11. MYSTERY STATION

In the 60’s many shortwave listeners, myself very much included, were puzzled by a mystery station which broadcast the same song over and over again. It was a badly modulated recording of Shirley Bassey belting out "Kiss me honey, honey, kiss me. Thrill me, honey, honey, thrill me. Don't care even if I blow my top, but honey, honey, don't stop!" The song was on a looped tape which lasted for just over two minutes and was then repeated. This went on for hours and hours on several frequencies and could be heard in most parts of the world. Here in Europe it was especially loud on 11.696 kHz near the edge of the 25 m band. The mysterious broadcast persisted for many years!

In the end it appeared that the endlessly repeated song was a new form of jamming. Usually communist countries trying to prevent their citizens from tuning in to broadcasts from certain Western countries by broadcasting loud oscillating sound waves on the same frequencies. Instead of producing this dreary, wobbly white noise the mystery jammer enlisted the the ‘help’ of Shirley Bassey to irritate would be listeners. First Cuba was blamed, then Iraq. The mystery was never really solved convincingly. Ultimately the most likely culprit proved to be Tehran trying to block communist sponsored broadcasts from Radio Peyk-e-Iran (Radio Free Iran), which were aired from East-Germany and later from Bulgaria. In 2006 the American State Department declassified information according to which Radio Peyk-e-Iran in its broadcasts in the 70’s regularly praised Khomeini for his “struggles” in support of “freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism”.

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06. STARTING WITH STARTZ ON SHORTWAVE

One of the first broad­casters I was captivated by, when initially roaming the short­wave, was “Happy Sta­­tion”. That was the special Sunday morning program­me broad­cast world­wide by Radio Netherlands. Little did I know that many years later  I would be in more or less the same time slot when presenting “North Sea Goes DX” on RNI. “Happy Station” was in fact the oldest running radio pro­gramme in existence. It was presented by the multi-lingual Eddy Startz (1899-1976), who had started his transmissions for the Dutch company Philips in Eindhoven in 1928. As a young boy in 1960 I was very much taken with Startz’s happy chatter and the mixture of Dutch street organ music and marches by John Philip Souza. Although Souza wrote over a hundred marches, the one that sticks out in my memory is “Stars and Stripes Forever”. On the rare occasions that he was stormbound and at home, my father was also very fond of the programme. In the kitchen, only yards away, my mother was oblivious to it. She seemed to prefer cooking Sunday dinner to any form of entertainment that did not include the then German heartthrob Freddy Quinn. Who were we to complain, when we were about to be treated to succulent chicken in a thick brown sauce! It has to be said, all my mother’s dishes were deliciously Delia, avant la lettre.

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05. GETTING TO GRIPS WITH BBC ENGLISH

On New Year’s day 1961, I saw my meagre savings gratefully topped up by my grandmother. That meant that on the second of January I could go radio hunting in Bruges clutching a 500 franc note (just over £4 at the time), being the sum of my worldly possessions. My quest for a new, inexpensive and cheap to run portable radio of the transistor persuasion was soon met with success. I returned home with a small hand-held radio, an ear-to-ear smile and 5 francs to spare.

The new transistor radio fulfilled all my expectations. It was small, loud, clear and cost hardly anything to run. Apart from that, it managed to capture far away stations that had failed to register on the Tesla. An added bonus, which I only discovered after I got home, was the fact that the set even had ‘Shortwave’! 

Whilst studying in my room I also started listening to ‘English by Radio’ from the BBC. Every day I tuned in to programmes for beginners and intermediate learners. The lessons were broadcast on 648 (where now Caroline lurks :) and 1296 kHz, the loudest channels on the Medium Wave at the time. I sent off £ 2.5 to an address in Brussels and subsequently obtained a year’s subscription to a weekly magazine, which included the texts of the dictation exercises that had been broadcast the previous week. That was a great help for a budding learner of English. After many spelling trials and tribulations I got quite good at it. In fact I had turned learning English into a hobby. Thanks to the BBC my knowledge of the language increased in leaps and bounds. I didn’t have the faintest idea then, that at some time in the future I would become a stringer for one of the BBC stations. I’m sure that would never have happened if it had not been for that small transistor radio. 

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03. THE THEATRE OF THE MIND

It soon proved that my mother’s wireless set survived unscathed my many manipulations. Hence, the rules were further relaxed. This meant that I was now allowed ‘on the Medium Wave’. The increasingly appealing LW and KW, which stood for Long Wave and Short Wave, remained off-limits however. No reason was given, but I think my mother feared that engaging too many of the push buttons on the wireless box might upset some delicate balance in the innards of the set.

On the new stomping grounds my attention was soon drawn by the children’s programmes in Dutch broadcast from Hilversum in The Netherlands. To me they were slightly more appealing than any of the Flemish programmes on our own Belgian NIR, which stood for quite a mouth filling ‘Nationaal Instituut voor de Radio-omroep’.

As I grew a bit older I became captivated by so-called ‘Hoorspelen’. In English they were known as radio plays. Through them the wireless became my very own Tardis. The actors -with only their voices- magically transported me to another place, a different time and new sensations. With no visual component these audio dramas depended on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the story. As a result they were often referred to as “the theatre of the mind”. Radio drama became very popular before television ruined everything. That’s why even today I often only listen to Eastenders whilst doing some work on the computer. I like to think that my imagined version of the goings-on in Albert Square somehow has the edge. 

Looking back, the effectiveness of radio drama was probably best born out by a Halloween radio special broadcast by CBS in the States. In 1938 Orson Welles proved so good at communicating with his listeners and creating the theatre of the mind, that he drove a nation into panic (if the papers of the day are to be believed, that is). In the radio adaptation of ‘War of the Worlds’, he presented H.G. Wells’ novel as a simulated news broadcast. People believed it and ran into the streets with wet towels as make­shift gas masks to protect against the poison gas the radio said was headed to­wards them. Many had no doubt that civili­zation was laid to ruin by invading Martians and were convinced it was the end of the world. One particular farmer who, when hearing about the menacing Martian war machines with their tenticular arms and stilt-like metallic legs, is said to have gone out into his field armed to the teeth, ready to do battle with the alien monsters. In the darkness the poor man mistook his neighbour’s water tower for one of the gigantic Martian invaders, blowing several large holes in it with his shotgun.

In the seventies we had a copy of the broadcast as performed by the Mercury Theatre in our music library on board Radio North Sea. In fact on September 17, 1973, ‘Daffy’ Don Allen put the ‘War of the Worlds’ double LP on the air in it’s entirety on RNI. The album, lasting for over an hour, had just been released in Europe. While it was playing, the dj’s on the Mebo apparently sat listening in the darkened studio. Graham Gill was reported to have chewed off all of his fingernails during the performance. Unfortunately I wasn't on board at the time. In connection with the ‘War of the Worlds’ many people have remarked that when they approach the towers of Red Sands Fort -the former Maunsell Sea Fort home of Radio 390 in the Thames Estuary- they are immediately reminded of these woeful Wellsian war machines.

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