Listen In

Listen In explores the sensational early history of radio from the perspective of listeners through previously unpublished testimonies. Packed with touching stories and anecdotes, illustrations and cartoons, it traces how radio transformed family life.

Radio today can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the ‘Radio Craze’.

This narrative history shows what the arrival of radio meant at a personal level through the voices and experiences of individuals as they adopted the then radical form of communication technology, invested in their first-ever gadgets and tuned in by their own firesides to outside voices and music, SOS calls, the Pips, the News, sport, royalty and innovative radiogenic comedy. It traces how radio affected family life, exploring whether it shifted dynamics between children and adults and between women and men, as well as its impact on class and a wider sense of nationhood.

Generously illustrated and drawing on contemporary journalism, fiction, diaries, cartoons and a remarkable cache of unpublished first-person testimonies discovered in the archives of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Listen In is packed with entertaining and thought-provoking stories. It comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting in response to podcasting, and the entire experience of how we consume audio is once again undergoing transformation.