Objects on the radio
I have a new commute to work these days. With time spent walking or standing on packed trains I have re-discovered the joy of the radio podcast.
Most recently, I've been charmed by the 'Museum of Lost Objects' on Radio 4: a series of ten short programmes focusing on sites and objects of world cultural importance that have been destroyed by the so-called Islamic State. Presented by journalist Kanishk Tharoor, these are compelling in the spectrum of perspectives that they give on the objects that have been lost. Undoubtedly of great importance to world history, they are discussed by international curators, archaeologists and historians, but they are also shown as sites and objects of local importance, loved, used and abused by local people. The archaeologists whose life's works have been lost at the hands of ISIS speak just as movingly about the local families they have befriended whose lives have been uprooted and senses of home, community and identity lost with the destruction of these monuments. These extraordinary objects are shown to be part of everyday, ordinary life.
In some sense a museum of 'lost' objects seems suited to radio. While each programme is accompanied on the website by a photograph of the object in question, their destruction now leaves space for the programme to weave a narrative of words around their histories. As a listener you are encouraged to see them through the eyes of the people whose lives they touched. But this got me thinking about objects on the radio more generally. It is counterintuitive, after all, to use a sound-only medium for portraying something that is inherently visual and tactile. Yet, the 'History of the World in 100 Objects' was a hugely successful series that did just that, encouraging close attention to a series of objects in the British Museum collections that the audience couldn't see.
Cynically, you might think that this simply directs listeners to increase the number of hits on the British Museum website or to join the hoards of tourists pouring through the doors. But there is also something more magical. As a curator, I know that one of the hardest things is to conjure up the myriad facets of an object in a simple label, let alone to entice a visitor to stop and pay that one label and object attention in a full and busy gallery. What a simple, ten-minute radio segment does is to force that moment of stillness and attention, and require the listener to build the object in their mind's eye, appreciating its parts one by one, into something so much more compelling than the whole with which they started.
Something similar has been happening for Britain's less well-known museums on a Sunday morning, with Broadcasting House's series of features on people's favourite small museums. Again, your imagination is grasped by their affection, before any preconceptions that your eye might bring to a little, poorly-funded space. In the age of buzzfeed, I think these bite-size programmes may be the lifeline of museums and their collections, which make audiences listen, and then look, anew.