“The world is a small place when you have a radio,” remarks Cerys Matthews, presenter of popular and eclectic BBC Radio 2 and 6 music shows, in Last Train to Hilversum – a Journey in Search of the Magic of Radio.

Readers of a certain age may recall – way before digital or even transistor sets –  switching on ‘the wireless’ and puzzling at the names on the tuning dial while waiting for the valves to warm up. Home Service and Light Programme, respectively now Radio 4 and Radio 2, were easy to comprehend, but where were Athlone, Hilversum or Poznam?* An unknown world connected only by spindly masts and invisible sound waves.

In this book award-winning broadcaster Charlie Connelly – author of 10 books, including a bestselling history of the shipping forecast – travels the airwaves to explore radio’s social history. Whether speech or music based, radio provides a soundtrack, or at least background, to the everyday lives of an astounding 90% (49 million) of people in Britain. Waking up to a clock radio, in the kitchen as we cook, at our workplaces – you’d be surprised how many truck drivers (including this reviewer) have tuned into Woman’s Hour. 

Radio brings the world to us, an intimate experience enabling the exercise of visual imagination while applying ourselves to the mundane, ironing, or the inspired, art, tasks. As country music icon Nanci Griffith sang: “When you can’t find a friend… listen to the radio.” Reaching beyond the borders of towns, counties, even countries, radio at its best is a cultural ambassador and shared national experience. 

Emerging in the 1920s, the development of UK radio in many ways parallels that of the BBC. Connelly charts the exploits of an eccentric cast of characters – Captain Leonard Plugge – geniuses, crackpots and con men, haphazardly creating the medium as we know it today. The technological innovations of early 1900s radio being arguably every bit as important as the rise of the internet at the close of the 20th century.

The author also talks to modern broadcasting heroes, including Corrie Corfield and Dotun Adebayo, and reminds us that, unlike TV, radio is free; requires no licence and can be listened to anywhere. (For a bizarre juxtaposition try hearing The Archers in the centre of the Atacama Desert.) 

Exhaustively researched and entertainingly written, the author’s enthusiasm drives the narrative. Arguably a little over focused on the BBC, Connelly reveals that many presenters got their start in hospital radio and that without upstart Radio Luxembourg the BBC might never have been lured away from its Reithian mission to inform, educate and entertain and (grudgingly) provide popular music to all ages and social classes. Thanks to the pirate radio jocks of the North Sea this broadcasting medium liberated a generation of teenagers. 

Rather than endangering radio Cerys Matthews believes the Internet has provided a new transmission method to strengthen the medium and widen its reach. How else might you listen in real time to a mid-western US blues station or a West African dance music show? She also plausibly argues that radio presenters’ trusted human voices can never be replaced with algorithms. Let’s hope so.

*Ireland, Holland, Poland