Radio days

Better for you

Catching up on my reading, I came across an interesting article by Olivia Seligman in the Autumn edition of The Author about writers on the radio. Until May of this year there was an excellent children’s radio programme on BBC Radio 4 called Go4It. It went out on a Sunday evening and quite frequently I found myself listening to it as I gardened or pottered about. In her piece, Seligman bemoans the demise of such programmes, referring in her support to ‘recent neuropsychological research’ that has ‘demonstrated the difference in the activity of the brain when it is processing the spoken word as opposed to listening to music. For example, hearing a radio play (a unique invention of the 20^th century) can apparently generate frenetic cerebral activity in the listener – psychologist Aric Sigman has written on how it is far more cognitively demanding to listen to the radio that it is to be spoon-fed accompanying images by television.’ As I write this, I am listening to live commentary on the Chelsea-Liverpool match on the World Service. I could have gone to the pub but certainly the radio commentary has been generating a fair amount of frenetic cerebral activity. Given the different teams supported by the sprogs I had better skate over the result, though…