The Bloomsbury Handbook of Radio presents exciting new research on radio and audio, including broadcasting and podcasting. Since the birth of radio studies as a distinct subject in the 1990s, it has matured into a second wave of inquiry and scholarship. As broadcast radio has partly given way to podcasting and as community initiatives have pioneered more diverse and innovative approaches so scholars have embarked on new areas of inquiry. Divided into seven sections, the Handbook covers: - Communities - Entertainment - Democracy - Emotions - Listening - Studying Radio - Futures The Bloomsbury Handbook of Radio is designed to offer academics, researchers and practitioners an international, comprehensive collection of original essays written by a combination of well-established experts, new scholars and industry practitioners. Each section begins with an introduction by Hugh Chignell and Kathryn McDonald, putting into context each contribution, mapping the discipline and capturing new directions of radio research, while providing an invaluable resource for radio studies.

Tony Hancock stars with Sid James and Kenneth Williams in the legendary BBC Radio comedy series. Created by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson in 1954, Hancock's Half Hour was the radio vehicle that made Tony Hancock a household name. Each week listeners would be admitted to the sometimes fantastical, sometimes mundane life of "the lad 'imself". Aided and abetted by Sid James, Andree Melly, Bill Kerr and Kenneth Williams, Hancock would enter into the spirit of each episode with characteristic dolefulness. This collection of 10 episodes represents the surviving archive from the third radio series, along with PDF booklets featuring episode guides, series notes, cast biographies and specially written introductions by Galton and Simpson. Also included are two radio documentaries about Tony Hancock: Stone Me, What a Life! and The Complete and Utter History of Hancock. The episodes included are The Pet Dog; The Jewel Robbery; The Bequest; The Blackboard Jungle; The Diet; Hancock's Heir; The Student Prince; The Greyhound Track; The Conjurer and The Test Match.

Radio Hitler follows the life of Deutschlandsender, the Nazi equivalent of BBC Radio 4, and its sister stations that transmitted to Germany and the world at large. Using first-hand interviews, archives, diaries, letters and memoirs, this book examines what Nazi radio was and what it stood for. Detailed here is the vast 'fake news' effort, which bombarded audiences in the Middle East, Africa, the United States and Great Britain. A light is also shone on the home service stations that, with their monumental announcements including Stalingrad, the assassination attempt on Hitler and the invasion of France, provided the soundtrack to everyday life in Nazi Germany. Details of entertainment shows and programmes designed to lift morale on the Home Front are abundant and offer a fresh insight into the psyche of the nation. The book also looks at Nazi attempts to develop television throughout Germany and in occupied France. A rich cast of characters is featured throughout, including Ernst Himmler, brother of Heinrich, who worked as technical chief at Deutschlandsender, and Lord Haw-Haw, the infamous British mouthpiece of the Nazi propaganda machine. Nathan Morley had unlimited access to former Reich radio studios and transmitter sites in Hamburg, Berlin, and Vienna, as well as to a vast archive of recordings and transcripts. The result is a fascinating and revealing portrait of propaganda, communication and media in Nazi Germany.

During World War II, jazz embodied everything that was appealing about a democratic society as envisioned by the Western Allied powers. Labelled 'degenerate' by Hitler's cultural apparatus, jazz was adopted by the Allies to win the hearts and minds of the German public. It was also used by the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, to deliver a message of Nazi cultural and military superiority. When Goebbels co-opted young German and foreign musicians into 'Charlie and his Orchestra' and broadcast their anti-Allied lyrics across the English Channel, jazz took centre stage in the propaganda war that accompanied World War II on the ground. The Jazz War is based on the largely unheard oral testimony of the personalities behind the German and British wartime radio broadcasts, and chronicles the evolving relationship between jazz music and the Axis and Allied war efforts. Studdert shows how jazz both helped and hindered the Allied cause as Nazi soldiers secretly tuned in to British radio shows while London party-goers danced the night away in demimonde `bottle parties', leading them to be branded a `menace' in Parliament. This book will appeal to students of the history of jazz, broadcasting, cultural studies, and the history of World War II.

When Jon Holmes became a father (twice), he was asked to fill in a form detailing his family medical history. Except he couldn't, because he has no idea who his family are. Born to an unnamed, unmarried mother and an unknown father and given up for adoption at four weeks old, Jon decided to document his own history, so that one day he could pass it on to his children. It's a story of how boys grow up to become (stupid) men, of sexual misadventure, of being accidentally shot in the face, of spiders, a ghost, a fatally injured gerbil, American road trips that went wrong, becoming inadvertently locked in Graham Norton's toilet with an Oscar nominated screenwriter, being removed from Mrs Thatcher's vicinity by her security detail and having loving parents who did their best to bring up a child that wasn't theirs. Part memoir, part hilarious insight into why men are so inept, this is the true story of how an unwanted baby in the Midlands went on to become a wanted man in the state of Texas, and everything that happened in between. His children will never be allowed to read it.

The funny, heart-warming tale of Adam Carroll-Smith's enduring love of sport on the radio - a uniquely personal collection of memories with the power to generate a shared, nostalgic sense of deja vu. From furtively listening to Premier League matches under his duvet as a boy, to secretly following Ashes Tests and Wimbledon championships when he should have been working, all the way to sleep-deprived nocturnal sessions with the Super Bowl and the Ryder Cup, The Pictures are Better on the Radio tells the story of how one fan fell in love with sport on the wireless. Full of acute observations, touching anecdotes and Adam's customary mix of deadpan and absurdist humour, the memoir effortlessly gets to the heart of what it means to be a sports obsessive, and explores why radio continues to be such a cherished medium for fans across the world.

Before the internet, before TV, Manitoba was a hotbed for innovation in radio. These innovations range from the first publically-owned radio station to the first play-by-play broadcast of women's hockey. During World War II, a Winnipeg broadcaster was as well-known in England as Churchill. And Neil Young's very first recording was done at a local station. These are but a few of the stories of early radio in Manitoba. In its first half century, the medium was a powerful, revolutionary force that touched and linked virtually everyone in the province.

'In these memoirs I bounce all about British TV with such success that I wind up in radio. I will also be filling a few holes that I left in the previous decades. For example, I managed to forget in Book One that I had been shot. Twice.' Danny Baker's first volume of autobiography, Going to Sea in a Sieve, was a Sunday Times bestseller, acclaimed for its non-stop humour and anecdotal flourish. It told the exploits of Danny's extraordinary childhood and the wild living of his teenage years. Now, he is twenty-five and it is 1982, and he embarks on an accidental and anxiety-induced career in television - going off alarming. With rollicking good stories from what he describes as 'a frankly crackpot life', Danny continues this stupendous chronicle with irrepressible verve and hilarity. Dozens of TV shows - many of them lousy - give up their backstage stories, and Danny's extraordinary family, particularly his father Spud, react to the ride throughout. Game shows, talk shows, adverts and TFI Friday are but a few of the unplanned pitstops along the way. Not forgetting the tale of Twizzle: the Dog Who Hanged Himself, Died, Then Came Back to Life Again...Clearly, this will be no ordinary showbusiness-stroll down memory lane.

The first hilarious volume of comedy writer, journalist, radio DJ and screenwriter Danny Baker's memoir, and now the inspiration for the major BBC series CRADLE TO GRAVE, starring Peter Kay. 'And what was our life like in this noisy, dangerous and polluted industrial pock-mark wedged into one of the capital's toughest neighbourhoods? It was, of course, utterly magnificent and I'd give anything to climb inside it again for just one day.' In the first volume of his memoirs, Danny Baker brings his early years to life as only he knows how. With his trademark humour and eye for a killer anecdote, he takes us all the way from the council house in south-east London that he shared with his mum Betty and dad 'Spud' (played by Peter Kay) to the music-biz excesses of Los Angeles, where he famously interviewed Michael Jackson for the NME. Laugh-out-loud funny, it is also an affectionate but unsentimental hymn to a bygone era.

Wartime British writers took to the airwaves to reshape the nation and the Empire Writing the Radio War positions the Second World War as a critical moment in the history of cultural mediation in Britain. Through chapters focusing on the middlebrow radicalism of J.B. Priestley, ground-breaking works by Louis MacNeice and James Hanley at the BBC Features Department, frontline reporting by Denis Johnston, and the emergence of a West Indian literary identity in the broadcasts of Una Marson, Writing the Radio War explores how these writers capitalised on the particularities of the sonic medium to communicate their visions of wartime and postwar Britain and its empire. By combining literary aesthetics with the acoustics of space, accent, and dialect, writers created aural communities that at times converged, and at times contended, with official wartime versions of Britain and Britishness. Key Features Merges the fields of sound studies, radio studies, and Second World War literary studies through considerations of both major and marginalized figures of wartime broadcasting Brings substantial but underused archival material (from the BBC Written Archives Centre, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the British Library, and other archives) to bear on the cultural importance of radio during the war Foregrounds the role of radio in bridging literary movements from the highbrow to the middlebrow, and from the regional to the imperial Draws on Listener Research Reports, listener correspondence, newspaper coverage, and surveys by Mass Observation and the Wartime Social Survey in order to capture listeners' responses to wartime broadcasting in general as well as specific programs Fills a gap in accounts of literary radio broadcasting, between Todd Avery's Radio Modernism (which ends at 1939) and postwar accounts of the Third Programme (by Humphrey Carpenter and Kate Whitehead) and individual writer-broadcasters