“Be not afraid,” Caliban reassures two new arrivals on Prospero’s island in The Tempest. “The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not.”
In my Australian childhood, the “sounds and sweet airs” were provided by radio.
Long before television, I was drawn to the walnut-veneered console in the corner of the living room. Let other boys race around in the sun, pursuing various species of ball. I wandered in a world of rumbling bass voices and mysterious locales, of infinitely prolonged family sagas, spasmodic comedy, and, later in adolescence, of jazz.
For a time, I flirted with taking a job in radio, and, at 16, even tried out as an announcer for the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Commission. The text they gave me to read, notwithstanding the scatter of foreign words and such pronunciation traps as "psittacosis," posed no difficulties.
Harder to remedy was my lack of the deep, resonant voice regarded as essential for classic radio. But so few boys considered a career in broadcasting that the Commission offered me a job as a trainee producer. I refused. Even at 16, I knew that if you were not on the air, you were nothing.
Australian radio mostly replicated that of America in the thirties and forties. Aside from the ABC, every station subsisted on commercials. From 10am to 4pm Monday to Friday, a procession of soap operas marched through the living rooms of the nation, each sponsored by some deep-pocketed manufacturer. The night was for game shows. On weekends, sport took over, with blow-by-blow descriptions of cricket, football, tennis and, particularly tedious, horse-races.
Almost nobody programmed jazz. For that, we looked to short wave and the Voice of America. Not then outed as a CIA front, the VOA broadcast Music USA, a nightly two hours, half New Orleans and blues, the rest devoted to the moderns. My adolescence passed to the growl and moan of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk's enigmatic noodling, and an edgily precise Art Pepper, Chet Baker, Shelley Manne and Milton "Shorty" Rogers, embodiments of Californian cool
Willis Conover, with Chesterfield.
Each track on Music USA was patiently annotated by presenter Willis Conover in his "Special English," a style of speech slowed to a crawl for the benefit of his core audience; not we Anglophones, but middle Europeans and Russians with limited English.
In his deliberate diction, names unfolded like Chinese paper flowers dropped into water. I suspect he programmed certain tracks intentionally. How else to explain his relish in identifying Dizzy Gillespie's Night in Tunisia as "Night...in...Too...nees...ia" and lingering over the name of an obscure New Orleans bass player so that it emerged as "Al...cide...'Sloooow Drag' Pav...a... geau."?
A lifetime of Chesterfields (an addiction that finally killed him) had cured Conover's husky baritone to the suppleness of an old tobacco pouch. His nocturnal murmur, as instantly recognisable as Charlie Parker's alto sax or Billie Holiday's voice, articulated like no other the sadness of that "dark night of the soul" where, as Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "it is always 3am." Augmented by Bill Evans playing In Your Own Sweet Way or Peggy Lee singing Black Coffee ("Feeling mighty lonesome, haven't slept a wink..."), melancholy had no more lulling medicine.
Conover was a celebrity in eastern Europe, where to tune in to his program was an act of revolt. When he made a private visit to Poland, mobs greeted him at the airport. As he was driven through Warsaw in an open car, crowds lined the streets and cheered.
The comedy and action shows so central to American broadcasting were regarded as too specialised for Australians. It was years before I became acquainted with Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, Burns and Allen, and Jack Benny. Radio made stars of such men as Orson Welles, but if we expected to hear him deliver his famous incantation "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Who knows… what evil… lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" we were in for a disappointment
Orson Welles as The Shadow.
Rather than use the originals, penny-pinching producers bought the scripts and had Australian performers re-record them. Jumping at this lucrative gig, local actors never anticipated the effect on their other work. One took time off from playing a radio super-hero to appear on stage in Hamlet. At his first matinee, attended mainly by high school kids studying the play, he'd barely spoken a line before the whole audience, recognising his voice, shouted "Superman!" He never regained control. Worse, rowdies in the front rows, testing his invulnerability, pelted him with candy. One of them, having smuggled in a slingshot, loaded it with a Jaffa, a sphere of chocolate armoured in a candy shell. Choosing a moment in mid-soliloquy, he let fly at the bulge in Hamlet's tights. Halfway through the first line of "Oh, that this too too sullied flesh..," the man said "Awk!" and doubled over. Hilarity ensued as, clutching the injured area and muttering curses never imagined by Shakespeare, the Man of Steel hobbled into the wings.