point, but it needed to be longer for that moment to become true silence, to have its full impact.

On the Asian Network this week, Catrin Nye also was given too short a time to take us into the strange world of Possession, Jinn and Britain’s Back Street Exorcists (Monday night). She talked to social workers and psychiatrists about the increase in the number of patients suffering from mental illness who have been subjected to exorcism rather than hospital treatment, mainly in Britain’s Asian community.