(no subject)

[skygiants]

Before starting in on the backlog of books I read while traveling and ... from before then (SO MANY), I probably should take the opportunity to mention This Is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine, which I read towards the end of last year.

This is one of those nonfiction books for which the title is a lot more lyrical and evocative than most of the actual text -- the book is a history of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, which the BBC ran from 1936 up to the 1948 war, but unfortunately there does ... not appear to be a ton of information available to build a really compelling history of the other PBS. So the book is quite dry, and spends a great deal of time doing deep textual analysis on, for example, ads for radios in Arabic-language newspapers. Not that this isn't interesting in and of itself! Especially if you happen to be interested in/invested in the history of public broadcasting and telecommunications, which I do in fact happen to be, professionally. But grippingly readable it is not exactly.

The book is significantly more interested in the Arabic-language broadcasts than the Hebrew- and English-language broadcasts, which is a little too bad, because I'm quite curious about all three. It's arguing that the decisions that the BBC made to split off and separate out departments focused on Arabic-language programming and Hebrew-language programming contributed in part to the increasingly sharpening divides between those communities, which ... is probably not entirely untrue, although, I mean, if I were designing a radio station for three different linguistic communities I would probably be tempted to make a significant number of my programming decisions around language as well. Anyway I wouldn't say it was my most compelling nonfiction read of 2015 but I learned some things, though there is still much more that I would be happy to know about the Palestine Broadcasting Service.

(Also, as always, history like this makes me want more spec-fic and historical fiction and adventure stories about broadcasting and radio and pirate radio. Such a rich vein, so little mined! Voices in the dark!)

Comments

[sovay]

(Also, as always, history like this makes me want more spec-fic and historical fiction and adventure stories about broadcasting and radio and pirate radio. Such a rich vein, so little mined! Voices in the dark!)

+++++1.

[kore]

Wow, this does sound interesting. Also "Voices in the Dark" would be a great title, too.

[sovay]

Also "Voices in the Dark" would be a great title, too.

Okay, so it isn't called that, but: "Mercury Retrograde Theatre."

[skygiants]

YES, ABSOLUTELY, LIKE THAT

[skygiants]

IT WOULD, look at all these ideas free to a good home

[gramarye1971]

Having read (and edited) several books on government-backed radio broadcasting at this point, including books on Radio London, the BBC's Third Programme, and Radio Free Europe, I feel like it can be oddly hard to strike the right balance of history and storytelling in books about broadcasting history. Too much storytelling and it turns into a book full of gossip about who-said-what-to-whom; too much history and you're spending all your time wading through footnotes about bandwidth and listening figures. It sounds like this book didn't quite have the narrative side down pat.

The splitting of broadcasting departments based on language is quite interesting to think about, though, and I can see how it would have had an effect on the local communities in Palestine. The example I recall from RFE is that the Czechslovak service had a tricky time in balancing its Czech and Slovak programming and staff positions, but the higher-ups refused to create separate departments for the two languages. It also refused to promote the views of Slovak separatists because US government policy wanted a united (and noncommunist, of course) Czechoslovakia. The atmosphere in the Czechoslovak RFE service got so bad that the whole department imploded at one point in the early 1960s -- most of the staff walked out in protest over some badly handled management decisions, and the CIA ended up stepping in, firing almost everyone else on the staff, and running the Czechoslovak service itself for a while, rather than letting local emigres be in charge. Not exactly a win-win situation.

I might have to get my hands on a copy of this book to see just how dry it is, though. ^_^

[sovay]

YES, ABSOLUTELY, LIKE THAT

I am here to help!

This is my only other radio poem and it's really more of a Shakespeare poem, but I think you may want to watch David Thomson's A Child's Voice (1978); it's all about voices in the dark. Off the top of my head for historical or speculative stories, I can point you toward Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices (1980) and Cocteau's Orphée (1950); see comments for numbers stations. I can recommend a bunch of actual radio drama that I like. Otherwise I think I mostly write about radio my husband writes.

[vass]

(Also, as always, history like this makes me want more spec-fic and historical fiction and adventure stories about broadcasting and radio and pirate radio. Such a rich vein, so little mined! Voices in the dark!)

ObEarworm: This! Is! Radio Clash! On pirate satellites! Orbiting your living room, cashing in the Bill of Rights!

But yes, me too.

[davidgillon]

The actual history of UK pirate radio could easily support a novel or two - offshore forts, boarding parties, and a notorious killing!

[skygiants]

'both a Shakespeare poem AND a radio poem' are two great tastes that taste great together to me!

I actually read Human Voices last year for pretty much precisely this reason, it's one of the books that I spent months reading to write up and never got around to. I liked it, but it hasn't stuck very well. The films, however, I have not seen. (I will be asking for radio drama at some point soon, though! I'm trying to cultivate a podcast addiction.)

[skygiants]

Do you have any recommendations for books in this vein that do strike a good balance? Because I would absolutely be interested, if you do.

It sounds like the RFE example is sort of the exact opposite of the PBS example -- and just as much of a powder keg in the opposite direction. (PBS, unsurprisingly, eventually did just split into two separate stations during and after the 1948 war, with the Hebrew-language programming merging with a Hebrew underground radio station to become Kol Yisrael, and the Arabic and English-language programming broadcasting under Jordanian authority from the West Bank until 1967.)

[skygiants]

I don't actually know the song! Well, I didn't. Until now!

[gramarye1971]

...somehow, I must have totally left out the sentence or part of the sentence that referred to the RFE example as the opposite problem of the PBS. (Proofreading, what is proofreading, sez the edit-person.)

At any rate, I do have one particular recommendation for a book on broadcasting history! When I was living in London, I picked up Humphrey Carpenter's book The Envy of the World, a history of the BBC's Third Programme -- the supposedly 'highbrow' channel of arts and culture, as opposed to the more news-based and current events programming on the Home Service (now Radio 4) and the music and entertainment of the Light Programme (now split mostly between Radio 1 and Radio 2). My brief review of the book from a decade ago still holds good, and anyone interested in public broadcasting will probably get a bit of a laugh over how most of the same arguments are still going on in programming meetings today. I think I still have my copy of it, and I could try to get it to you if you like! There's also a book on Radio 4 that I've been meaning to read for ages, though I haven't been able to acquire a copy yet.

On RFE in particular, the book I helped edit on the Polish secret services' attempts to block/jam/otherwise discredit RFE was fairly interesting, but it's definitely an academic book and also on the dry side. It does have some neat illustrations in it, though, including a hand-drawn map that the author found in some old intelligence files that showed the overall layout of the RFE headquarters in Munich, indicating that at some point Polish intelligence had considered sending spies into the building itself. A slightly less dry but still well-researched book is Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond, by former RFE director Ross Johnson.

[sovay]

'both a Shakespeare poem AND a radio poem' are two great tastes that taste great together to me!

Thank you!

I liked it, but it hasn't stuck very well.

I was surprised no one had made a movie out of it. I'm not sure I got as far as fantasy-casting, but it did seem like exactly the sort of thing that studios throw a bunch of British character actors at.

(I will be asking for radio drama at some point soon, though! I'm trying to cultivate a podcast addiction.)

I can help with radio drama! Podcasts, I know almost nothing about. Most of my friends are into Welcome to Night Vale and The Black Tapes, but I imagine you have already been recommended these.

[spatch]

AMC produced a show in the nineties called "Remember WENN" which is a wonderful period piece about a radio station out of Pittsburgh in the 1940s and the cast and crew who called it home. Rupert Holmes of Drood and "The Pina Colada Song" fame was behind it, and he brought in guest stars such as Patti LuPone and someone whose name I'm blanking on right now but wow what a guest star let me tell you. You might be able to find VHS rips on YouTube if you look around enough. It's a shame the show disappeared as it did; AMC tried another dramatic series called "The Lot" which didn't do so well, and decided maybe they'd better chuck both and stick to movies for the time being. Oh, dear.

[skygiants]

Ooh, yes, if you still have a copy of The Envy of the World floating around I would love to borrow it from you, that sounds really fascinating! The RFE stuff also sounds intriguing and I may well seek it out.

[sovay]

AMC produced a show in the nineties called "Remember WENN" which is a wonderful period piece about a radio station out of Pittsburgh in the 1940s and the cast and crew who called it home.

Seconding Remember WENN. I've only seen two or three episodes, but they were brilliant. I'm not sure if this playlist encompasses the entire series on YouTube, but it looks like a lot of it to me!

[skygiants]

This is a weird thought, but it's like -- I feel like perhaps if you married Human Voices to a Connie Willis short story about Human Courage In The Blitz, you'd have the right balance of story/character/wistful whimsy to be appropriately filmable.

Yes, I have been listening to The Black Tapes and am very aware of Welcome to Night Vale! I have a couple more recs to get through, and then will be throwing the net wider once I run out.

[skygiants]

I feel like I've heard of this before -- perhaps as a Yuletide fandom? -- and found it deeply intriguing!

[sovay]

I have a couple more recs to get through, and then will be throwing the net wider once I run out.

If it hasn't yet come up, I strongly recommend Cabin Pressure (2008–2013), a BBC radio comedy series starring Stephanie Cole, Roger Allam, Benedict Cumberbatch, and John Finnemore, who was also the writer, with a prominent recurring character played by Anthony Stewart Head, who I always like. The plot concerns the (mis)adventures of the world's tiniest airline—they have one plane; "it's more of an airdot, really"—and the series is pretty much the only thing in which I have unequivocally liked Cumberbatch, partly because he's playing a nebbish. There are twenty-seven episodes, each named after a city beginning with a different letter of the alphabet; the finale is a two-parter. It is very funny and stray lines have worked their way into my household slang with derspatchel. Look, it's a modern thing I know about!