PERSONAL COLUMN

One of the Wireless set

GILLIAN FREEMAN

I try not to date myself, but once or twice I've slipped up and said 'wireless' by mistake. If I'd said ' wireless ' to the seventeen-year-old girl who was living in a hotel lobby in New York (she'd been there, on a diet of salted almonds, for a week when I met her) it would have been as remote and meaningless as if I'd suggested a game of piquet. She said she couldn't remember radio.

I didn't ask her about the endless music in elevators and automobiles. No doubt she assumed it came on with the works and discounted it along with other contemporary noises like police sirens and jets. Of course American radio must have been an important force once (as ours still is), apart from selling, I mean. After all there was that panic over Welles's Martian invaders — although when I first went there (seventeen myself) it seemed to be all schmaltz and soap opera, very different from the programmes I'd left behind. I remember lying on my bed in the foetid central heating of the twenty-ninth floor and listening to the adventures of Portia, a lady lawyer, and of Hop Harrigan, American Ace of the Air, between plugs for Colgate and coffee with no caffeine. Nowadays it's localised advertisements and staccato news flashes and pop music, so cut about that to the untuned ear the impressions are as arbitrary as madness. In some central states even the touchstone of pop music is bast aside. There's nothing to hang on to. One might be in outer Mongolia or Colney Hatch.

In Los Angeles they boast of a music station. They mispronounce titles and names. They announce Grieg and promptly play a snatch of Saint-Saens. One afternoon, when there was a live performance, I was surprised and pleased to hear that a famous American symphony orchestra was going to accompany a brilliant young virtuoso violinist.

The commentator went into considerable detail on the soloist's career, how he had studied in Berlin with so-and-so, how he had won this prize and that prize, how his concert reputation was growing throughout the world. I settled back in expectation. What was he going to play? The Beethoven concerto or the Brahms? One by Prokoviev perhaps? There was prolonged applause as the soloist joined the. orchestras "And now ", said the announcer portentously, "here is the theme music from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."

Very little of the music, however, is off record, and the channel's collection appears limited and often scratched. Twice within three days I heard' the same Rachmaninov symphony late at night; several records were wholly marred (without apology) by damaged surfaces. It isn't until after midnight that one is ever able to hear anything worthwhile, or even played in its entirety as we are able to (until, of course, Radio 3 is handed over to the DJs). One finds oneself listening instead for other reasons, like the soupy voice of Dick Crawford introducing a palm-court selection — " It's music for the cocktail hour."

"We'll be back again," said the BBC man the other afternoon, "at teatime tomorrow." (Radio, more than anything, makes one aware of being home.) Ranged behind him, in my mind's eye, was the Record Library, stretching for miles. I extolled it to my younger daughter. She'll remember radio, although being one of the visually orientated generation, not with the same pleasure that I do.

"We'll be back again at teatime." The words dispensed a nursery orderliness. There was always teatime and after teatime in those days there was Children's Hour. I was a regular listener before I knew what it was all about; listening, I suppose, with no more awareness than the girl in the hotel lobby listens to tunes as she's transported down Highway 6. I must have been about six when I went with my mother to Portland Place. It was like Open Sesame as we passed through the main doors and across that modern foyer and down long corridors to the actual studio from which Toytown was due to be broadcast to the children of the nation at five. We sat with a few other people on a row of upright chairs and chattered nervously until the light came on for silence. Uncle Mac (he was real, not just a voice which came through the ginger-coloured canvas behind a fretwork grill) made the inevitable inimitable introduction beginning " Hul-lo children" and then assumed his alter ego, Larry the Lamb, which in later years, when I listened to him on my own children's records, seemed to border on the schizophrenic. I watched these astonishing grown-up people bleat and baa and bark into the microphone, and then cling together and laugh.

I learned a few things about technique and technology that afternoon. The programme ended with a lady and gentleman singing nursery rhymes. I had records of them singing the same nursery rhymes at home.

At home we acquired a new wireless. It was walnut wood, very handsome, and the panel had names like Stuttgart, Hilversum and Midlands on it. There was a little green light that closed up in a complete circle when the set was properly tuned. I remember seeing and admiring it for the first time as it stood on the grand piano in our drawing room in St Johns Wood Road. We heard the war declared on it and listened to it all through the years ahead.

There's no point in reiterating the significance of radio during the war but it is surprising (when contemplating the idea of not remembering radio at all) just how many memories are actually bound up with it. Of course there were the speeches and ITMA and the daily anticipation of the news, but there was also the day when British class structure took its first knock from the establishment. It wasn't John Osborne or John Braine or the Beatles who started off that particular revolution. It was the blatant brogue of Wilfred Pickles reading the news, his very name indicative of the change that was on the way. From then on, really, the term ' BBC accent' became meaningless. There was another freedom movement, this time for freedom of speech, only it failed. A comedian named (could it really have been?) Oliver Goldsmith ended his music hall turn with something like these words : " I've got to go. I can't wait." All of England waited for the programme repeat. When it came those innocuous sentences were actually cut out. So, from then on (like his predecessor Max Miller), was (if that was his name) Oliver Goldsmith. It caused as much of a national frisson as Kenneth Tynan saying ' fuck ' on BBC3.

I find it tempting to collapse into a nostalgic listing of names. Conversations with cineastes so often deteriorate (after an initial period of "Do you remember. . .?") into the mere shouting of titles. (The Blue Angel. "Oh yes! The Last Laugh.") I want to write down Old Ebenezer; Dr Morrell and Sally; Ramsbottorn and Enoch (to think there was actually an Enoch who made one smile); Paul Temple and Steve. I had quite a jolt one day when I read Nancy Banks-Smith reviewing the first tele-Temple. Well, not reviewing really, since Steve was apparently s new to her. It follows she probably didn't know Frankie either.

Frankie was real and she introduced a programme called Duffle Bag on the American Forces Network. It was on Duffle Bag that I heard the first Frank Sinatra record ever — This is a Lovely Way to Spend an Evening,' and 'I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night' on the flip side; all to a backing of a massed female choir because there was a musician's strike at the time. Frankie's co-commentator was Brad Crawford, long long before we watched him on Highway Patrol. Their smalltalk seemed to be the ultimate in laconic sophistication and I used to fake illness in order to stay home from school to listen to them almost flirt.

It wasn't fake flu but the real thing that allowed me to indulge in some prolonged listening late last year. Nothing had really changed except for the names of some of the programmes; I sat there propped against the pillows hearing the seagulls squealing for Desert Island Discs and Ambridge preparing yet again for Christmas. I also heard plays of such incomparable diversity and quality that I suffered a surge of patriotism. Surely this must be the one country in the world in which it is sometimes tolerable to be ill, or even bearable to live alone.

I was back. It was like returning to a lover. The time-consuming affaire with television was over and from now on there were going to be two media in my life.

I once discussed the theatre with an elderly friend whose own taste runs to musical comedy. "I suppose," she said, "you'd call yourself one of the Shakespeare set?"

I'm one of the Wireless set, anyway.