Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2011

The Rescue, Edward Sackville-West's 1943 radio dramatization of part of Homer's Odyssey with music by Benjamin Britten, appears to be the first substantial treatment of Homeric epic on BBC Radio, and also the most enduring (with six further productions to 1988). The Homeric epics are rich sources of material for radio dramatization: the poems offer much that is worth re-telling, with many dramatic episodes; furthermore, a great proportion of each poem is delivered in direct speech. But there is also a strong affinity between the ancient performance of Homeric epic and the modern radio play. Both tell of characters and events that the audience cannot see: ancient bard and modern radio practitioners (writers, composers, actors, etc.) must capture and hold the imagination of the audience without the aid of bodily impersonation.

This article considers two interrelated aspects of this particular radio Odyssey: first, how the collaboration of Sackville-West and Britten made a distinctive exploration of the dramatic potential of radio; second, how the close association of words and music suggest a reflective awareness of The Rescue's relationship with ancient epic performance, especially through the character of the bard Phemius. The narrative of The Rescue both resonates with the contemporary international situation and argues for the humanizing potential of aesthetic experience: in the Epilogue, Phemius implores the (radio) audience to Forget the poem I made; but remember/The purer voice you hear behind my words, distilling a theme of the play which encourages characters and listeners to search for the meaning and value of things. Thus, the listener is encouraged not only to hear the story but also to listen to its meaning not simply hear the music, but listen to what it is saying. The article concludes with a consideration of the evidence in the Listener Research Report of how individual listeners actually engaged with and responded to the 1943 premire and later productions.

This article offers a cultural historical interpretation of The Third Man: The Lives of Harry Lime (195152), an internationally syndicated radio series based on the film The Third Man (Reed 1949). It argues that the series' cultural meanings can only be fully assessed through accounting for the programme's international framing or encoding, which critics have heretofore overlooked. As an internationally encoded series, The Third Man has a high degree of interpretive openness in order to appeal to and resonate with heterogeneous audiences. The article examines the ways in which the series creates interpretive openness through its ambiguous characterization of the protagonist Harry Lime, use of Lime's American nationality, international settings and through drawing upon the Cold War for dramatic material. The series' international encoding, interpretive openness and period of broadcast during the Cold War ground interpretations of its cultural meanings. The article claims that the series offers critical perspectives on the Cold War through Lime's presentation as a metonym for the United States, and through plots that allegorically and satirically dramatize the Cold War milieu.

This article is part of a larger study that examines the characteristics of a transnational youth net-radio audience and their associated values, attitudes, behaviour and cultural practices. It reports on a survey of 209 college students' media habits. Respondents were enrolled in undergraduate journalism, media and communications programmes at either City University of New York (CUNY) or New York University (NYU) in the United States, or Monash University in Australia. Extending existing US-based studies (Free 2005; Albarran et al. 2007; Ferguson et al. 2007), this comparative survey uses transnational research to focus on why two different sample groups of Australian and US college students access radio online and net-only radio. The article identifies a youth net-radio audience within the transnational arena that is alienated by traditional radio programming in its locale.

How should scholars approach the study of the developmental uses of rural radio? What is the theoretical framework within which to locate the study of rural radio formats employed as development communication? To answer these questions, this brief critique develops a theoretical matrix to be used as an analytical framework for positioning any discussion of rural radio as a development communication pathway. Building on rural radio case studies from the world over, the discussion propounds three trajectories encompassing linear-external, shared-bottom up and self-bottom up approaches, which formulate a matrix for understanding the use of rural radio in development.

Pieces of Sound German Experimental Radio, Daniel Gilfillan (2009) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 211 pp., ISBN 978-0-8166-4772-9 (pbk), $25.