I’m old school. Today, radio is in the hands of a new generation, although my generation reject and hate them. It appears to be the job of the ‘elders’ to not gracefully hand on the baton to the next generation. Thus, for most of my generation with a fetish for radio broadcasting, the only radio that was ever real radio is the radio of yesteryear. The rules are that we have to ignore today’s innovation and just be grumpy and old, longing for a return of what decades ago was the innovation of the day.
I guess I straddle both camps. Radio is and can be very exciting these days. But, it also was in the good old days. However, those days are gone.
For us radio ‘anoraks’, the pioneers and those we respected as teenagers are now, like us, old men. And, old people die.
Last week, following a stroke another one of ‘our’ radio mentors died. He was quite an important one in ‘anorak’ circles. Today’s radio folk or enthusiasts will never have heard of him, but those from the old school will have respected him as one of our idols or figureheads. An innovator and a ‘do-er’.
It seems that at least a couple of times a month a new name will come up as the latest to be announced as dead, and I will have known them personally in the past, or at least known of them, heard of them, or once listened faithfully to them.
I can only assume an equal number of my peer group of old time radio enthusiasts are also shuffling off this mortal coil, but I just don’t hear about them.
In other words, my generation now really are dying. Dropping like flies.
Where we were once young men loving music and listening to our favourite disc jockeys broadcasting from radioships at sea, we, like them, are now old granddads. And granddads die.
Depressingly, websites dedicated to the memory of old style radio are now largely Obituaries for dead radio blokes.
Damn. I’ve written about this only a few months back. Now, I truly am scared. Don’t tell me I’ve got that short term memory loss thing. Or are more and more old radio blokes dying?
Sigh.
England's England 