One of the 20th century’s most remarkable radio broadcasts was made from rural Surrey on an evening in May 1924. Beatrice Harrison was a renowned cellist. (The composers Frederick Delius and Edward Elgar chose her as the soloist for their works.) Harrison liked to practise in the garden of her home, a converted Tudor barn near Oxted in Surrey and one evening, while playing Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Chant Hindou”, she heard a nightingale echoing her cello with its song.
When she told the BBC about her duets with the nightingale, a team was dispatched, armed with a new, highly sensitive microphone. Sure enough, shortly after 10.45pm, just 20 minutes before closedown, as Harrison played, the nightingale began to sing. The BBC cut away from its scheduled concert to broadcast live from Oxted, the sound being carried via her telephone line: “For 15 minutes the nation was spellbound by the extraordinary sonic combination of cello and nightingale.” The response was unprecedented with the BBC receiving 50,000 letters from across Europe. It was, Charlie Connelly writes, “one of the great radio and cultural moments of the century”.
Connelly’s first radio appearance was in 1984 aged just 13, when together with a friend he attempted to serenade listeners to BBC Radio Kent’s Rod Lucas Show down a telephone line with their version of “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” by Showaddywaddy. Sadly Rod cut them off before they had got into their stride, but this was “the moment radio stopped being a passive experience” for Connelly. Now a broadcaster in his own right and the author of a previous book on the shipping forecast, he proves to be an enthusiastic and entertaining guide to radio’s history, personalities and hallowed sites. His book is a heartfelt and funny celebration, from the earliest broadcasts of musical performances, such as Dame Nellie Melba’s at Chelmsford in 1920, the origins of radio comedy (The Goon Show was “the first piece of radio to exploit a generation gap”), those unmistakable voices of the network, the announcers, such as Radio 4’s Corrie Corfield (a “mix of lullaby empathy and no‑nonsense head girl”). He tells the inspiring story of Britain’s smallest commercial station, Two Lochs Radio in north-western Scotland, which serves an area the size of Glasgow that has a population of only 1,600 people: “I have sat in bus shelters bigger than the Two Lochs Radio building.”
Connelly is especially good at evoking “the magic of the medium”, its uniquely immersive intimacy in comparison with TV. “It’s a collaboration: the radio provides the sound, we provide the pictures.” A collector of old radios, he laments the impending switch-off of analogue radio, now that digital listeners exceed those on FM, AM or long wave: “The pop and crackle is on its way out.” It’s the end of an era and we will lose the sense of mystery and discovery that he experienced as a “bored, directionless, isolated teen in a soulless suburb of south-east London”, when turning the radio dial, eavesdropping on the “conversations of nations” and being transported through the ether to exotic stations such as Luxembourg or Hilversum: “Even the name came to sound onomatopoeic: there was hiss and hum in Hilversum.”
• Last Train to Hilversum by Charlie Connelly is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £20). To order a copy for £17.60, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
