Television may be sexier, web video cooler, and podcasts trendier, but nothing yet surpasses our humble radio. Libby Purves tells us why:

Using only sound, radio stretches the imagination and makes the listener its partner. A humble plastic box can introduce you to writers, ideas, arguments, facts, music and atmospheres you might not encounter in two lifetimes. Speech radio, in particular, is a curious medium: more vivid than print, bringing ambient noise and atmosphere, conveying tones and breaths and hesitations and tension in the voice. It is indifferent to the artifices of appearance. Sometimes, listening to a politician or panellist on television, I close my eyes to judge them better. Take away Tony Blair's beguiling grin and he always did sound like a ham. It is a great medium for denying the empty cult of celebrity: watch a screen talk-show and you are at least partially mesmerized by Hollywood glamour. On the radio you judge more squarely ("Who on earth is that giggling idiot?"). Radio is democratic, portable, open, free to hear and cheap to make. It is a pocket university.

Read her whole ode to radio in the Telegraph

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1:02 - February 9, 2009

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