Listening in Radiophonic Spaces : Politics and Aesthetics of Early British Broadcasting

Based on research in the BBC archives, this book examines the negotiation and establishment of a figure of the ideal listener and ideal listening in the context of BBC radio drama in the 1920s.

Guided by the idea of itself as a public service, the BBC articulated a new space of aesthetic experience constituted by broadcasting as a public sphere from the very beginning and conceived of its listener as a citizen, characterized by a specifically trained listening and the capacity to imagine and concentrate. If this conception of the listener and his listening shows how the BBC resolutely positioned itself to shape society through education and training, the study exposes British broadcasting as both an aesthetic and a political order.

This study turns to the radio drama as the location at which the listening and imaginative competencies required from the listener are short-circuited with strategies of radiophonic sound production and transmission. It illuminates how in theories and practices of BBC radio drama a new realm of possibilities of medial experience was being gauged. In using concrete radiodramatic strategies it shows how British broadcasting forms a specific order by attempting to position and orient the listener within this new radiophonic space. In doing so, the study states, a radiophonic drama conceived by the BBC performs a programmatic transfer of specific British values upheld by the public service into universal categories and blurs the traces of their production not least on the basis of a specifically conditioned listener.