WE LOVED RADIO

Elsewhere I have touched on the central position radio occupied in our early lives. Without television and with just a smattering of cinema occasionally, we looked to radio for news, sport, education and entertainment. Today I resent bitterly the way TV came into our lives and simply battered down those glorious theatres we had built in our minds. Today people no longer read and don’t have radio to stimulate their imaginations. They are force fed images by TV and have no choice in their inner landscapes and I just despise the sameness of it all. You and I will listen to the same play on radio and mentally we’ll have widely differing backgrounds and sets which the characters occupy – not so TV. You’re stuck with what they show you and it’s their picture, the same one everyone else has. How utterly boring and how sheeplike we are without our unique and active imaginations.

Dad bought a Traveller valve radio sometime in the thirties, when he originally lived in Ladybrand. He shared a house with his mother and siblings and I recall him telling us that he had climbed a tall tree in their garden in order to string a simple wire antenna to enable him to pick up the BBC World Service from Daventry, on shortwave. Two local stations in English and Afrikaans were available but probably not much else. Dad had a fondness for the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan and he often spoke of a set of 78s which he had owned by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. Pop music as we know it today did not exist and Gilbert & Sullivan was about as light as music got back then, unless you were a fan of the Big Bands of Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and the like. The music of Albert Ketelby (Bells across the meadows, In a Persian Market, Wedgewood blue etc) which we sort under light classics today, was pop music in its day.

In the late forties, the first local Commercial station started broadcasting. Springbok Radio was born and radio was never the same again. It blossomed into a wonderful centre of entertainment in the home and radios just stayed on all day in our house. Mom also had a little bakelite valve set next to her bed which we as kids would listen to when sick in bed – in my case, pretty often! I started becoming involved in the endless serials which entertained housewives in the morning. I recall some like, Dr Paul, Portia Faces Life, Rendezvous etc and in the afternoon Afrikaans serials like Liefdeslied would keep us enthralled. These were not kiddies’ material and yet I recall getting so involved with stories so that I resented having to eventually go back to school. In the evening we had punchy half hour dramas like Consider your Verdict and Squad Cars, endless competition and game shows like Pick a Box, comedy shows like The Men from the Ministry, The Caltex Show, proper soap operas from Lux Radio Theatre (Which originally was an American one hour radio play programme from which the term Soap Opera was derived). Even learned men strutted their stuff on “The three wise men” , “The Oxo Brains trust” and the “Castrol logbook”. Everything and everyone was catered for and you’d be very hard to please if you found nothing you liked.

The old English SABC station often used to run BBC comedy series like Hancock’s Half Hour, The Goon Show, Beyond our Ken, Rays a laugh, Take it from here. It was an era of true Golden Comedy which has not been equaled since. I have accumulated large amounts of material from that era and the humour stays fresh and funny. Anything which was put on by the BBC was (And still is) excellent, not just comedy.

Late afternoons I had a clutch of serials designed for kids to listen to: Adventure Man, Superman, Hop Harrigan, Tarzan, Captain Silver, Flight through Space, Clyde Beatty, etc. On winter afternoons, Mom would light the fire in the lounge fireplace and I would park in an easy chair beside the fire, to lap up the adventures emanating from the old Traveller. I’m sure I was Dad’s despair because he’d have rather have had me been playing sport which I actively abhorred (Still do in fact) but I much preferred the Theatre of the Mind.

Dad of course loved his news bulletins which coincided with our lunch and supper times. One did not chatter during the news, not even the “vringible” news (My sister’s pronunciation of Regional) which to a kid’s mind was duller than ditchwater. Boredom beyond measure for me, were the marathon cricket matches that used to accompany Dad during his forays in the garden. A little Phillips portable joined the radio line-up which made it possible for him to have his sport wherever he pottered in Ladybrand. Dad just loved sport and on Saturday afternoons the station was on rugby and nothing much else. But more than anything else, Dad enjoyed entering the numerous competitions which the radio offered. He used to buy postcards by the hundreds and using different writing styles, sent in entries to every competition presented, for each one of us. We never won anything really major because the sponsors tended to offer their own products as prizes or small amounts of cash but boy, win we did. Dad at one time kept a book in which he listed all the prizes that we won but it must have been disposed of when Dad died. I recall some prizes: Ponds beauty products, Lyons tea, Ransom cigarettes, All Gold canned goods, Silver Leaf canned goods, all the records on a weekly hit parade, (Numerous times) Pepsodent toothpaste, cash, a large table radio which ran on a car battery, Cadbury chocolates, Suchard sweets, book society books for a year etc. I recall the list being at least 1.5 foolscap pages long. He hated missing a competition so either Pat or I had to listen for questions while he and Mom were at the movies. If you wanted to see Dad acid, you just had to miss one of his competitions after he’d asked you to listen.

I probably won the biggest prize of all in a programme when I collected R100. I had a fabulous time planning what I would spend it on, before it arrived but when it did turn up, I simply split it five ways with the family, even including Granny, who was not really ever in my good books. We had no telephone in those days but Dad would send in cards to the “Eyegene Jackpot” show, listing his work number, because if they drew one’s card, they’d phone you and quiz you for whatever prize was being offered. The password which one had to say first was “Eyes right with Eyegene” – say “Hello” and you were deemed out of the competition right away. So it happened on at least three occasions over the 8 years we were there, that at night the folks would have to troop up to Dad’s office, which had no electricity, where Springbok Radio would phone and Mom or Dad would participate by torchlight.

Later in Ladybrand, I also took part in a phone-in programme and while I didn’t win the substantial jackpot, I was happy with whatever I won. Even R10 was plenty in those days.

Naturally I loved all the music programmes which were on offer : New releases, Hit Parades, even certain lighter classical and jazz programmes. I listened to them all avidly. LM Radio which played pop music almost exclusively, was a rival to the SABC but I don’t remember listening to it in Trompsburg. Some of those early tunes still linger in my mind – Ted Heath’s “Faithful hussar”, Edmundo Ros’ “Wedding Samba”, Helmut Zacharias “When the Lilacs Bloom Again”, Jo Stafford “Shrimpboats”, Percy Faith’s “Delicado” etc. The list is endless. I have acquired every song and piece of music I loved as a kid and still listen to bits every now and then. Just as well because the local radio stations today no longer play any decent music at all. There is simply no consideration at all for senior citizens who might still like to hear music from their era as was the case in the past. Worst of all, radio entertainment as we knew it, was simply discarded for the technically superior but ultimately intellectually inferior television.

Dad’s old Traveller must be more than 80 years old now and I think it still works. It has been handed down to Pat’s daughter Heather van Rooyen who might revere it as an antique but unfortunately will never experience the pleasure it brought us in our youth. Her father Chris sanded down and revarnished its cabinet so it looks as good as ever. Mom’s little Bakelite radio must have packed up and was replaced with the Phillips portable, which was an early transistor model.

My sister also listened to radio a lot but she heard things a little differently when she was very small. For instance, she once announced to Mom and Dad who had been out, that “Consider your birdie” was going off the air. (Consider your verdict) Little smartypants that she was, on one kiddies programme she was listening to, they asked, “We all know what a dragonfly is but what is a Snapdragon?” Quick as a wink Patty said, “It’s his wife”. Truer words have seldom been spoken.