So much in common.

There are a number of program's that are put out on Radio 4 which highlight the quality of the BBC. Listening to a new App, Tunein Radio which displays the remarkable opportunity offered by the Internet to tune in around the world and listen to stations broadcasting from all corners of the world."


I remember when" I would sit with my Nordmende Globetrotter radio tuning across the dial trying to find something of interest. The sound of the BBCs signature tune from their World Service Station was cathartic. It lent a connection to a civilised spot on the g.lobe, a BBC studio with a clear well enunciated presenter reading the news. I could picture the wet streets and the red buses the bustle of shoppers the relatively dignified business of conducting the transactional aspect of every day life. A far cry from Bombay or the mosquito laden air of Papua.
It triggered the same nostalgia as when I sat in the Reference Library in Cape Town and heard the rain falling in the street outside and was moved close to tears as I was transmuted to the Library in Bradford and imagined walking out to catch the bus home.
The radio connects us, through the ether to a society very different from the one we know. Chinese music, African music the babble of the discussion program's centred on Alice Springs the heated politics of South America all now at the touch of a key but then sort through laborious tuning and re-tuning, in and out of signal strength, negotiating the surrounding static like a small boat finding safety in a harbour out of the storm. One could nearly smell the tropics of the Congo or sense the controlled ideologically contrived output of Mao's China. The isolation of the Aussie in the Outback or the vibrancy and the torrent of words hurled at the microphone in Columbia. The world flowed through the speaker and kept one from becoming parochial.
I remember I was living in Amsterdam when the American Navy were standing off the Cuban Coast thwarting the might of Russia as Kennedy stared, eyeball to eyeball with Nikita Khrushchev and we all trembled at the consequence. The people sharing my run-down lodgings were from all over the world and we waited our turn to tune in to the station we knew and the language we understood to listen as events played themselves out.
In some ways the static and the tricky signal were part of the experience, they added to the mystique and made the distance seem palpable. The world became richer, more defined as, with language and song, national identity was crystallised and day and night became of little consequence as we roamed the airwaves from our spot somewhere on the same globe. We were joined, for a moment or two, the broadcaster projecting his culture the listener absorbing, building his knowledge, learning first hand that whilst different, we had much in common.