from Perdio to Perfidy

Our house is stuffed with radios. There's at least one in every room, apart from the downstairs loo, but there's one just around the corner if you are desperate.


The first radio I remember was a big hulking thing that my brother had in his room, which I used to listen to occasionally, but the first one of any great import was a Perdio transistor with a bright gilt grill. I used to claim it as often as I could and twiddle the dial that had magical names like Motala, Kalundborg, the wonderful Lux and Allouis. Of course, pop-pickers, I did listen to the top 20 countdown on Sundays and by then had a growing collection of LPs, but I loved the radio for the plays, for classical music and for listening to foreign language stations which drifted in and out with the tide. I used to stare at that dial for hours; I really should have got out more.


I found a Perdio radio (I now know to be a 1962 PR36 Fanfare) a few years ago in a collectors' emporium in Brighton and had to get it. It's not quite the same, though. The dial and the grill are there as is the badge, although reduced to "Perdi" now, but some of the casing is pink and not oatmeal and the L/M switch isn't right, but the on/off switch sounds the same. I wasn't joking about the time I spent with that radio.

Which brings me to the cursed tale of digital radio.


On a very rare shopping trip recently, we bought a new digital radio suprisingly cheaply. I'd wanted one for ages, so it was jolly exciting. When we got the thing home it was permanently stuck on the BBC Asian channel, which isn't so bad as the music is good, but more variety was required. Anyway, I have no patience for instruction manuals, but Richard has, so we eventually got off that and on to Birdsong. Now, we live in the country, so aren't short of a twitter or two, but it was very soothing. Then we find out that the channel is temporary. We then switched allegiance to TheJazz, an excellent station, and soon the notebook next to the kitchen radio is full of tracks and artists. However, that closed down in March. The reassurances that we can listen to it online fall on drum solo-deaf ears; listen up, Classic FM, not all of us have online access where we want to listen to music (can't quite see us sitting around the PC in the spare room and, anyway, that's where I work everyday). I like drama on radio, so access to OneWord was something I had in mind, but that has stopped broadcasting. Thank goodness for Planet Rock, we say, to find that its future, too, is in doubt.


No wonder the bloody radio was cheap - there's nothing to listen to apart from the main BBC channels and, er, sport. Hurumph.