Hear, hear!

CHRIS BENNETT finds life in the sound of the sea…

I HAVE now been living a life free from radio or television for some weeks; an interesting experience.

I have always had great difficulties with paying attention to television. Radio, on the other hand can be a source of delight. The listener’s imagination is imperative in creating the bond required to understand what is being said or read.

Television, by its nature, is exclusive; it makes no allowances for the viewer and allows him no role, which is to say that the medium is completely passive as far as the viewer is concerned, and thus at once hypnotic and soporific. I have friends who like nothing better after a hard day’s work than to slump (note that) in front of the TV and forget their trials and tribulations. Within three minutes they are asleep.

Television is a series of images, all of which are either photographed by a twentysomething with a Steadycam, or one of those things the news people carry on their shoulders like grenade launchers: which, of course, they are - in a sense. I prefer to read a news story in print and shape my own interpretation of things, which, essentially, is what radio allows you to do.

Because radio is a listening medium, much of the process involved in interpretation is very similar to that used by the brain to interpret the printed word. It is another form of reading in which the listener creates images based on ideas he perceives. For this reason, reading into a microphone calls for much training and hard work to achieve anything approaching proficiency. The majority of people cannot read out loud. If the listener loses track for one second the whole story goes out of the window.

It is my belief that TV as we know it today will eventually be little more than a medium for disseminating sporting events. Documentaries are now too expensive to make and nobody wants to sponsor them; news is becoming the prerogative of the Internet and advertising seems to be taking over all our cellphones.

The growth in popularity of electronic readers such as the iPhone, the Sony eReader and Amazon’s Kindle speak for themselves. By and large people like reading very much.

As one who spent his working life in radio journalism I find the fading of the light in what that great TV critic, Clive James, called the Chrystal Bucket a welcome prospect.

We have a radio station here in our midst on the South Coast, although it seems to be Radio Sunny Sheppie more than anything. Let us give them time to settle in and hear what happens. The first time round the management of Radio Sunny South made a pig’s ear of it, sad to say.

There was a saying many years ago in radio circles (you can name almost any country) which is still true today. It ran thus: How do you make a small fortune? Take a large fortune and open a radio station.

And that’s all for this week. Tune in again next Thursday…

CB

22/1/10