The Death of Imagination

..a
bigger audience than TV. The second series ‘The Red Planet’, the
one of which I have the best vague recollection, was optimistically set in the
early ‘70s, a choice of era that showed a refreshing trust in the rapid
and useful advance of technology heralded by the V1’s one-way trip from
Peenemunde to London.
Jet Morgan, in his bright blue flagship Discovery, head a space fleet on a seventy
million mile round trip to Mars to explore the mysterious and supposedly uninhabited
Red Planet. Each episode was fraught with danger, some calamity spelling near
disaster for the fleet in one cliff-hanger episode after another. Once the Red
Planet was reached they discovered secrets that challenged their stoic English
sanity, their survival and the security of Earth itself. Compelling stuff.
With an unusually careless regard for posterity all the recordings of the series
were destroyed in a purge of the BBC archives. Fortunately , a pile of misfiled
transcription discs were found in 1986 by Ted Kendall, a BBC recording engineer
who carefully restored them and they are available – according to the BBC web
site – for a mere eighty pounds or $198.54 AUD. Plus postage
Curiously the one voice that I still remember, apart from Whittaker, was that
of Alfie Bass, the cockney actor who later featured in my favourite TV program
of the era ‘Bootsie and Snudge’, with Bill Fraser playing ex-Sergeant-Major
Claude Snudge. It was a series which continued the hostile relationship started
in the ‘Army Game’ series, where, as respectively idle dreamer and
bully, they became handyman and hall porter at the Imperial Club – again respectively,
if not retrospectively.
It didn’t take much to establish a mental vision of space travel more
compelling than Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001’ or a future as real
as ‘Bladerunner’. It only required a great script, a handful of
actors, whose appearance was unimportant, a small studio, perhaps with as little
as a single microphone, a couple of sound effects men (are they still called
Foley artists on radio?), a director and an engineer. With these humble resources
they captured the vast emptiness of space and the enormous time that the journey
was meant to take.
All the work was done in the minds and imagination of we the audience, potentially
scattered all over the globe, housed at our own expense in triple fronted brick
veneers, Californian bungalows or wattle and daub cow barns. There we created
worlds from our own hopes, fears and aspirations. As each radio serial followed
another, as ‘Superman’ seguéd into ‘Night beat”,
we were transported from Smallville to Kings Cross, with only a change of accent
and sound effects.
Radios had real presence and, if one was lucky, real tone; the latter brought
to you by a ten inch Rola speaker and two watts of valve amplification, housed
in a veneered cabinet the size of a respectable side-board. My grandparents’
radio was equipped with a Magic Eye that conveyed a combination of signal strength
and program spectrum, wishful thinking all within one luminescent green cat’s-eye
shaped bulb.
Radio was the first medium of mass entertainment, allowing hundreds of thousands
to simultaneously share an event, rather that the small audience which could
be relied to turn up to watch a witch burn, or cheer the cavalry charge at the
Battle of Borodino. This was both good and bad; people now started to huddle
around the radio as a family and could hear great singers and distant orchestras
rather than entertaining themselves by gathering around the piano and singing
vigorously out of tune. Now the great minds of the generation could speak to
a suddenly larger audience and hasten the spread of individual uniformity. Alternatively
one went to bed early wondering if Persil really did wash whiter, because it
was only a moment’s inattention that saw Public Radio become public property
and advertising move from the walls of the subway to sonic wall paper.
Being an insomniac I get to listen to a lot of radio at various eccentric hours
of the very early morning, and because I detest advertising and Blacks in Bling
destroying the English language and ghettoising their compatriots, I listen
to the ABC. Either Radio National – the only station with any pretension
to intellectual standards – or ABC FM, where I can get to listen to music uninterrupted
by advertisements for aerated sugar water or haemorrhoid preparations. An honourable
mention to MBS for its classical music program is also called for.
Regrettably a “Prairie Home Companion” is no longer on the ABC,
but if you are awake each morning at 5. 30am you can hear radio programs from
the 1960’s, ranging from the appallingly boring ‘Just a minute’
through to the interesting ‘Quote, Unquote’, ‘My Music’
,‘My Word’, the quintessential English program, ‘The Goon
Show, still going after 50 years, ‘The Navy Lark’, nice harmonica,
and “I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue’, the last being my
favourite and which has been on Sundays lately. I say ‘has been’
as the ABC does change programs around, so what I say now may have no relevance
to the programming when this finally gets put up on Mike’s site.
There is a neat sequence. Firstly, the book, which destroyed memory and ended
the oral society but was the most radical alteration ever made in Western intellectual
history; then radio, which destroyed our ability to entertain ourselves but
that has, in the space of a hundred years, knitted the world together; then
television, which has commoditised the culture of the very common lowest denominator
man but made the triumph of capitalism inevitable, and then finally the internet,
which has destroyed credibility and veracity but has given the chance of democracy.
An equality of mediocrity surrounds us, but we shall survive.
Whether it will be worth it is another question.