Wyn Drabble doesn't like seeing school corridors lined with kids staring at screens and failing to communicate with the friends beside them. Photo / NZME
Wyn Drabble doesn't like seeing school corridors lined with kids staring at screens and failing to communicate with the friends beside them. Photo / NZME
The latest edition of The Listener was sitting at a rakish angle on the coffee table in front of me and the name of the publication sparked a thought. Was it called The Listener because it started up in the days of steam wireless, ie, before the box?
I'm notconcerned about the real reason so please don't bother writing in with the correct answer. It was just that it set me on a thought train for this week's column.
From this age of social media madness, it's so hard to imagine that we once used to sit around the wireless – a huge wooden structure the size of a refrigerator with front-mounted rotary dials – and simply listen to the fare. It was very innocent entertainment, sometimes interrupted by loud static.
In an almost-perfect semicircle, we sat around the wireless and listened to family favourites like Dad and Dave, It's In The Bag, Hancock's Half Hour, The Goon Show and Portia Faces Life. I was too young then to understand the intricacies of apostrophes so I thought that last one was a show about the life of someone called Portia Face.
My memory – not always reliable, I know – tells me that we even looked at the wireless as it delivered sounds, looked at it in the same way as we would soon look at the new kid on the block, television!
Toilet visits had to be carefully pre-planned as the pause function had not yet been invented. This was even more important if two favourites were playing one after the other.
Later, during my teenage years, I went my own separate way and listened to the hit parade on a transistor radio (or it could have been a crystal set) under the sheets of my bed at night. Under those covers might well have been where I first heard the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Also Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
I think the telltale signs of future decline came when they tried to modernise some of these purely auditory gems. To me, The Telegoons never worked as an updated version of The Goon Show. The original was an auditory experience that engaged your – wait for the magic word – imagination. It did not need pictures.
Three men stood around a microphone and did all that! We didn't need to see what Eccles looked like. In fact, I'm sure we all had our own imagined version.
Wasn't it all so much simpler? Nowadays, I think you have to Bluetooth your Instagram and Spotify your YouTube in order to reboot your drive. Or something.
Call me antediluvian and push me into the corner labelled "old fuddy-duddies" if you will, but I still like the simplicity and innocence of yore. And I like my music to come as an album – with a cover, liner notes and lyrics. Shuffle play is not for me.
I would like my communications to come in more-personal ways than texts and emails. Do you remember handwritten letters? And please don't get me started on spam or phishing.
I'm not a fan of Facebook. I don't like the damage I've seen it do. I don't like seeing school corridors lined with kids staring at screens and failing to communicate with the friends beside them.
And I'm certainly over passwords and loyalty clubs and signing in and logging on and "liking" stuff.
Yes, give me the good old days, the simpler ways without social media. I might become a recluse until it has all gone away so if things change while I'm in hiding, please let me know.
