BBC Radio Love

From “Why we’re still ga-ga for radio” in the UK Telegraph:

The 1929 BBC Handbook was untroubled by controversy. Seven years on from its first cracklings, John Reith’s pioneers were still drunk with the glory of it all. “Broadcasting, that magical agent,” they wrote, “has made available by means of comparatively simple apparatus and at next to no cost the finest things there are to hear.”

Meanwhile C. A. Lewis, Reith’s deputy, spoke of the aerial posts “like spears against the sky”, as sounds were carried “along the roadsides, over the hills, brushed by trees, soaked by rain, swayed by gales … [to] the shepherd on the downs, the lonely crofter, the labourer in his squalid tenement, the lonely invalid on her monotonous couch”. Grim old Reith himself put it more succinctly: “There are two kinds of loneliness: insulation in space and isolation of spirit. These are both dispelled by wireless.”

Article by Libby Purves, author of Radio: A True Love Story.