‘In a true emergency, you need something you can trust,’ said radio critic Gillian Reynolds in her series You, Me and the Wireless, on Radio 3. When she was four, she heard Neville Chamberlain’s voice ‘speaking from the Kebinet Room in Tin Downing Street’. Now aged 90 and a quarter, Gillian is still listening. But that very soundbite reminds us that we no longer huddle round the wireless. Our phones alert us to the ‘AI-generated images’ from the latest war, and every Trumpery has to be tested by the fact-checking services of the ‘BBC Verify’ department, employing a team of 60. Gillian is a person of invincible good sense, like a kindly, explaining granny. ‘Are you old enough to remember carbon paper?’ she asks in an aside. In 1963, she shrewdly ordered mini-Beatles suits from London, and sold them on her mother’s stall in Liverpool Market. She graduated from St...
I’m afraid this isn’t one of our four free articles available in full, which are set out in the first two rows of the ‘Magazine’ page.
Please click here to find them.
To buy a digital version of this issue for just £2.99, click here
