Last week, I went to see John Peel’s Shed, written and performed by John Osbourne. John Osbourne tells his story of what radio means to him. As his starting point, he uses a box of records that he won in a competition on the John Peel show. But the main focus of the show isn’t really those records, it’s radio as a whole and what it means to all of us.
It was a great show for making me think about radio. It was about John Osbourne’s experience of listening to radio, but there was so much of it that reminded me of my experience of radio that it really made me think and laugh. Even though it was just one person talking, the performance was very inclusive, and felt more like an interesting chat in the pub than a show in the theatre.
Radio has played a big role in my life. I used to love the John Peel show, and remember listening to it while doing my GCSE and A Level course work, stopping every so often to write down the name of a song, band and their record label. Back then it always felt important to know the record label, as that made it easier to get hold of the song on CD. At university, I helped run the student radio station, and learnt an awful lot of skills in the process. DJing sadly wasn’t one of them. I also met my soon-to-be-husband through student radio in a roundabout way. What impressed him most when we first started going out was not my wit and charm, but the fact that I owned a Pure Evoke-2 DAB radio, which was pretty unusual at the time.
So I loved spending an hour listening to John Osbourne’s insight into why he loves radio. He’s also written a book about it, which I’ll be reading at some point. It’s made me think that I should invest a bit more time in checking out the radio schedules. I tend to listen to the Today programme on Radio 4 in the morning, 6Music in the daytime and early evening, and then back to Radio 4 later at night. But seeing the show reminded me that there is so much radio out there, I’m going to make an effort to listen to a broader range of stations and programmes.
How odd – I forget that John Peel spanned the generations to that extent. I too studied for my A levels listening to him. So much music I would never otherwise have heard, much of it far more important to me now than anything I studied. I’d like to read Osbourne’s book too.