What’s in the Air? A new graphic novel rises
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Artist Jude Montague, ever interested in the history of radio and TV, has produced a lively and sometimes extraordinary graphic novel, detailing the beginnings of radio in Manchester. It’s a personal story, featuring (among a cast of dozens) her grandfather Sydney Wright and his wife Marjorie. Sydney was a cellist in a trio (playing in a Manchester picture house) who were recruited to take part in the second BBC broadcast from Metropolitan Vickers, which was the next broadcasting base after Marconi’s and named 2ZY.
It was a unique era – four years after the end of the unspeakable carnage of WW1, launching radio all over the country in a year that was, internationally, exceptionally creative in all the Arts, 1922 being an annus mirabilis for so many literary, artistic and social pioneers. A handful of these intrepid innovators broadcast live music, the first children’s programs, news, and French lessons, all from a tiny makeshift studio at an engineering works with a dominant, newly-built radio tower.
Montague has re-imagined her grandparents’ history in the context of the cultural history of the era, from the crackling of an aerial in 1920, and the birth of experimental wireless stations, to the first long distance ‘radio relay’ transmission, inaugurated at 2ZY and represented in Jude’s book with comparative sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the radio tower at Metrovicks. Her rapid drawings and text cover the pages in a random format, plentifully interspersed with dream sequences, word associations, vignette sketches of Manchester (a Lowry-like depiction of the entrance to Metropolitan Vickers covers a page, for instance), old train carriages, war tombstones (with a list of first names), a sequence of a woman chatting and cutting her hair into a bob (so significant for the flappers of the time), woman-to-woman conversations about the replacement of silk stockings and lingerie by exciting man-made nylon fibre equivalents, and the then thriving tailoring business in the North. At one stage the protagonists fly in a biplane – presumably a Vickers.
NO FEAR OF FLYING
It’s an unashamed, fascinating, and rather wonderful brain dump, arising out of Montague’s undeniable facility with pen, brush and design straight on to the page, and some cogent research. There are scans of newspaper articles and old photos at the back, which for me could have done with enlarging, as they look as though they might help to indicate the trajectory of the narrative, but only the headlines are big enough to read. Even the title has a generous assemblage of meanings – the ‘air’ as in broadcasting ‘on the air’, the network, the ‘air’ as in the surrounding culture, the ‘air’ as in the general Zeitgeist, the anxiety and exhilaration of creating a New Age. And there’s flying in the air too – a proliferation of owls, dreams of flying, and (when listeners started to write in to the station) a reference to a local story about a flamingo lost from the park. There are incidental chats about spiritualism, the opening of a box radiating the ‘energies’ of jewels (remember crystal sets?), the ‘crackle and the static of the air that waits’ – ‘so luscious – a spirit language’, all rapidly and copiously illustrated. And there’s a page on which the rows of Manchester terraces ‘seem to know a New Age is dawning’.
The introductions, by broadcaster and radio historian Paul Kerensa and musician Alan Hempsall, ex Manchester band Joy Division (now of Crispy Ambulance), are essential reading. They help to ground the reader in the narrative, which digresses so plentifully (sometimes wildly) through local and national culture of the time. The novel’s form, however, exactly echoes the content: it was the age of random and sometimes unintentional discovery, of burial of the past and celebration of the new, of an incorporation of science and technology into art (partly via the Futurists and the Vorticists) and the dismantling of representational tradition and the re-evaluation of Art itself. And if you get slightly confused about who’s who in Montague’s plethora of characters, and whether the illustrations are about imagined conversations or real social history, well then you’re into the moment of creation, as they all were.
What’s In the Air can be obtained from Montague Armstrong on 15 Kings Road (open Sats) any time, or online at montaguearmstrong.com. Book launch, readings, and presentations at Hastings Book Festival, 3 September
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