the wireless

The wireless

Home entertainment in the 1950s was minimal, in terms of equipment. A television was the main luxury item but not all households had one. We didn’t get one until around 1960 and so for many years the wireless radio was the only electrical equipment that brought the outside world into our homes. We listened to the news, plays, comedy sketches and music from it. Ours was a brown, Bakelite, Philips valve radio. When you turned it on, it took a few minutes for the valves to heat up and sound to emanate from the beige cloth speaker grille. There was a particular smell that I quite liked when it got hot. It probably came from the paxolin circuit board and components, a sort of hot, dusty, waxy smell. When you turned it off, the sound continued for a few seconds as the valves cooled.

There were three wavebands to choose from - Long, Medium and Short. On the Medium wave, the BBC provided our choice of listening, through stations called The Light, Home and Third. Shortwave produced various eerie whistles and bleeps which dad identified as morse code. Longwave had some strange, exotic sounding names such as Hilversum, Prague, Oslo, Allouis and Luxemburg. When you tuned to them, you could listen to foreign gobbledegook. Luxemburg later turned out to be pivotal in our musical education though.

On Sunday lunch times, there was a variety program called Billy Cotton’s Band Show. It was a cheesy mix of old-fashioned variety-hall style humour and music. His star singer had the unlikely name of Alan Breeze. Billy did a weird comic monologue piece where God appeared to be talking down to him. It would start with God shouting to get his attention and Billy answering him. The clever and whitty dialogue would go something like -

‘Hey you.’
'Who?'
'You down there.'
‘Who me?’
‘Yeah you down there with the glasses.’

It was a chronic show from our point of view and Billy had a catch phrase that he bellowed at the start of the program - ‘wakey-wakey’. The second ‘wakey’ was drawn out for several seconds and it was our aim to dash to the wireless and turn it off before he finished the second ‘wakey’. As the sound faded, it was as if he was disappearing down a deep well, which is exactly what we hoped for.

Other programs you may remember from that period were Jimmy Clitheroe and The Clitheroe Kid. He was a sort of early version of The Crankies - a middle aged man playing the part of a mischievous schoolboy. One of the weirdest acts was Archie Andrews. Can you believe it, he was a ventriloquist on the radio! There was Children’s Favourites, I think on Saturday mornings, where you could request songs such as The railroad runs through the middle of the house; Billy goat’s gruff; the rather spooky Sparky who might have been a talking piano and my favourite – Tommy Steele’s Little white bull.

Occasionally the wireless would die on us and it would have to be sent to the repairman to get a new valve fitted (tube for our US readers). When it finally packed up, we got the radiogram. This was a huge piece of wooden furniture that not only housed a wireless but also a record deck. My uncle Frank acquired this for us from the saleroom. It was second-hand of course and only played the old fashioned 78 rpm records. The heavy Bakelite and metal arm held a needle (stylus) that looked like a small panel-pin nail. There was a dish built into the deck to hold spare ones. At that time the new 45 rpm records were becoming popular and we desperately wanted to be able to play them on our new machine. Uncle Frank was a bit of a dabbler with electrical things and figured he could modify it to play them. There was a lever that varied the turntable speed slightly. With some clever engineering he could get the thing to play anywhere between zero and 100 rpm which was fantastic fun for me, making crooners such as Bing Crosby sound like The Chipmunks on laughing gas. When Frank was finished fiddling with it and about to switch the electricity on, I thought it would be a wheeze if I fired my toy gun containing a small explosive cap. It did the trick – he nearly s**t himself. Our first 45 rpm record was Cliff Richard’s Living Doll. At first it sounded great but after 20 plays, the heavy weight of the record arm had almost ground it’s way through to the other side of the record and ruined it. We didn’t keep the radiogram for long. Soon we would have a telly and proper record player. More about those later.