Last Train to Hilversum

Charlie Connelly,

Bloomsbury, £20.

EVERY day starts the same. Before the cats get fed, before last night’s dishes finally get put into the dishwasher, before the kettle gets filled, before milk is splashed over granola, before anything else, I turn on the radio.

It’s tuned into 6 Music these days. I’m getting used to listening to Lauren Laverne in the morning rather than Shaun Keaveny. If I’m at home it will stay there most of the day, but if I’m driving to work I’ll turn over to Radio 4 for Start the Week or In Our Time or Desert Island Discs. If I’m free later in the day I might try to catch Janice Forsyth on Radio Scotland.

In the evening I switch over to Radio 5 Live for the football talk. If cooking, it’s Radio 4 Extra. Later I might listen to some of Late Junction on Radio 3 and if I’m in Ayrshire for any reason I try and find Radio Ulster on the car radio for old time’s sake.

From Ed Stewpot Stewart’s Junior Choice and The Old Record Club with he who can no longer be named on Radio 1, through student nights drifting off to John Peel and Billy Sloan to now and everyday pleasures of Conor McNamara and Chris Waddle reporting from Turf Moor radio has been, still is, the background noise to my life.

I have my blind spots and prejudices of course. Things that prompt me to turn off or turn over. Any phone-in programme, John Humphrys on Today, most Radio 4 comedy panel shows. And there are radio stations I’ve moved away from; Radio 1 inevitably (I’m now far outside the target demographic), and now Radio 2 (Simon Mayo’s departure was the last straw).

But though the radio may be retuned, it’s never turned off. And this is the norm for most of us, isn’t it? As Charlie Connelly points out in his new book on the “magic of radio”, Last Train to Hilversum, 90 per cent of the British adult population turn the radio on every week. That’s some 48.9 million of us for whom radio is simply part of life. The reassuring soundtrack to domesticity.

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“Right from early childhood the radio is party to your most intimate life in a way that television isn’t,” Charlie Connelly writes in his entertaining book. “Your television set stays in one place – you have to go to the television – but you make sure radio follows you around the home.”

Last Train to Hilversum takes the measure of that intimacy. Connelly’s book is an idiosyncratic, at times curious, always hugely entertaining and inevitably personal take on the story of radio; as interested in the byways as the highways of radio then and now. And so, in its pages he travels to Gairloch to visit Two Lochs Radio, the country’s smallest commercial radio station, and, following the dial (an analogue reference, kids), eventually heads to Hilversum, the home of Dutch broadcasting.

Along the way he tells the stories of a few of the more remarkable characters who have had some influence on the medium. From Lord Reith, of course, to women like Sheila Borrett, the first women radio announcer in July 1933 who lasted just over three months before being, Connelly says, “effectively hounded from the airwaves.”

And then there’s Hilda Matheson, whose life story is a Woman’s Hour special in waiting. She was recruited by MI5 during the First World War, then became assistant to Lady Astor and helped her become the first woman to take her seat in the British parliament, before joining the BBC as Head of Talks. In that capacity she booked Vita Sackville-West and soon after became West’s lover. Eventually she fell foul of Lord Reith, left the BBC and went on to become the Observer’s radio critic.

More recently he celebrates the voice of James Alexander Gordon. For years Gordon was the sound of football on BBC radio, reading the scores on Sports Report every Saturday at 5pm. And yet, until he went to Highbury in 2002 to watch Arsenal against Manchester United, the last time he’d been at a football match was 1948 when he was 12 and taken to see Falkirk play Celtic.

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In the pages of Last Train to Hilversum Connelly circles around and back, following his own interests. And so, we travel back to the first sports commentary, the BBC’s own Orson Welles-style War of the Worlds controversy and the long-gone Radio SOS messages.

It’s not a year-by-year account. And though it touches on the digital world, it is not too engaged with what the future might hold for the medium. It’s a book with one foot in the present and one in the past, marking the distance between the two.

Not everything is from the archives. Connelly sits in with Charlotte Green (who, it turns out, is a Spurs fan) as she reads the football scores on Sports Report on a Saturday evening, Dotun Adebayo as he broadcasts through the night on 5 Live and Cerys Matthews as she does her wildly eclectic Sunday-morning show on 6 Music.

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It’s also, and I speak as a man who has a few more years on the dial than he has, a middle-aged man’s book. Connelly is in his forties and his book reflects that. When he starts talking about pirate radio he doesn’t go off chasing around east London trying to track down some breaking Grime DJ. Rather, he tells the story of 1980s pirate station Laser radio.

In the end it’s a love letter to the medium that, for all its faults, connects so many of us. We are all in touch with the modern world, as Jonathan Richman once nearly sang, because we’ve got the radio on.