Alone together

A love letter to radio

The longest-running TV programme in Greece aired 3,457 episodes over fourteen years. It was called Λάμψη and, though I lived in Greece for most of the fourteen years that the series ran, and I am still not entirely sure what it was about. The drama was the point. There were star-crossed lovers and there were kidnappings, there were children with mistaken ideas about who their parents were and, every so often, there were threats that someone would be sent to ‘the asylum.’ It did not matter that the screenwriters never really specified what kind of institution the asylum was or that this language sounded rather strange to Greek ears. Viewers just knew to be wary of it.

Much like The Young and the Restless or Dynasty or other soap operas of the era, one could dip out of Λάμψη for a season or three, tune back in, and be right at home in the plot. Some of the characters would be the same, some would have been killed off, but the basic storyline would be easy enough to parachute back into. After all, the drama was the point.

My mother and her friends had a complex relationship with these programmes. The Young and the Restless and Dynasty aired with Greek subtitles, bringing with them the allure of the foreign. “Look how wealthy and dramatic they are over there in America,” viewers could say, with the wealth and drama comfortably oceans away. Λάμψη, however, was Greek (even if it was Greek-with-American-aspirations). The wealth felt both more ostentatious and more phoney, and watching it—or admitting to watching it—was more fraught.

I was slightly too young to be the target demographic for Λάμψη, but I was not too young to notice how television in Greece in the 1990s organised time. It was the pre-screening era, before Netflix and TV on demand, and before it became imaginable that we could watch a full series over a weekend. If you wanted to watch something on TV in Greece in the 1990s, you had to be there at the appointed time. Every so often, a sporting event (or, worse, elections coverage) would displace Beverly Hills 90210 off its regular screening slot, leaving heartsick teenagers grumpy up and down the country—never mind that we lived a full ten time zones away from Beverly Hills itself.

Most TV programmes would last an hour, a good twenty minutes of which would be taken up by commercials. The viewing pleasure, however, spilled out of the 60-minute slot. Throughout the week, trailers would air, previewing the drama of the episode to come. Friends would debrief these trailers in the schoolyard, trying to guess which character would make out with which. After each episode, my cousin and I would get on the phone (the landline!) and discuss said drama, the characters feeling as real to us as people we knew. We learned this phone ritual through careful observation of our own mothers, whom we had watched debrief soap operas in great detail with each other for years. “Me? Oh, I don’t watch that rubbish,” they’d say, inevitably followed by an exhaustive recap of the latest episode.

In that sense, these TV programmes were like a town square or a church, giving people an appointed time to gather and a designated spectacle to reflect on. They structured time and conversation, and they also gave us opportunities to try on different selves. Before I developed my own first crush, longing came into my life vicariously through watching Beverly Hills 90210 and becoming invested in the will-they-or-won’t-they relationships of young people with hair far shinier than mine. This was not just a private (and slightly parasocial) relationship between a viewer and a character, but a relationship among viewers too. We watched roughly the same things in the same place roughly at the same time each week—and, crucially, we talked about them, shaping each other’s tastes, aspirations, and desires.

Now allow me, for a moment, a tonal shift from the Greek soap operas of the 1990s to today’s BBC Radio. When I first moved to Scotland, I used to listen to the radio on demand, with little to meaningfully distinguish between live radio and a podcast I could download at any time. A few programmes immediately caught my attention. Like a new Scot who was learning to make peace with the wind, I loved the Shipping Forecast and its poetry of gales. I loved hearing John Wilson speak to artists about the art that had shaped their lives on This Cultural Life, and I loved Night Tracks on BBC Radio 3, all whispery and mysterious and piano-filled, with the occasional Nordic flutes thrown in for good measure.

These loves initially resisted being pinned to time. Night Tracks usually airs after 11 PM, by which point I am firmly in bed, so I would instead listen to the recording around mid-morning, the presenter’s whisper at odds with the pinging of my email. The shipping forecast can seem especially pointless if one listens to it out of sync, like reading the Tuesday horoscope on a Friday and trying to compare the cryptic predictions to the life that actually transpired.

Christmas snapped me out of this pattern of out-of-sync listening. We found ourselves in Shetland, as we often do, where the gale made itself known for days on end, forecast or no forecast. There was blessedly little to do except to sit and watch weather move across the landscape. I put on BBC Radio 3 while picking at a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. I did not intend to listen all day; more likely, I simply forgot to turn the radio off. As the breakfast show gave way to Essential Classics, the presenters carried us through the festivity of the day. “Perhaps you are doing some last minute wrapping of presents,” they’d say, “or maybe, like John in Bristol, you are peeling Brussels sprouts.” I was not, in fact, peeling Brussels sprouts in Bristol, but I could picture John doing it, just as I could picture last-minute shoppers on the high street at 5 PM, as In Tune came on air. The radio became the you-are-here dot on a floor plan, locating its listeners in place, time, and ritual.

The gales eased. We returned to the mainland from Shetland. I returned to work. Through it all, I kept returning to the radio too, especially first thing in the morning. I’d shuffle out of bed, put the kettle on, and wait for Petroc Trelawny to say good morning on the airwaves. For a creature of habit, there is a real pleasure to watching new habits form. I am drawn to a loose rhythm that punctuates the days more than I long for the rigidity of routine. I am not always aware of how, when, or why I pick up a new way of living, but I notice when these habits become stitched into the cadence of the days. “On FM, digital, and on your smart speaker, this is BBC Radio 3” is now firmly part of my rhythm of living.

As intimate as these cadences feel, they are also shared. As I have learned to recognise which programme gives way to the next on air, I have also slowly become familiar with a universe of listeners. A typical broadcast flows from presenter to listeners, the former chatty and in control of the music, the latter invisible and seemingly (but only seemingly!) merely recipients of sound. The listeners become knowable to me when they interrupt that pattern, usually by sending an email that the presenter reads on air. This is how I come to know John from Bristol and his Brussels sprouts, and also how I learn that the daffodils in Ella’s garden in Norwich bloomed before mine.

Every once in a while, these exchanges become heated. Essential Classics aired a reworked Abba composition one morning. The next morning, by her own account, the presenter’s inbox was bursting at the seams. “This was neither essential nor classic!” Tom from Devon raged. I do not recall if his name was actually Tom, and he may not have been from Devon, but the indignation was palpable on the airwaves—and, apparently, shared. “I will be keeping my radio firmly off,” a different listener took the time to write in. “Well,” the presenter replied somewhat cheekily to the proverbial Tom from Devon, “this next song is for you. I hope you’ve kept your radio on!”

It is in these moments that I recognise in the BBC some of what I cherished about the popular culture of my childhood in Greece: that it was there for us to engage with and respond to, and in responding, we shaped it and it shaped us. I grew up to taxi drivers treating the radio as a conversational medium, not as a broadcast. The listener—doubly so if that listener was a taxi driver—was there to offer their own opinion: What makes a classic? What is essential? Who gets to say so? And what happens when someone disagrees? Some of the time, I am baffled by the righteousness with which fellow listeners express their opinions on matters of taste. But mostly, I find it reassuring to know that we are all here, listening at the same time, alone together, even if what we hear is different.

Through devoted listening, I have become better at recognising an incoming radio storm as it forms. A few weeks ago, I had just turned the shower on when Petroc Trelawny said to listeners in the UK that “in just four minutes, we will reach the spring solstice.” He went on to introduce a song that he said was tied to the solstice, and I went on to bathe—all the while thinking “uh oh.” Sure enough, by the time the track had ended, Petroc was back on the microphone to say that, of course, he meant the spring equinox, not the solstice, thanks-very-much-to-the-listeners-who-were-quick-to-point-out-the-error.

There is always someone on the radio who can correctly identify the bird chirping on a track or name a cloud pattern or proffer a strong opinion on harpsichords, even when no such opinion was requested. I do not always like these fellow listeners, and I sometimes bristle at the pedantry, but I am glad to live in the same world as them, even as we make different sense of it—and to be reminded that we live here together.

That feeling is especially close to the surface during the half-hourly weather reports on the morning programme. Even the shortest forecast will list the temperature for London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Belfast. From time to time, the presenter throws in some other points on the map. In the past month alone, the breakfast programme listed the temperature for Briton Ferry in Yorkshire, Maplethorpe in Lincolnshire, Dymchurch in Kent, Beale in Northumberland, and Helmsdale in Sutherland. It does not matter that I do not live in Dymchurch or that I needed to look up how to spell it. I like picturing its residents grabbing umbrellas on their way out the door, just as I find it reassuring to picture London underground commuters navigating ‘minor delays on the Piccadilly line.’ Occasionally, a place I recognise will make the list, and I will delight in the knowledge that, though it is raining in Dunblane, a place I once called home had its three seconds on the radio that day.

The rituals that become woven into the fabric of our days inspire a kind of attachment that resists change. Every so often, a character in the Greek soap operas my aunts watched would be killed off. My aunts would immediately swear the programme off. “That’s it, they’ve gone too far,” they’d say about the screenwriters. Or perhaps a plot line was introduced about a secret lovechild and this aunt or that would dislike the actor. More sighing, more arguments, more smoking, more “I’m done with it!” However adamant they appeared in the moment, my aunts would invariably be back for another season, like students who will not miss the lecture before the exam.

This morning, with the shower running and the radio on, I learned that one of my favourite presenters is leaving the morning radio programme I love. Unlike the characters in the Greek soap operas, he is not disappearing. He will remain on air, albeit in a different time slot. The morning programme, too, will continue, with a different host at the helm—a host who, according to a recent interview, loves birds; a host whom I am primed to love. And yet! I finished showering and, before I had fully dried off, I had to text the dear friend who shares a love of this programme. Multiple exclamation points were involved. In that moment, I became my younger self again, phoning my cousin on the landline. I became my aunts, too, who realised the passage of time most acutely not through observing the changes in their own lives, but through being confronted with changes in the lives of the people who weave the cultural background to our days.

A character is killed off in a soap opera, a different character is pregnant, two others make out. A radio presenter moves to the early evening slot. A woman puts the kettle on and slowly gets used to a different kind of “good morning.” Hopefully Ella is still out there with her daffodils, reminding us that, in Norwich, it is spring.