Alphabeticon: Concerning Radio
DEDICATION: To the good memory of Josef Červinka who kept alive the tradition of enlightened radio when all around was brutality and lies
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
This book pays tribute to the art of radio, which played a major role in my life from an early age. After my family left Canada for England in my childhood, we lived in an isolated Lincolnshire village. There was almost no access to movies of any worth. There was no theatre, except what was organized by my mother, who directed local productions in the village hall. And there was no good music, except what was broadcast by the BBC — there was not yet any television. Children’s programs on the radio were vivacious and charming; and my sister and I listened to them raptly. The Children’s Hour, as it was called, came on the air at five o’clock; and it was followed by the six o’clock news, the major bulletin of the day. We listened to that, too; and with parental help we came to an understanding of national and international affairs that was, perhaps, unusual among youngsters.
Broadcasts of that sort were vital for the war effort from 1939 to 1945. Radio was important. It sorted truth from rumour — even when the news was bad, we needed to know the worst, to come to terms with it. And this was good for morale, thanks in part to Churchill’s bulldog speeches.
After the war, in 1946, BBC Radio divided its services in three. The Light Programme, as its name suggests, gave listeners popular music and variety shows. The Home Service catered to middlebrow tastes. The Third Programme, so called and instantly famous, aimed for the highest possible standards of artistic and intellectual achievement, broadcasting only the best of classical and modernist music, established and experimental poetry, challenging original dramas, and (this above all) features especially created for the microphone, which ranked it with all the other arts, and which earned for that kind of radio a deserved reputation as the Tenth Muse.
In 1947, the BBC Third Programme broadcast a large-scale radio version of David Jones’s “In Parenthesis”, brilliantly adapted by Douglas Cleverdon. By any measure, it has to be counted one of the greatest achievements in the history of English-language radio. As narrative, it conjured up the first world war — Jones had served as an infantryman. But on a profounder level, it evoked all wars of the past, in their horror but also in their transcendent meaning. I was enthralled by it, for I had grown up among veterans and the Great War had coloured the culture of my slightly more recent time. “In Parenthesis” showed me what radio was capable of, and I set my sights on a career in the medium.
Returning to Canada in 1949, to a teaching job at UBC, I switched on the CBC, selectively, finding good and sometimes quite ambitious programs, especially of classical music and radio drama. On the side, between courses, I wrote and delivered a few broadcast talks, and was occasionally hired as a studio actor. Three years later, partly because of this and partly because I was active as an opera conductor, the CBC offered me a job, in Toronto, as a trainee radio producer. I stayed there for the next thirty-four years, branching out from music productions into drama, documentaries, and features, some of which I wrote and composed myself. I count myself privileged to have worked with many of Canada’s finest writers, composers, and performers. And especially I was lucky to have done so at a time when CBC Radio was vigorously faithful to the ideals of public broadcasting.
Those days are gone now. I am long retired; CBC has cancelled radio drama, and far too many hours on air are devoted to pop music of tiresome banality. Some attention is still paid, quite usefully, to public issues of vital concern to all citizens. Snippets of good music are still interpolated between the swathes of sonic rubbish. But radio in Canada, if not elsewhere, is now extinct as a genuine art in its own right.
The art of stained glass, so luminous in the Middle Ages, somehow got lost in the mists of time. But what was accomplished, back then, can still be seen in the windows of medieval cathedrals. If the art of radio, similarly, has been lost — at least in Canada — I may mourn the loss, but I can also console myself with knowing that what was once accomplished, here, can be listened to, by appointment, in the Toronto archives of the CBC. Silence may have been inflicted; but not all is lost.
EDITOR’S FOOTNOTE
John Reeves’ career was honoured, from time to time, by various awards. He won the 1959 Italia Prize for radio drama. He was awarded a Canadian Music Council prize for best choral programming. In 1977 he was given the John Drainie Award for radio excellence. Two awards recognized his many programs about the predicament of Czechs and Slovaks under communism: the 1989 Masaryk Award, “for contribution to the freedom of Czechoslovakia”, and the 2005 Gratias Agit Award, from the Czech Government, for his contribution to freedom of speech. While active in Toronto, he participated in the introduction of stereo on CBC, and he pioneered the use of the Kunstropf system of surround-sound. Internationally, he served on the Italia Prize documentery jury and on the committee to revise the rules of the Italia competition. He was founding member, and occasional chairman, of the International Radio Features conference in Europe. And he served, in the United States, as visiting producer and advisor in the American attempt to revitalize radio drama as an art on NPR.
