Pirate channel Veronica, pillarized broadcasters and sports program Langs de Lijn. There will be few people who don't think about the radio right now. This medium is celebrating its centenary this year and a book was inevitable.
The title gives it away a bit:'The Radio. A cultural history' is about the change in society due to the arrival of this mass communication medium. It can be compared with the internet and the smartphone. The world suddenly became a lot bigger because of the information that became available en masse, and the radio itself was in 1919 what the smartphone was at the beginning of our century. Everyone was talking about it and the device was purchased en masse.
The technological side is of course also discussed. Author Huub Wijfjes, professor in the history of radio and television at the University of Amsterdam, calls this radio archaeology himself. He is able to clearly articulate how we get from techniques such as the wireless telegraph for shipping traffic to a device with short-wave tubes. The creation of the final device was the result of a technical snowball effect and there is therefore no single inventor of the radio.
The fact that we are still celebrating the centenary is partly due to the Dutch engineer Hanso Idzerda. He was (one of) the first in the world to have a radio broadcaster, without even realizing it. The later definition of a broadcasting service - the regular broadcasting of a program announced in the press - began in the house of Idzerda on November 6, 1919.
A new world
Twenty years later, the radio was a standard part of living room furniture. Cozy with the whole family in the living room listening to music, the news or a radio play. And for free too!
Listening to music every day was one of the biggest changes with the arrival of radio, according to Wijfjes. Music made up the highest percentage of broadcasts and was played mostly live, in front of the microphone in the radio studio well into the 1950s. Homegrown music and classical pieces played by Dutch orchestras were the most heard.
Influencing listeners
But there was more than music. There was also talk in radio broadcasts, for example about the news. A survey from the 1950s found that the Netherlands spent 42 percent of its airtime on news and the spoken word, compared to 26 percent in the United States and 17 percent in England. In the Netherlands, pillarization played a role, and every broadcaster wanted to propagate its own identity through their radio programmes.
Until the end of the heyday of radio (between 1920 and 1960), Dutch society was roughly divided into four pillars:a Protestant, Catholic, socialist and liberal pillar. Each pillar had its own political parties, associations and partly its own schools and so people already lived in their own 'filter bubble'.
Although people had little to do with people outside their own pillar in many areas during the heyday of pillarization, the radio threw a spanner in the works. Wijfjes beautifully shows how the radio makers initially wanted to educate and elevate their listeners (religiously) by broadcasting sermons and religious music. Contrary to expectations, the listeners were not limited to the broadcasting of their own religious pillar and just as easily tuned in to VARA game shows, according to research. Grinding their teeth, conservative broadcasters had to lighten their programs to retain their listeners.
Golden years
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The broadcasters of the first hour jointly had two channels to broadcast on. That was very different from what we are used to now, because there was no structure at all. Broadcasters broadcast short programs of fifteen minutes to half an hour for their own target groups. These programs were broadcast at a different time every week and the channel was not fixed.
Until the late 1950s, radio was mainly geared to the daily schedule of families, with news at times when father was home, knitting and cooking programs for mother in the morning, and children's programs after school and family programs in the evening. The music that was played differed per column. Classical and religious (organ) music accounted for as much as twenty percent of the airtime.
The glory days of radio are interrupted in the book by the Second World War, in which the author puts Radio Oranje in perspective. When it comes to the war and especially the resistance, Radio Oranje is always mentioned. But Wijfjes shows how limited Radio Oranje actually was:not only in broadcasting time, but also in range. The listener numbers only amounted to a few thousand for fifteen minutes of news a day. Many more people listened to the permitted channels and programs than to Radio Oranje.
The golden years of radio ended in 1960, with the advent of television. Radio was no longer the only medium that the whole family listened to together, but became more individual. Technically, this was also possible with the advent of portable transistor radios. Young people now no longer had to listen to stale programs with their parents and tuned in en masse to stations with pop music. The traditional broadcasters barely broadcast this, but now there were other opportunities to listen to pop music, such as foreign and illegal stations, including Veronica's radio boat in the North Sea.
Smart DJ
Veronica has left a big mark on radio programming anyway. Following the American example, there was a DJ who chatted his choice of music together in a witty manner and played funny jingles. This way of making radio is now normal, but it was really startling in the late 1960s and quickly became extremely popular.
To keep listeners, the broadcasters had to change. With the media law of 1965 there was more structure and a third channel, Hilversum Drie. Each station was given its own profile to make it clearer to the listener what to expect. This partly helped, but the public broadcasters kept losing listeners with the arrival of commercial channels. What it did do well all this time are sports programs and especially along the line. Sport has therefore even been given its own chapter in the book, which is great for enthusiasts.
Overlap
Sport is not the only specialist chapter. The book consists of two parts:Wijfjes kicks off with the chronological story, divided into three chapters. Part two of the book was written by other scientists, in the fields of music, sociology and sports. The other specialist chapters go deeper into classical music, pop music, news on the radio and radio for Dutch people abroad. Leaving aside this last chapter, all these topics are also covered in the first chapters. With this layout there is quite a bit of overlap in the book, and that is a shame.
Still, it is a nice book to read and look at because of the many photos. It also makes you think again. It's so common for us to have all those different media at hand, read fast news and listen to the music you want, that it's hard to imagine what it must have been like without those capabilities. In that respect, radio did indeed bring about a cultural change.
Running through 2019, the book pulls in all sorts of things, such as digital radio, to show how relevant the medium still is. The last few years I find the least interesting of the book. Sure, the radio is still fun to listen to, especially in the car. However, radio is now only one of the many media sources we can choose from and certainly not the most versatile. The choice is huge and that was clearly different in the early days.