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Elizabeth Hay’s novels include the Giller Prize-winning Late Nights on Air and Snow Road Station, which will be published in April.
It’s always there waiting, disembodied. You turn it on and it’s with you: direct, intimate, story-filled. You find out what’s happening close by and far away, and what’s far away seems close by when someone in your kitchen is telling you about it.
Since the CBC president Catherine Tait’s recent declaration that broadcasting over the airwaves is eventually coming to an end, I’ve been thinking of all the things I love about radio. It lets in the world. It exposes you to things that surprise you. It leaves room for the imagination. In fact, it relies on the imagination. Yet you can do other things as you listen.
With luck the voice that’s talking to you sounds alert, relaxed, not trying too hard, not pushing, but giving you what you need to know to locate yourself in the here-and-now: the weather today and to come, the state of the ice on the canal, the condition of the roads and sidewalks, the musicians coming to town, the movies opening this week, the sports scores, the price of eggs, the arguments at city council, the scandals and disasters, and the mighty or lacklustre efforts around us to carry on despite ourselves.
When I started working at CFYK Yellowknife in 1974, I was the receptionist with a desk, a phone, a typewriter, a telex machine. The best part of that job was taking down the community announcements that people phoned in from all over the listening area, as we called our corner of the world. I would type these messages on yellow carbon paper for the announce-operators, who read them on air in regular, dependable timeslots so that everyone could tune in, whether they lived in town or in Fort Smith, Fort Simpson, Rae-Edzo, Fort Providence, Fort Chipewyan, Fort Resolution, Hay River, Pine Point, Lac La Martre and so on. Our listening area. The people we served. Our job was to include them, not leave them out.
“To the Chocolates in Fort Rae: Debbie Lynn had a baby boy, six pounds, three ounces. Both doing well.” Or, “To Albert Drygeese: The plane won’t be coming in today because of the fog. It will come tomorrow at 3 in the afternoon. Dad.” Or, “Helen Jumbo: You have a COD parcel in the Fort Simpson post office.”
Less than 10 feet away from my desk was a room the size of a cupboard where news reporters, two of them, beavered away on stories that were broadcast to the whole of the Northwest Territories. Some of these stories were picked up by the national network and reached the entire country. Radio was the great connector between the very local, the regional, the national, the world. If you listened you were woven into the fabric of the country’s life and you were always learning.
It was a two-way street of the smallest news and the biggest, the minute and the massive. A COD parcel has arrived; a major pipeline is coming. In my time in Yellowknife the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline was the biggest story by far and the Northern Service of the CBC saw fit to do it justice. Whit Fraser, the senior of the two newsmen toiling away in that newsroom-closet, recruited four Indigenous reporters and, from then on, in Dogrib, Chipewyan, Slavey, Gwich’in, Inuktitut and English, they gave listeners in-depth coverage of the Berger Inquiry into all of the pipeline’s implications.
Those languages went beyond the towns and villages into tents and trapline cabins that were in the path of the pipeline. Then, as now, radio was as much a part of life in the bush and barrens as it was of goings-on in town. It was capable of informing every single person in the North, whatever their background, about a project that would have completely altered their lives had it gone ahead.
Radio was fast, economical, flexible. It can still be that simple. Give a person some manner of recording device. Set them to work. For the listener, turning on the radio is as easy as opening and closing a book. Turn on the dial, turn it off. No one is intimidated. No one has to go through the barbed-wire fence of the internet to reach it.
I remember eating breakfast as a girl in my small town of Mitchell, Ont., and waiting for Max Ferguson to do his satirical skit conceived on the spot from the morning’s headlines, while Walter Bowles and Ed Fitkin, newscaster and sportscaster, talked to each other like the best of friends. Toast & Jamboree, their show was called. What reassuring company they were before another day in the salt mines of Grade 6.
I remember one time arriving late to fetch my kids from a piano lesson, having pulled the car over to the side of the road so I could finish listening to an absolutely mesmerizing voice talk about the turning point in his life. He had been 13, he said, when he and his mother paid a visit to some elderly neighbours in a cottage, and the couple brought out bread and beer. Then one of them, an amateur musician, went to the piano and played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. The effect on the boy drinking his first glass of beer was electric. This was what he wanted to do with his life: study music, move around the notes. It turned out to be Canadian composer Harry Somers. The interview ended and a choir began to sing She’s Like a Swallow, one of the Newfoundland folk songs Mr. Somers arranged that every child in a Canadian choir has sung at one time or another. I sat on in tears. You could not have asked for a more complete or meaningful moment made of memory, voices, music.
I recall with gratitude the stalwart radio voices during the great ice storm of 1998 that kept us sane, informed, accompanied. As they’ve done during the pandemic. For radio is, above all, a low-key, useful medium. Hype and glitz kill it. Ads weaken it. They turn radio into noise. Radio doesn’t need to compete with TV or the streaming giants; it shines when it embraces its intimate strengths. Listeners want someone talking to them, not at them, helping them get through all their days and nights.
I am remembering how great radio can be because right now I’m living with my bitterness that Radio-Canada recently yanked Stanley Péan’s suppertime jazz show, a highlight of my day, out of its usual timeslot and consigned it to 10 p.m. But that’s another thing about radio: We learn what matters to us. We learn how arbitrarily it can be snatched away.
It matters to me that Alice Munro got her start in radio. In 1951 she sold a story to Robert Weaver for his CBC radio program Canadian Short Stories, and for the next 10 years he was her main literary support. BBC Radio did the same in the 1950s for V. S. Naipaul through Caribbean Voices, and for Wole Soyinka through West African Voices. Those were programs that “took local writing seriously and lifted it above the local,” as Mr. Naipaul wrote in appreciative hindsight. Radio was how writers and readers found each other.
I grow old, as the poet said. What radio has been to me, podcasts are to my children. They fill the air with familiar, well-loved voices. Friends materialize next to their ears. A small community forms around them. Human voices, as Penelope Fitzgerald called her wonderful novel about the BBC during wartime. The advantage of radio over podcasts, though, is that you’re not bound by your current interests or biases, but exposed to things you wouldn’t otherwise encounter.
So, yes, I’m a fond old listener. I treasure the collective spirit of radio working hard to knit together this huge, disparate, often incoherent country and make it more coherent, more companionable, more knowable. The yearning I feel, however, isn’t old. It’s not outmoded. It’s the human yearning to feel less alone, more alive, more connected to oneself and the community and the world. It’s a yearning that radio, when it’s true to itself and accessible to all of us, has a beautiful capacity to satisfy.