Listen in: How Radio Changed the Home

Intimate stories that offer entertaining perspectives on what it was like to engage with radio when it was new.

Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the Radio Craze. Listen In expresses what the radio’s arrival signified at a personal level. This narrative history recounts the perspective of listeners who adopted the then radical form of communication technology, invested in their first-ever gadgets, and tuned in by their firesides to outside voices, music, SOS calls, the Pips, news, sports, royalty, and innovative radiogenic comedy. Listen In also traces how radio affected family life by exploring whether it altered dynamics between children and adults, changed relationships between women and men, as well as affected class and a wider sense of nationhood.

Packed with touching stories and anecdotes, Listen In comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting, and the experience of how people consume audio is once again transforming.

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