Long before I became a telly addict, I was a hopelessly hooked radio junkie. I still am.
I rarely watch the box before 5pm but the moment I waken, and often through sleepless nights, I’m tuned in to my favourites on the airwaves.
The love affair with the wireless, as mum ca’ed it until she died – and I still do in extremis – goes back to the early 50s when TVs were rare hens’ teeth.
We’d hunker roon the huge brown box for entertainment.
Wrinklies of my vintage will never forget Listening With Mother at 1.45pm, which started off with the lugubriously named Daphne Oxenford asking: “Are you sitting comfortably?” (We’d snuggle up.) “Then we’ll begin …”
No pictures just our imagination
Stories and musical nursery rhymes. No pictures, just our vast imaginations.
Later, daft comedy shows like Educating Archie (a ventriloquist’s puppet on the radio?) and the sublime Round The Horne, with Kenneth Horne and Williams, which still has me in stitches today.
Come the 80s and 90s I nearly sparkled into a radio star masellie, occasionally invited by the Beeb at Beechgrove to take part in some local phone-in, although aye nervous as hell.
As soon as that red ‘On Air’ light went on, I was a blitherin’ wreck. Fit a nightmare that day, when Nicky Campbell introduced me, and I sez back to him, ever so casual: “Hi there, Moreen.” Pause, then here’s the cheeky sod: “So will I just call you Nicky?”
Or when my al’ pal Frunkie Gilfeather sometimes invited me on to his Northsound Sunday morning show.
Again agitato as stink, a’ the clever things I’d thocht o’ sayin flew oot my napper instead o’ my moo. During my prolonged pregnant silences, Frunkie would make demented signs in desperate efforts to get me voluble.
Given my addiction, I was ower the moon a couple of years ago when my quine bought me a Smart Speaker for Christmas.
At first Alexa was so easy to use
A virgin to the new technology, I was fair tricket. And soo easy to use.
Set up in my living room, I read my papers, do the crosswords … fitever, changing the programme withoot movin’ a muscle, just utterin’: “Alexa..” and the name of the station. Luuved it.
The next year, my radios in the kitchen and bedroom almost simultaneously went kaput.
Fit aboot another two Alexas? Oh the joy in bed, not even having to sit up to change the station, just a mutter to the pillow and the wee ballie.
Sadly, I really dinnae hae the foggiest how these speakers work and – typical me – chucked oot the instructions when my quine set them up. So a’thing sometimes gings a bit pear-shaped.
For some reason that’s a mystery to me, they go dead; either together or separately. If I shout too hard to get one back on, the other two fire into life (my bungalow’s nae that big.)
I end up cowerin’ on top of the stubbornly silent een and whisperin’ like I’m a secret lover.
Last week, I suffered a complete failure outage on the same day as that Microsoft debacle.
None of my three speakers workin’. Che?
Pressed buttons on top. Still zilch.
Losin’ my cool on the hot day, I just kept scraikin’ – ever louder: “Alexa! Times Radio!”
Next thing there’s a tap at my open window. My lovely neighbour, lookin’ anxious.
Sez she: “What’s wrong? I heard you shouting for help.” How I cringed. “Soo, sorry, ” sez reid-faced Mo: “I was jist tryin’ to switch on the wireless.” The peer quine looked utterly baffled.
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press and Journal, and started her journalism career in 1970
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