Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home

Beaty Rubens’ hugely enjoyable book shows us why the medium of radio cast such a spell over those who suddenly found they could travel the world without leaving home. She weaves a compelling story of the radical changes the wireless brought to the way people lived. – Rory Cellan-Jones

For all of us who love radio and feel it is the essential companion in our lives, this book is a delightful and insightful read. It's both informative and entertaining as it takes the reader on a journey behind the scenes of a medium we have come to take for granted in its scope and ability. Lord Reith would be proud! - Fi Glover

Radio today evokes feelings of familiarity and comfort, background noise to ease the silence. Its early history, however, was far more exciting. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the ‘Radio Craze’.

Listen In explores the impact of radio on a personal level through the experiences of those who were there before and during its circulation into the home. The then-radical form of technology revolutionised life within the private sphere, whereby families could tune into outside voices and music, SOS calls, the Pips, the News, sport, royalty and innovative radiogenic comedy.

Generously illustrated and drawing on contemporary journalism, fiction, diaries, cartoons and a remarkable cache of unpublished first-person testimonies discovered in the archives of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Listen In is packed with entertaining and thought-provoking stories. It comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting in response to podcasting, and the entire experience of how we consume audio is once again undergoing transformation.

Beaty Rubens was a BBC Radio producer for thirty-five years and is now a freelance producer, presenter and writer.

• Hardback
• 272 pages, 234 x 156mm
• ISBN 9781851246311
• Publication: February 2025

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