Sep 25, 2010
I remember this edition of Media Network because it had a superb
story from China as part of the Memory of the Millennium. The
author explained how radio had been a friend and foe in his life,
especially to his father. It is only when you visit other countries
where listening to foreign radio stations is discouraged that you
realise the risks people took in the past, and (in some countries
like Burma) risks that they still take today. This edition also
contains a chat with the late Bob Tomalski on recordable DVD's
(what a standards mess that was) and we hear from a listener in the
UK who believes the BBC is trying to do too much. This edition was
recorded at a time when BBC German was amongst a number of language
sections threatened with closure. We also did film reviews: Henry
Stokes writes from Green Bay Wisconsin. I remember in the dim
distant past, Media Network ran a series of features about Motion
Picture musings, a sort of film review section where the idea was
to spotlight films that somehow involved radio in their plot. It
seems incredible that films such as Good Morning Vietnam are now
well over a decade old. Since then a few James Bond films have had
a radio connection with fights on radio telescopes for instance,
but these days’ secret agents are sent abroad to blow up satellite
TV stations not clandestine radio transmitters. I live in an area
with quite a lot of people from Polish origin and there has been
some considerable discussion about a new film by Robin Williams
called Jakob the Liar. It is actually a remake of an East German
film from 1974 with the same name, although the new version gets
more treatment from Hollywood special effects. This is a holocaust
drama about a Jewish concentration camp. The critics have panned it
because of the rather forced Polish accents by the American actors,
especially Allen Arkin. It also disappeared from the cinema
circuits here very quickly and I’m not sure whether it has been
released yet in Europe, I doubt it. My reason for bringing it up is
that it the star of the film, Jakob, is a lonely widower in 1945
who starts to become popular when he listens to allied broadcasts
from the BBC and then relays the information to the others in the
Polish concentration camp. Excited by the news that the Russians
are on their way, he gives a lot of people hope in the midst of
their despair. But since the news isn’t always want they want to
hear, he starts embellishing. He also claims to own a transmitter
so he can get secret news in and out. I enjoyed the way they
portrayed short-wave broadcasting at the time. The rest of the film
was only fair. The photo was taken at the entrance to the Shanghai
metro in the days when being asked not to take explosives onto the
metro was really quite funny. How times have changed.