Janice Long, Terry Wogan and the intimacy of radio

Touche. New tricks are not necessarily new to old dogs.

Podcasts and radio share a lot of commonalities, but it’s the differences that mark them out. Unlike podcasts, radio is all about flow. It’s an ocean of sound that you dive into. Some of it – much of it, perhaps – flows over us but now and then we hit land.

It can be a pleasingly random process. A thing of chance. On Boxing Day, I turned on the radio just in time to catch the best thing I heard over the festive season. Piers Plowright, Soundsmith (Radio 4, a repeat from the previous weekend) was a fascinating and thoughtful account of the life and work of the radio producer who died earlier this year. Plowright’s towering reputation for radio documentary was well deserved, but this tribute also tapped into his love of poetry and his idea of faith (drawing on John Donne, he liked the idea of being transformed into music in the afterlife).

But the programme was also a hymn to an idea of radio itself, an idea steeped in close listening and the intimacy of the form.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that intimacy this week. The way a voice on the wireless can become part of the texture of our lives. It was prompted by the sad news of the death of Janice Long, a voice I realise has been part of my own life since I was a teenager. Hearing her name immediately transports me back to a student dorm in Stirling University in 1983, NME spreads on the wall, Janice playing the Bunnymen on the radio.

Every station she had links with, from BBC Radio Merseyside and Radio Wales to Radio 2 (where her After Midnight show was always a joyous listen before she was unceremoniously dumped) and Greatest Hits Radio, paid fulsome tribute, fuelled by lovely and loving memories from the many musicians she helped down the years. All of them pointed out Long’s love of music (surprisingly not always a given among DJs), her innate decency and warmth. My favourite might have been that of former Soup Dragon Sean Dickson (aka Hifi Sean) on 6 Music. He said meeting Janice was like “being hugged by your favourite chocolate bar”.

The depth and width of the love for Long spoke to what I want to call radio’s “innerness”. We are immersed in that ocean of sound and, as it passes by us, it also passes through us. We become deeply attuned to its voices.

That was implicit in the second-best thing I heard over the festive season, a radio drama (also a podcast, the New York Times might like to know) from RTE.

Wogan’s Sweet Sixteen by Kenneth Sweeney (which, Auntie Beeb take note, would sound great on Radio 4, or even Radio 2 for that matter), looked back at the early part of Irish broadcaster Terry Wogan’s career at the BBC and the tension between his Irishness and an establishment that struggled with that Irishness in the midst of an IRA bombing campaign.

Helped greatly by actor Al McKenna’s impressive (and emotionally resonant) impersonation of the familiar Wogan voice, Sweeney’s drama had much to say about the relationship between Ireland and England, the conservatism and default Englishness of BBC management (though in this particular case the cartoon bad guy was a Scot).

It was also a reminder that the voices that we grow to love like Wogan’s (and Long’s for that matter) can stay with us forever. That is radio’s not-so-secret power.

Listen Out For: Life Tracks with Amy MacDonald, Radio Scotland, Wednesday, 10pm. The singer-songwriter concludes her stint as a Radio Scotland DJ.

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