As you must all know by now, one of my chief pleasures in editing this fine magazine is using my editorials to travel back in time, as indeed Christopher Reeve does in this issue, only in my case to recall the cosy joys of growing up in the 1960s. We didn’t have a hundred TV channels back then and our version of social media was basically just passing letters round in the classroom. Our telly was a 14-inch black and white 425-line model and it was 50/50 whether the wonky aerial would pick up a picture on any given occasion. But there was always the radio, which was our life saver. I have to say that I have zero interest in the music of today and could not tell you what the name of the Christmas number one was for 2021, but when I was a lad in short trousers back in the day I followed the music charts religiously and was outraged when my favourites Jet Harris and Tony Meehan didn’t get higher than number 4 with ‘Applejack.’ I still think they were robbed to this day.
Can radio be an addiction? Depends on the frequency I guess, but it was certainly a magical thing to me back then. There was a programme called Movie Go Round that I used to listen to on Sunday lunchtimes. Introduced by Peter Haigh it featured news and interviews from the world of cinema. One Sunday they covered the 1963 version of The Day of the Triffids and I was transfixed!