OMG. It’s August. August is a very bad month. It’s a month full of anniversaries of … (gulp) … radio stations births, deaths and marriages. Ok, not marriages.
But August is when very old people wear black armbands and weep into their paper hankies, stand to attention, and listen to very very old recordings.
August 1967, that’s a long and tedious 47 years ago, is where it all started. The offshore pop pirate radio stations were forced to close down. Dear god, the bloody radio anoraks just keep going on about it. They go on and on. But it was 47 years ago! August across the years is also when a station or two started, came back on, or got raided and put off the air for jamming short-wave frequencies, or closed down due to Dutch law changing.
Sigh. August is like the holy month of Ramadan for old radio anoraks. Every day is another day to go on and on and on about something else, look at photos, videos, or listen to almost impossible to hear recordings they have heard over a billion times before. Strangely these recordings never change, yet they listen to them intently with tears in their eyes as if they’ve never heard them before.
That’s a bit odd, since most of these radio anoraks have the kind of dementia that keeps them stuck in the past, reliving it over and over like Groundhog Day.
‘Radio’ is an exciting, living, breathing constantly changing and evolving medium. True, there’s a lot wrong with it. Just as there was back in 1967, and every year since. But these bizarre Groundhog Day old men (it’s always old men) believe ‘radio’ is now the devil. And August is the month of tears, tantrums, and others in their households or nursing homes keeping quiet as the old radio anoraks reminisce or force them to accompany them on pilgrimages to places where pirate radio paraphernalia once was.
So, if you are the wife, son, daughter, or are in another way related to an old radio anorak, you have my deepest sympathy. At the moment it is illegal in this country to put them out of their misery, but maybe the laws will change and the families of old radio anoraks will be allowed to give them lethal injections and get on with their lives.
England's England 