When I was a child, before we had television in our house, we used to listen to the radio quite a lot. There were plays and serials as well as music and news broadcasts. One thing I remember listening to was “Journey Into Space”, a science fiction series. Special effects were all sound-created and therefore totally believable. Created in 1953 (I’ve just checked that on the internet) it ran for three series but seemed to me to go on forever. It was apparently the last UK radio programme to attract a bigger evening audience than television. There was always a cliffhanger, naturally. We kept going back for more. I remember none of the story lines, nor any of the characters, just the fact that they were frequently under attack from aliens whose mysterious music or just rhythm transmissions made the intrepid travellers sleepy and therefore easily defeated. At least once an episode you would hear the main characters intoning, droning, “I must not go to sleep! I must not go to sleep!”
I feel I should be repeating that in the morning when I have snoozed my alarm once or twice, eventually switched it off, and know that if I so much as close my eyes, the next time I open them half an hour at least will have gone past. All my determination to get the day started a little earlier will have been to no avail! However did I manage when I had to get up considerably earlier in order to be up and organised and ready to hit the road before rush hour started properly? It’s likely that my alarm back then did not have a snooze button.
I don’t remember listening to specific music programmes on the radio in my childhood. We did however acquire a second hand wind-up gramophone from one of the church jumble sales we all helped at. It was a huge piece of wooden furniture with a speaker horn, like the one on the His Master’s Voice labels. At least that’s how ai remember it. It came with a stack of old 78s, some of them classical, some pf them perhaps slightly more modern, those silly songs that were all the rage for quite a while: ‘I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus” and “ I’m a blue toothbrush, you’re a pink toothbrush” and “The laughing Policeman” and such like. There was a little box of “needles” which we changed every so often, hoping to improve the quality of the music. My older sister and I made good use of it. The younger siblings were too young to be allowed to mess with it. Then one day disaster struck! We overwound it! There was a huge twang! Whatever spring mechanism made it work had broken. And that was the end of that!
Not long after that we moved house. And then we got a television set. Before we knew it we were watching Pinky and Perky and the other puppets performing pop songs. My older sister learnt to dance a really good jive, a skill I envied, as I did her ability to do hand stands against the wall. And there was science fiction on the TV too. When “A for Andromeda” began to be broadcast, on the same night as I was supposed to go the Girl Guides, I suddenly discovered I had too much homework to be able to continue with my Girl Guiding. My father sussed me out and was quite disgusted but it was too late by then. i was hooked.
Nowadays I’d be able to watch it on catch-up! Different times!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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