Download PDF Radio Head John Osborne FRC 9781847392541 Books

Product details Paperback 304 pages Publisher Pocket Books; UK ed. edition (March 4, 2010) Language English ISBN-10 1847392547

Radio Head John Osborne FRC 9781847392541 Books Reviews

• Office temp John Osborne lives about a hundred miles from London, so he has a wealth of radio stations to choose from on his digital radio. He decides to stray from his few favorite stations and explore the rest of the radio dial. He plans to listen to a different station each day for a few months, one station all day. Since he does boring data entry, he can listen while he works, removing his earbuds only on the rare occasion when something more interesting or more important comes up.
  
  Osborne is in his twenties and most of his favorite listening is music, not surprisingly. However, his project is to be open to all kinds of stations and he manages to make nearly all of them quite interesting to read about. I suspect this has more to do with the quality of his writing rather than the quality of the radio shows.
  
  He tries out different sorts of music, spending an entire day each with classical and jazz for a change. He listens to sports talk radio, political talk radio, the BBC Asian Network. When there's an earthquake in the area one night, a very unusual occurrence, he listens to the local station and is impressed at how smoothly they switch to reporting on the effects of the quake, while staying calm. It reminded me of when the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit when I was in San Francisco and how the first thing I did after finding that the phone lines were overloaded, was to grab the battery-operated radio and find out what was going on. No stiff upper lips on American radio, I'm afraid, nothing but rumors mixed with semi-true reports and breathless drama.
  
  You wouldn't think that radio would be a very interesting thing to write about, or at least I wouldn't have thought so. And yet here's a book that is about almost nothing but listening to the radio, a book that I read from cover to cover and was sorry to come to the end. I enjoyed it so much that when I finished I had to find out whether John Osborne has written any other books. Yes! The Newsagent's Window.
  
  Two more recommended books that feature radio - Travels with My Radio and Travels in a Strange State.
• This was a diverting, entertaining and quick read, based on the author`s simple idea of listening to a different UK radio channel each day and recording his thoughts about the experience.
  
  Osborne is a genial, humorous commentator, intertwining the narrative of his listening project with the daily aspects of his life - his rather mundane job, his co-workers and his personal aspirations - as he gets involved with local radio and the research interviews that would eventually become part of the book. Much of the time he lets transcribed excerpts from the programmes he listens to do the talking, followed by his reactions to them - far more interesting than it sounds and quite an effective idea.
  
  "Radio Head" is unlikely to change your world to any extent, but Osborne's enthusiasm and genuine love of radio make this a far more rewarding read than it might appear on first consideration.
  A gently absorbing book, worth picking up.