Here is a first-hand portrait of the flamboyant American genius who became a titanic figure in twentieth century popular culture. Orson Welles revolutionised theatre, terrified a nation of radio listeners, and made cinematic history with Citizen Kane, regarded by many as the greatest American film ever made.

Using film theory and current criticism, White traces the figure of woman in the work of Max Ophuls.

In this fascinating history of the portable radio, Michael Schiffer shows how this invention is as American as apple pie. Along the way, he tells how technology has responded to consumer preference, how corporate 'cryptohistory' has made us believe the Japanese invented the radio, and how the spread of the portable radio mirrors that of other technologies. More than four hundred photographs make this book both a definitive resource and a delightful browse.

The biography of the radio comic Fred Allen is a vision of comedy in the 20th century and of an individual remembered for his incisive wit and talent. Starting in vaudeville as the "World's Worst Juggler," graduating to the Broadway stage of variety shows and torch singers, Fred Allen became an American icon in the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing from Allen's scripts, journals, letters and books, Robert Taylor has recreated that humour. Robert Taylor is the author of "Saranac" and is art critic and senior book critic for the "Boston Globe".

Rob Brydon tells story of his slow ascent to fame and fortune in Small Man in a Book. A multi-award-winning actor, writer, comedian and presenter known for his warmth, humour and inspired impressions, Rob Brydon has quickly become one of our very favourite entertainers. But there was a time when it looked like all we'd hear of Rob was his gifted voice. Growing up in South Wales, Rob had a passion for radio and soon the Welsh airwaves resounded to his hearty burr. However, these were followed by years of misadventure and struggle, before, in the TV series Marion and Geoff and Gavin and Stacey, Rob at last tickled the nation's funny bone. The rest, as they say, is history. Or in his case autobiography. Small Man in a Book is Rob Brydon's funny, heartfelt, honest, sometimes sad, but mainly funny, memoir of how a young man from Wales very, very slowly became an overnight success. Rob Brydon was brought up in Wales, where his career began on radio and as a voiceover artist. After a brief stint working for the Home Shopping Network he co-wrote and performed in his breakthrough show, the darkly funny Human Remains. He has since starred in the immensely popular Gavin and Stacey, Steve Coogan's partner in The Trip, and was the host of Would I Lie to You? and The Rob Brydon Show. He now lives in London with his wife and five children.

Acoustic signals, voice, sound, articulation, music and spatial networking are dispositifs of radiophonic transmission which have brought forth a great number of artistic practices. Up to and into the digital present radio has been and is employed and explored as an apparatus-based structure as well as an expanded model for performance and perception. This volume investigates a broad range of aesthetic experiments with the broadcasting technology of radio, and the use of radio as a means of disseminating artistic concepts. With exemplary case studies, its contributions link conceptual, recipient-response-related, and sociocultural issues to matters of relevance to radio art's mediation.

Often described as 'the father of realism', Henrik Ibsen was a pioneer of modernist drama. He influenced playwrights as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Included in this collection are adaptations of his tragicomic masterpiece The Wild Duck, his complex and compelling play Rosmersholm, the epic drama Brand and the tragedy John Gabriel Borkman. Ibsen's A Doll's House is relocated to 1879 India in Tanika Gupta's Audio Drama Award-winning dramatisation, while the provocative and scandalous Ghosts is adapted by Richard Eyre, with the cast of his Olivier Award-winning Almeida Theatre production. Also featured are vibrant dramatisations of Hedda Gabler, whose desperate heroine is trapped in a suffocating marriage; The Lady from the Sea, about a woman torn between security and passion; and An Enemy of the People, in which a whistleblower reveals an inconvenient truth and is vilified for it. The casts of these stunning dramas include David Threlfall, Nicholas Farrell, Helen Baxendale, Indira Varma, Lesley Manville and Harriet Walter.

Ready for the first biography on blonde, bubbly Marie Wilson? Was she really that vapid? Well - read the book on the My Friend Irma star!

Young Johnnie Walker was obsessed with music and loved to share that passion. So it wasn't long after he'd started DJing in dance halls and pubs around his Solihull home that he got his big break: he talked his way into a slot with newly founded pirate station Radio England - and launched his incredible career. Here, he tells of forty years at the heart of British broadcasting, stints that involved working on the legendary Radio Caroline, BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2; of the stars and musicians he's met and worked with; of how he won the hearts of his listeners and of his devotion to pioneering new music. Johnnie also speaks candidly about the personal challenges he's faced: divorce, exile and his very public struggles with drug addiction and cancer. His life has been inspiring and - above all - entertaining. His autobiography is no different.

This new revised and expanded edition of Reality Radio celebrates today's best audio documentary work by bringing together some of the most influential and innovative practitioners from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. With a new foreword and five new essays, this book takes stock of the transformations in radio documentary since the publication of the first edition: the ascendance of the podcast; greater cultural, racial, and topical variety; and the changing economics of radio itself. In twenty-four essays total, documentary artists tell--and demonstrate, through stories and transcripts--how they make radio the way they do, and why. Whether the contributors to the volume call themselves journalists, storytellers, or even audio artists--and although their essays are just as diverse in content and approach--all use sound to tell true stories, artfully. Contributors include Jad Abumrad, Daniel Alarcon, Jay Allison, damali ayo, John Biewen, Emily Botein, Chris Brookes, Scott Carrier, Katie Davis, Sherre DeLys, Ira Glass, Alan Hall, Dave Isay, Natalie Kestecher, Starlee Kine, The Kitchen Sisters, Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, Maria Martin, Karen Michel, Joe Richman, Dmae Roberts, Stephen Smith, Alix Spiegel, Sandy Tolan, and Glynn Washington.

In this book my father dies. I almost die.*** My showbiz career winds down. And yet everyone keeps telling me it's the funniest book I've ever written. If I'd known that's what the public wanted, I'd have cancelled Pets Win Prizes and just got sick sooner. Along the way this time we encounter, among others, David Bowie, Kanye West (I think), John Cleese, Peter O'Toole, and have several adventures in the Fourth Dimension. Oh, and I can reveal the Man With The Foulest Mouth In All Show Business. Plus assorted high-kicking hoopla and a whole lot of rather stark stuff about what it's like to be told you could be On The Way Out. *** (SPOILER ALERT: I don't actually die.)

Full-cast dramatisations of seven of Ruth Rendell's tense psychological thrillers. This collection includes: The Bridesmaid: A beautiful stone statue and her living double lead Philip into a nightmare of obsession and murder. Going Wrong: Besotted with his childhood sweetheart, Leonora, psychopathic Guy Curran will do anything to make her his. King Solomon's Carpet: London's Underground links a group of misfit housemates and is the catalyst for a devastating crime in this compelling tale, written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. People Don't Do Such Things: A suburban couple befriend a charismatic novelist, but their relationship soon slips into sinister territory. The Fever Tree: On safari in South Africa, Ford and Tricia find the tensions in their marriage exacerbated by the unforgiving wilderness. The Dreadful Day of Judgment: Clearing up an abandoned cemetery, John, Gilly and Marlon's personal demons come to the fore. Thornapple: Poison enthusiast James becomes captivated by the ruthless Meribel on a visit to her wealthy aunt. Among the casts of these seven suspenseful adaptations are Jamie Glover, Mark Strong, Reece Shearsmith, Paul Rhys, Danny Sapani and Juliet Aubrey. Duration: 7 hours approx.

In "Fireside Politics," Douglas B. Craig provides the first detailed and complete examination of radio's changing role in American political culture between 1920 and 1940--the medium's golden age, when it commanded huge national audiences without competition from television. Craig follows the evolution of radio into a commercialized, networked, and regulated industry, and ultimately into an essential tool for winning political campaigns and shaping American identity in the interwar period. Finally, he draws thoughtful comparisons of the American experience of radio broadcasting and political culture with those of Australia, Britain, and Canada.

Eddie Mair is, by his own account, one of Britain's most beloved broadcasters. Born in Dundee, Scotland, he has worked in radio all his adult life. From the foothills of commercial radio in his hometown, through the sunlit uplands of the BBC in Scotland, he has reached the peaks of his profession, with BBC network radio in London. And he's never afraid to work a metaphor beyond endurance. In addition he's appeared on most of the BBC's TV channels, including ones that are no longer on TV. He witnessed the handover of Hong Kong and once asked Arnold Schwarzenegger a question - though he takes no responsibility for either. For nearly twenty years he has been at the helm of Radio 4's PM: a nightly news round up that means Eddie works for just one hour a day, giving him plenty time to knock together these diaries. Whether he's interviewing politicians, getting people to share their personal experiences, or just imparting his favourite zesty chicken recipes, Eddie is never happier than when he is at the microphone. Except when he is at the microphone with a large martini. In truth, his neediness is an irritation to everyone who knows him and if you buy this book he might get out of their hair. Eddie's other work, as a humanitarian and tireless, secret worker for charity is not mentioned in these pages.

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 an innovative cultural history of Argentine movies and radio in the decades before Peronism, Matthew B. Karush demonstrates that competition with jazz and Hollywood cinema shaped Argentina's domestic cultural production in crucial ways, as Argentine producers tried to elevate their offerings to appeal to consumers seduced by North American modernity. At the same time, the transnational marketplace encouraged these producers to compete by marketing "authentic" Argentine culture. Domestic filmmakers, radio and recording entrepreneurs, lyricists, musicians, actors, and screenwriters borrowed heavily from a rich tradition of popular melodrama. Although the resulting mass culture trafficked in conformism and consumerist titillation, it also disseminated versions of national identity that celebrated the virtue and dignity of the poor, while denigrating the wealthy as greedy and mean-spirited. This anti-elitism has been overlooked by historians, who have depicted radio and cinema as instruments of social cohesion and middle-class formation. Analyzing tango and folk songs, film comedies and dramas, radio soap operas, and other genres, Karush argues that the Argentine culture industries generated polarizing images and narratives that provided much of the discursive raw material from which Juan and Eva Peron built their mass movement.

This unique anthology assembles primary documents chronicling the development of the phonograph, film sound, and the radio. These three sound technologies shaped Americans' relation to music from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, by which time the technologies were thoroughly integrated into everyday life. There are more than 120 selections between the collection's first piece, an article on the phonograph written by Thomas Edison in 1878, and its last, a column advising listeners "desirous of gaining more from music as presented by the radio." Among the selections are articles from popular and trade publications, advertisements, fan letters, corporate records, fiction, and sheet music. Taken together, the selections capture how the new sound technologies were shaped by developments such as urbanization, the increasing value placed on leisure time, and the rise of the advertising industry. Most importantly, they depict the ways that the new sound technologies were received by real people in particular places and moments in time.

Fleeing the Nazis, Theodor W. Adorno lived in New York City as a refugee from 1938 until 1941. During these years, he was intensively involved in a study of how the recently developed techniques for the nation-wide transmission of music over radio were transforming the perception of music itself. This broad ranging radio research was conceived as nothing less than an investigation, partly empirical, of Walter Benjamins speculative claims for the emancipatory potential of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction. The results of Adornos project set him decisively at odds with Benjamins theses and at the same time became the body of thinking that formed the basis for Adornos own aesthetics in his Philosophy of New Music.
Current of Music is the title that Adorno himself gave to this research project. For complex reasons, however, Adorno was not able to bring the several thousands of pages of this massive study, most of it written in English, to a final form prior to leaving New York for California, where he would immediately begin work with Max Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Robert Hullot-Kentor, the distinguished Adorno scholar, reconstructed Adornos project for the Adorno Archive in Germany and provides a lengthy and informative introduction to the fragmentary texts collected in this volume.
Current of Music will be widely discussed for the light it throws on the development of Adornos own thought, on his complex relationship with Walter Benjamin, but most of all for the important perspectives it provides on questions of popular culture, the music of industrial entertainment, the history of radio and the social dimensions of the reproduction of art.

For four decades, Ideas has presented more than 400,000 CBC Radio listeners in Canada and the United States with the most challenging contemporary thought of the day. Now, to mark the program's 40th anniversary, executive producer Bernie Lucht has selected the most striking interviews and lectures for Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds. Featuring some the best thinkers from North America and around the world that have appeared on the program since its beginnings in 1965, Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds touches upon societal values, how we govern ourselves, and navigating in the international community. In this remarkable book, Bernie Lucht, winner of the John Drainie Award for broadcast journalism, introduces readers to the origins of the ground-breaking program and to "the best ideas you'll hear tonight." Since the beginning, geopolitics has been one of the significant concerns of the program, and issues such as democracy, dictatorships, the nature of the nation-state, the public good, ideology, religion, peace and violence keep returning to the fore. Although many of the topics have been around for decades, the questions remain startlingly topical today, even in a radically changed world. Exploring geopolitics writ large, Ideas features interviews, lectures and radio documentaries with such influential contemporary thinkers as Tariq Ali, Michael Bliss, Noam Chomsky, Ursula Franklin, Northrop Frye, Bernard Lewis, Margaret MacMillan, James Orbinski, and many, many others. While each thinker speaks from his or her specific experience in time, the themes and concerns resonate as much today as they did last week or forty years ago.

Despite the growth of digital media, traditional FM radio airplay still remains the essential way for musicians to achieve commercial success. "Climbing the Charts" examines how songs rise, or fail to rise, up the radio airplay charts. Looking at the relationships between record labels, tastemakers, and the public, Gabriel Rossman develops a clear picture of the roles of key players and the gatekeeping mechanisms in the commercial music industry. Along the way, he explores its massive inequalities, debunks many popular misconceptions about radio stations' abilities to dictate hits, and shows how a song diffuses throughout the nation to become a massive success.

Contrary to the common belief that Clear Channel sees every sparrow that falls, Rossman demonstrates that corporate radio chains neither micromanage the routine decision of when to start playing a new single nor make top-down decisions to blacklist such politically inconvenient artists as the Dixie Chicks. Neither do stations imitate either ordinary peers or the so-called kingmaker radio stations who are wrongly believed to be able to make or break a single. Instead, Rossman shows that hits spread rapidly across radio because they clearly conform to an identifiable style or genre. Radio stations respond to these songs, and major labels put their money behind them through extensive marketing and promotion efforts, including the illegal yet time-honored practice of payoffs known within the industry as payola.

"Climbing the Charts" provides a fresh take on the music industry and a model for understanding the diffusion of innovation.

When Breeze FM Radio, in the provincial Zambian town of Chipata, hired an elderly retired school teacher in 2003, no one anticipated the skyrocketing success that would follow. A self-styled grandfather on air, Gogo Breeze seeks intimacy over the airwaves and dispenses advice on a wide variety of grievances and transgressions. Multiple voices are broadcast and juxtaposed through call-ins and dialogue, but free speech finds its ally in the radio elder who, by allowing people to be heard and supporting their claims, reminds authorities of their obligations toward the disaffected. Harri Englund provides a masterfully detailed study of this popular radio personality that addresses broad questions of free speech in Zambia and beyond. By drawing on ethnographic insights into political communication, Englund presents multivocal morality as an alternative to dominant Euro-American perspectives, displacing the simplistic notion of voice as individual personal property an idea common in both policy and activist rhetoric. Instead, Englund focuses on the creativity and polyphony of Zambian radio while raising important questions about hierarchy, elderhood, and ethics in the public sphere. A lively, engaging portrait of an extraordinary personality, Gogo Breeze will interest Africanists, scholars of radio and mass media, and anyone interested in the history and future of free speech.

WBAA: 100 Years as the Voice of Purdue documents the fascinating history of WBAA, Indiana's first radio station founded at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, on April 4, 1922. Richly illustrated with more than 150 photos, the book chronicles the station's evolution over the years, while highlighting the staff, students, and volunteers significant to WBAA's success. WBAA began as a lab experiment conducted by Purdue electrical engineering students in 1910. Later, the station became a vital method for Purdue's Cooperative Extension Service to broadcast the knowledge of the university, particularly agricultural news, to the people of the state. From the 1960s to 1980s, WBAA aired Purdue basketball and football games, with station manager John DeCamp as the "Voice of the Boilermakers." In 1971, WBAA became a member station of National Public Radio (NPR), offering popular programming such as All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Listeners tuned into WBAA to hear classical, jazz, and international music, along with in-depth news reporting. Mayors and Purdue presidents aired weekly programs. WBAA gave a voice to arts and community organizations. Read about the invention of the first all-electronic television by pioneering Purdue scientist Roscoe George; WBAA's long-running School of the Air educational program deemed the "invisible textbook"; and the Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI), an airplane that transmitted videos to schools while flying over six Midwestern states in the 1960s. Famous WBAA alumni include NBC sportscaster Chris Schenkel, comedian Durward Kirby, Today Show newscaster Lew Wood, Indiana State Representative Sheila Klinker, actress Karen Black, and actor George Peppard, among others. From the vacuum tube era to the digital age, this thoroughly researched book brings to light the intriguing backstories of the esteemed one hundred-year history of WBAA.