3. Radio in Britain in the 1920s: Narratives of Spectacle and Concern

This chapter starts by providing an historical overview of the way radio developed from a communication to a broadcast form. As radio developed the newspapers began to offer early forms of coverage written by journalists and radio correspondents, as no identifiable radio critics had yet been appointed. As this chapter shows, two important narratives, one positive focusing on the excitement of radio and one more negative and critical, came to dominate the early newspaper coverage of radio, which fed back into the wider public debates occurring about radio. The second part of the chapter analyses the early forms of radio coverage that appeared in the 1920s, which take up these early narratives, with some celebrating the spectacle and excitement of radio and its output, while other elements criticised the British Broadcasting Company (it became a public corporation in 1927), the organisation given the monopoly to run broadcasting in Britain and to provide its early radio output.