Listen in: How Radio Changed the Home

Beaty Rubens

Book cover for Listen in: How Radio Changed the Home
Book cover for Listen in: How Radio Changed the Home

Listen in: How Radio Changed the Home

Listen in: How Radio Changed the Home

Beaty Rubens

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Description

Intimate stories that offer entertaining perspectives on what it was like to engage with radio when it was new.

Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the Radio Craze. Listen In expresses what the radio's arrival signified at a personal level. This narrative history recounts the perspective of listeners who adopted the then radical form of communication technology, invested in their first-ever gadgets, and tuned in by their firesides to outside voices, music, SOS calls, the Pips, news, sports, royalty, and innovative radiogenic comedy. Listen In also traces how radio affected family life by exploring whether it altered dynamics between children and adults, changed relationships between women and men, as well as affected class and a wider sense of nationhood.

Packed with touching stories and anecdotes, Listen In comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting, and the experience of how people consume audio is once again transforming.

About the Author

Beaty Rubens was a BBC Radio producer for thirty-five years and is now a freelance producer, presenter, and writer.

Critical Reviews

"Rubens's research, including her discovery of unpublished personal testimonies in the Bodleian Library archives, gives new insight into radio's early days. [Listen In] is illustrated with contemporary journalism, fiction, cartoons, and diaries, and offers readers a window into the lives of those who first embraced the technology in their homes."-- "Oxford Mail"

"Stuffed with insights, quotes, and anecdotes, from Bristol locals reminiscing about their first encounters with the radio to profiles of famous early BBC presenters...Anglophiles and BBC regulars will find it worth tuning in."-- "Publisher's Weekly"

"In her joyous, richly illustrated book about the early years of radio from the listeners' point of view, the BBC radio producer Beaty Rubens takes us inside the British home. The period covers wireless's inception in 1896, with the exciting Electrophone (its advertisement showed 'Pulpit - politics - drama - general news - opera' all going into a Victorian housewife's ear via headphones), to the mass audiences of 1939."-- "The Spectator"

Publishing Information

Publisher: Bodleian Library
Pub date: 2025-05-13
Length: 272 pages

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