Where mostly do you listen to the radio? In the kitchen, on the M25 or M62, under the duvet, soaking in a bathtub? We’ve got used to moving around with the wireless, often listening with just half an ear, not really connecting at all, and with no opportunity to share the experience with anyone else. In the Dark, a band of radio enthusiasts who’ve got together to produce unusual audio documentaries, is trying to take us back to the sensation shared by those first listeners to radio, when families, friends, neighbours joined up to listen and laugh along to The Goon Show or Children’s Hour. They organise communal listening events in unusual venues, usually with the lights out, but with an unconventional twist. This is radio as ‘art’, not the mangled speech of politicians, DJ-managed music, weather alerts and shipping forecasts, but what In the Dark calls ‘found sound’ or ‘adventures in audio’.
Nina Garthwaite, a founder member, is taking the project on to Radio 4 this month with a half-hour magazine of documentary clips from around the world. Short Cuts (Tuesdays) has been buried in the afternoon schedule and I missed the first programme but was lucky enough to hear a snippet from it on Pick of the Week and was hooked.
A rather cheesy update of Brief Encounter to the last train home from Charing Cross and a couple who’d known each other at school and met up for a night out after a chance encounter on the Tube made me stop what I was doing to listen because of the quality of the production (by Eleanor McDowall). It was offbeat, yet acoustically sharp, and sent me back to iPlayer to hear the other items, lights dimmed, attention switched on.
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