As far as national broadcasting goes, I ended up running its radio programming section in the mid-1980s when I could no longer take the hopelessness and arrogance of certain instructions being thrown at us in the news department during that particularly hot period in Maltese politics. That I ended up enjoying it and making my own modest little contribution to the medium is a source of on-going satisfaction even at this moment in time of my life.
Radio was at the time, and probably still is in any multi-media organisation, the Cinderella department. News was the exciting, albeit stressful, place to be in if you considered yourself a fair player in the journalism game, and television of course had all the glamour. But it was also, at least for me, a medium to discover and to better appreciate. Having started in newspapers and gradually gone over to radio and TV news, this was yet another challenge that came – rather randomly – my way.
Until then, I shared the same prejudiced view of radio that most of my fellow workers had. The old jokes instantly came to mind when the then Xandir Malta brass-hats offered me the Radio Programmes management post to still my tantrums. Like the one which said that in the old days a comedian took a dirty joke and cleaned it up for radio, while today he hears a clean joke and dirties it up for television.
And when transistors came in, people would ask you whether you remembered “way back” when radios plugged in and toothbrushes didn’t. And so it went.
It didn’t take me long though, to realise the power of radio. Not only had it not lost its immediacy and impact, but at certain hours of the day people actually preferred it. This was confirmed by one public survey after another carried out before the era of the Internet. Radio has since been more or less rehabilitated and cyber space is happily replete with top-quality stations from all over the world. Listeners in Maltese communities in Australia, Canada and the United States enthusiastically follow Maltese radio in real time and there are presenters who, no doubt, still get a kick out of this.
The recent passing away of Charles Arrigo, the undisputed doyen of Maltese broadcasting, quite understandably took several generations of people back to the time when radio was the one powerful medium on the island. One particular letter-writer whose contribution I once read in a yellowing and disintegrating newspaper at the National Library in Valletta, insisted radio would never take the place of the newspaper, because you can’t swat flies with it.
Pluralism finally caused a radio explosion on Maltese air. We had the imitators who simply took our Radio Malta schedules and made them theirs, sometimes even using the very same titles for programmes long familiar with listeners of public broadcasting. Then we had the more adventurous who sought to create new formats, mostly based on music and phone-ins. Oddly enough, the same scenario persists today, almost a decade and a half later.
Though long gone from radio, I am still an aficionado. As with news, radio never really gets out of your system. Sadly though, it cannot be said that Maltese radio has made any exciting innovations and it remains stuck to the same, well-worn formats that came with pluralism in the early nineties. There is the long-proven scientific fact that the moon throws back the radio waves from Mother Earth, and in the case of Maltese radio we certainly cannot blame it for doing so.
There’s a small village out there where so little ever changes that the local community radio station is still running last year’s weather forecasts.
One still gets the impression that radio is a miraculous device that enables people who have nothing to say to talk to people who aren’t listening. One particular radio presenter talks and talks until you have a headache, and then tries to sell you something to relieve it! As for the many members of the clergy who patronise radio, it must be a nice thing about their radio sermons not to have people who turn and stare stonily back at them when they go on about certain pet sins.
When Francis Zammit Dimech, the minister supposedly in charge of the quality of national broadcasting, recently revealed the results of yet another public survey on the quality of television programmes, we got to know – and this did not come as a great surprise – that a good many Maltese do not think there is much of it on the local channels. It seems television has been a great teacher, after all – it has taught a lot of people to turn to radio. Radio can be both a good excuse and even an efficient camouflage. Way back in 1952, when Marilyn Monroe was asked if she really had nothing on in that famous calendar photograph, she had simply said: “I had the radio on.”
At a time when most people have been complaining about the way local cable television companies have grabbed the rights to all the sporting events we once got to watch for free, it does sound ironic that radio, still popular radio, does not feature in any of this. Has anyone thought of at least providing a good, Maltese language radio coverage of the forthcoming World Cup in Germany? Or is that too much to ask?
Considering how much simpler and more straightforward radio broadcasting is today, I find it an affront that our programmers should not even think of it – not as an alternative, but as a prompt and proper service to listeners everywhere, be they surfing the airwaves or the Internet. They must know that radio sometimes paints better pictures than television.