Listen with mother

‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all.

‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. They’ve already got the radio habit (having had, of course, absolutely no pressure from their interfering aunt). They’ve discovered for themselves that listening to Sherlock Holmes’s ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ is far more scary than watching Doctor Who. Radio, pipes up Tom, lets you paint the pictures in your head. Television just tells you ‘that’s how it’s got to be’. To get any pleasure from radio, though, you have to make an effort, focus attention, follow the plot. You have to learn how to listen. But what’s out there now for children? How are they supposed to experience the mind-enlarging world of aural communication by kilohertz, megahertz and gigahertz when so few radio programmes are made for them? How can they be persuaded that radio is worth paying attention to, as opposed to the pyrotechnic allure of Game Boy or the plastic charms of Wii? There’s nothing now on stations One to Four that’s been specially designed for young ears.