Radio Moscow had a dark, distinctive studio echo. I could always tell I was tuned in to Moscow by the quality of the silence.
Radio Moscow’s speakers had voices that wouldn’t have been out of place on the BBC World Service. Radio Portugal I imagined presenting its English programmes with benign forgetfulness, from rooms that had seen better days, with lots of chipboard around and faded yellow paint. Radio Tirana’s chief announcer, I used to think, must be standing up to read the news bulletins, as she did, and probably looked a bit like an Irene Handl character from an old British film.
An addiction
I listened to those stations, and others, in the 1970s.
Long-distance radio on medium wave is a night thing, a winter thing. My pocket radio, in deep January, brought local stations from Canada’s Atlantic seaboard into my Nottinghamshire bedroom. That wasn’t typical, but it happened more than once. Distant broadcasters verified my reception reports with postcards – known as ‘QSL’ cards – and I built up a collection of these.
The hobby offered such excitement: the thrill of distance; the thrill of newness when I came across a broadcaster I hadn’t heard before; the thrill of the chase and the capture on hearing things on my pocket radio I thought no one else had heard; the thrill of hatred, like on Radio Tirana that devoted itself to diatribes against everything I thought worthwhile, and seemed to imagine that the solution to every problem lay in armed violence; the thrill of the ridiculous when a programme showed complete misunderstanding of things any British listener would know; and, after a while, not much thrill of any kind, but the addict’s obsession with recapturing the thrill that had been there before.
My schoolwork suffered for a time. And even in middle age, I would still occasionally blame my lack of reading on the hours I spent glued to the radio, or scouring the World Radio TV Handbook entries for stations I would never find.
And after
My interest in long-distance radio faded around 1980, and is unlikely to come back to life in the same form. History and broadcast technology have moved on. The medium wave today is empty compared to what it was in my teens.
The web has, however, given my teenage hobby a kind of afterlife. I’m able to read Wikipedia-level knowledge and other listeners’ experiences of the stations, though I’m not always able to find these things more than once. I learnt that one of Radio Moscow’s presenters had been a socialite in 1930s London.
Concerning Radio Tirana’s follies, there’s a wealth of material. The ‘Irene Handl’ speaker reminded other listeners both of Ian Fleming’s Rosa Klebb and of Blackpool. And the station’s gaffes included many others beside their 1972 George Cross error, when they reported Malta’s vexation with its George Cross as involving a British official of that name. That one, I heard for myself, but I missed another thing I’ve read about, where they confused coke as a recreational drug with Coca-Cola.
Perhaps not all in the past
A field of study opens up: compare and contrast broadcast propaganda of half a century ago with all sorts of things in our own day: today’s government broadcasters, of course; today’s proliferation of privately owned and agenda-driven stations; today’s podcasts, blogs, micro-blogs.
Comparing and contrasting Radio Tirana with Elon Musk’s Twitter, or indeed with East Anglia Bylines, would be not so much like the same exercise with apples and pears, more like doing it with chalk and cheese, or with ships and sealing-wax. However, I shall not stand in the way of anyone who wants to have a go.
Some material in this article appeared in the Cambridge University Libraries Information Bulletin and the magazine Streetwise from St Matthew’s church, Cambridge.
Share this article on Bluesky
