Daventry was where the BBC had its powerful transmitters allowing it to send programming to Canada and Australia in the late thirties. According "London Calling:The Empire of the Airwaves" a working paper in Australian Studies by KS Inglis, available online: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation carried 11 hours a week of BBC programming in 1943 during the war.

London Calling has a quote at the beginning: J E Fenton, Postmaster General says in 1932: Under the Empire Broadcasting System, it will be possible for naked blacks to listen in the jungle to the world's best operas....brown-skinned Indians will be able to dance to one of England's best orchestras adn fur-clad Canadians in distance snow-bound outposts may listen to a description of the running of the English Derby."

All very ironic.. and prescient in a racist kind of way.

As one of those fur-clad Canadians (well, I'm not technically a First Nations member and I don't wear fur) I just cannot live without my BBC Radio 4. I discovered it on the Net two years ago and it has been, for me, an oasis of sanity in a sea of idiocy. Sure, my husband and I have a big screen TV (which I am using as a screen for the Net right now) and many many satellite channels (2000 channels and nothing to watch) but a radio four play or documentary or public affairs show is what nourishes me lately. If there's any good stuff on TV I have the rest of my life to buy the DVD.
Montreal radio sucks, English side at least.
It's heyday was in the 60's (at least for us Boomers) as my play Looking for Mrs. Peel shows. Gee, this play is all about RADIO.
The other day I downloaded some webcam images of Northern England (made a slide show) and listened to Radio Tees on the BBC. .. No one can predict how new technologies will be used!

Well, I can. I predict that soon I will be able to visit virtually any country LIVE with a 360 view of an enormous selection of sites.

We already have the webcams and live streaming and 360 views. Just must merge them.

Then I will visit the world without leaving my seat, although I won't absorb any local colour, talk to people, etc. Well, then. There is social networking!!!

If I could go back in time I would study this area... But if I had studied this area I would never have worked in the Media, radio especially and developed an interest....I will certainly study more and possible write an essay or two about it. Certainly, the BBC in the 30's considered Broadcasting a unifying force for Empire.

Inglis ponders whether Empire would have lasted longer if today's Broadcasting technologies had existed then. My story, Looking for Mrs. Peel is about End of Empire...I think my grandmother is a symbol for that.

One more point: Inglis writes that also he or she has read all the histories of the BBC, he or she can't make a comparison of 'the culture' of the BBC, ABC and CBC because there's there are insufficient records of CBC culture. Of this I'm not so sure.

It's true, radio CONTENT -especially commercial radio content- has not been recorded and preserved or much written about.

A man who works at CFCF (Canada's First, Canada's Finest) (now CTV because all the local call letters have been blown away as History is not important!) Danny Kowal gave me some airchecks with the old ads so that I could transcribe them, as they aired, for my play. )
Kowal is hard at work preserving stills, tapes and such from the CFCF TV station and of English Montreal Radio. Airchecks and such. He literally saved much of this stuff from the garbage. (So is Marc Denis, who has a website devoted to CFOX.)

My husband, who works for TV too, has a tape of Johnny Jellybean, Ted Zeigler, an English Montreal icon to Boomers. We're gonna put it on YouTube.

As far as I am concerned all this is important historical data and he is doing a great service. Especially with regard to fading memories of Anglo Montreal Culture.

A while ago I volunteered to work on a Canadian Association of Broadcasters website, with the aim of doing the same. But I was dismayed. They too aren't interested in content. And they only have the bios of a few 'superstars' of radio. The top owners and broadcasters like Gordon Sinclair, Dick Irvin. Both of whom I've worked with.

I have a great deal of work by my late friend, Gary Jewell, who was a producer, voice person etc. (Not even an announcer.) But it is HISTORY as far as I am concerned. I am passing it on to Danny Kowal.

Now, the BBC has preserved many productions, including the wonderful plays they've produced. Some old ones are available on DVD. You have a week to listen to the new ones. They are always interesting and often superb.

The CBC too. They have a fantastic online archive of TV and radio material. Brilliant. But the CBC no longer produces plays, which is sad as they once outdid the BBC in this domain, according to a British expert in radio drama.

So my radio play, Looking for Mrs. Peel, doesn't have a home. I am looking to publish it as a book. Publishers have expressed an interest.

Commercial radio has always been considered trivial, lowbrow and ephemeral. So little of it has been preserved except in airchecks kept by DJ's for their portfolios. That's why I have Gary Jewell's work.

It doesn't help that in the 60's much of commercial radio was aimed at teens. The stuff seemed silly. Gary's stuff is hysterical, a clever satire of popular culture. (He made fun of those Kraft Commercials;Star Trek, Miama Vice, and just about every iconic 50's or 60's shows in his radio ads. His work is in the style of the NOW SHOW on BBC Four, and every bit as good. He should have gone to England. He was too talented for Montreal.

I'm thinking out loud here. Blogging as they say. But I wrote an essay about the subject for the Toronto Globe and Mail a year or so ago. This essay (carefully formulated in about a day or two) was committed to newsprint so it has more validity than a blog ;)according to Neil Postman. It's also going to reprinted in an anthology (book form) so it will have even more validity.

I have a copy on my site.

My Mrs. Peel radio play is on my site This is one of the footnotes. Because it is online I can work on it even though it is published. I can guide people to it, as well, on directly or indirectly. If you have fallen on this page lo0king up Ted Zeigler, or Johnny Jellybean, you can read my play, which will likely be of interest to you.