British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Are We Listening?

Radio’s role in British cultural life
British radio has a global reputation, and it has shaped the British people’s view of themselves, providing a constant stream of commentary, opinion, culture, and entertainment. Despite the constant demands made on our attention spans by digital/social media and by television, radio listening is at an all-time high in this country (with 47.3m tuning into at least one station each week according to recent RAJAR figures), and the medium’s flexibility is evident in its migration to new platforms; we now have radio on the Internet, on digital, on free-view television and on mobile phones.

Few aspects of British culture life can be studied properly without reference to the role of radio and the mass media is, and will continue to be, a hugely important source for historians in understanding how people lived. Since the late 1950s there has been a gradual shift away from the notion of culture as synonymous with ‘high culture’, and towards the idea of culture as everyday customs, values, or a ‘way of life’. Radio is indispensable to such a notion of culture because of its ability to amplify or actively shape the everyday interests and aspirations of the British people.

… British radio has a global reputation, and it has shaped the British people’s view of themselves

In terms of education and academia, radio was for a long time a neglected or ‘invisible’ medium, especially compared to film and television. The Radio Studies Network (RSN) has done much since it was founded in 1998 to redress this relative neglect by encouraging research into radio, surveying and sharing best practice in teaching radio and improving radio’s cultural and academic status. However radio studies, as a discipline, has often felt frustrated by the scarcity and inaccessibility of radio ‘texts’. Scholars feel that access to archives would allow the evolution of radio genres and techniques to be traced and that the lack of access has inhibited the growth of theoretical concepts and a critical vocabulary for talking about radio.

Firstly, of course, the inaccessibility of texts is associated with radio’s historical status as an ephemeral medium, and the archival record for at least the first fifty years of British radio is often patchy and inconsistent. This can be attributed to the limited levels of staff time, financial resources, technology and general awareness attached to archiving over the years, and of course examples of off-shore and early commercial radio are as rare as certain areas of early BBC national and regional output. Sometimes radio practitioners have managed to build up their own ‘personal’ archives over the course of extensive careers, which has helped to ‘fill in’ the archival record. The acclaimed producer Charles Parker (see picture) was acutely aware of the importance of archives, keeping recordings and production materials from all of his programmes (which he often used in his work as a peripatetic lecturer), and the Charles Parker Archive, held at Birmingham Central Library, contains a wealth of material of interest to students of broadcasting and vernacular culture.

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