Radio: delights and downside
Many years ago, during the time of martial law, our radio was always tuned to one local FM station that purveyed classical music and preached Christianity in equal doses (it still does). Radio was very much alive and bracing until the early ’70s, with media units like Radyo Patrol, successively anchored by a much-younger Orly Mercado, Joe Taruc, Jun Ricafrente and company, doing live coverage of highly-charged political events such as rallies and marches, and political announcements from the Palace warning of an impending national emergency. Martial Law silenced the media. My recollection is that cartoons like The Herculoids and Wacky Races reigned on TV daily, while radio was mostly dev-com propaganda about the New Society. Not surprising, with a Marcos crony controlling several television and radio networks nationwide.
Living underground, we continued listening to classical-music FM station DZFE, but also to shortwave broadcasts from the BBC and Radio Peking. We did not bother listening to the AM stations as there was no credible open opposition to the regime on the airwaves, and radio would come alive only in the run-up to the electoral and political uprising of February 1986 that led to the so-called democratic restoration when media and the press were set free again, though the unchaining would lead to the revival of their former unbridled self, opening a new chapter in the life of what Butch Dalisay has described as Reality Radio.
Sometime in the late 1980s, shortly after Cory Aquino became president, her regime was bothered and beleaguered by the rightists. I was riding in a friend’s car one afternoon and at one traffic stop on EDSA, we were startled by the loud voice of an announcer from the radio of the car alongside us. “What’s happening? Is there another coup?” he asked, getting agitated. We listened awhile and it turned out to be an ordinary newscast about some quotidian event of city life, probably a traffic build-up, a bank heist, or a road accident. The announcer did sound as though the Palace was under siege, or that another world war had begun, or even that, as in the 1938 Orson Welles radio incident, the planet Earth was being invaded again by octopus creatures from Mars.
Radio is not only a survivor from the pioneering era of electronic mass communication, it is still holding its own against the new modalities of broadcasting news and feeding entertainment to the public, mainly TV and the Internet. TV has its primetime news spots, talk and game shows, sports coverage, telenovelas, and telegenic presenters); radio has its muckraking, crime-fighting, donations-soliciting, showbiz-gossiping, blind-item-spewing, love-and-sex-counselling programs anchored by announcers who read the news and give political commentaries and in the next segment earn on the side by hawking all kinds of commercial products from their sponsors. Unfair, of course, to compare our radio broadcasting culture with that of, say, PBS in the US and BBC in the UK. Look, we’re a Third World democracy, and we have more fun and freedom here.
When I came back from London several years ago, I decided not to buy a TV set because I had become a TV junkie while living in London, what with so many excellent programs on at least two government, publicly subscribed channels (you paid an annual fee for the privilege of watching quality programs without commercial interruptions). I could not do as much creative writing as I had hoped in London. I worked late hours at the office, came home tired, and consoled myself by watching TV until way past midnight, most often falling asleep on the couch till morning broke and it was time to prepare to report for work again. So back in the homeland, I spurned TV and only listened to AM radio or browsed the Web for the news, political interviews, and cultural programs. For the past four years, I have been enjoying the delights of AM radio, but also groaning at the horrors it often foists on listeners, the downside being some of the characters mentioned above, including a particular heavy-breathing, green-joke-spouting, past-midnight deejay who dirty-talks lonely callers, keeps up a running gag about the illicit relations between his half-wit sidekick and the latter’s mother-in-law, asks for callers’ cell phone numbers, and arranges “eyeball” sessions for these lost souls of the night. One can only hope that successful, happy, licit pairings have resulted from his system of social networking. I no longer listen to the program, but am forced to when I’m in a taxi taking me home in the wee hours and it’s the only program that seems to keep the driver alert.
In a special category all his own is a veteran broadcaster who is a past master in interviewing but who ends up cross-examining and endlessly interrupting his radio guests and resource persons, because he has to display his superior knowledge of the topic at hand. Even his own field reporters seldom get to finish what they have to say from their far-flung posts because he has to interject his ex cathedra comments.
Rather a lesser evil would be ear-grating, cringe-worthy commercial endorsements: a popular macho promoting vitamin pills and energy capsules who has to breast-beat and shout out the virtues of his masculinity and his products; a mercifully discontinued commercial voiced by an otherwise angelic actress flogging a shampoo product prefaced with a breathless ligokanangligo interminably; that irritating road-hunger advertisement for a burger which sounds like the copywriter scraping the rusty bottom of the creatives barrel; the multimedia broadcaster who uses the same butangero approach in reading the news or bragging about the benefits of a very expensive health juice, and one could go on.
Somewhere between good and ugly are the “public service” champions who hear out victims of crime and red tape, the dispossessed, the scammed, just anyone oppressed by the system, then call up and proceed to harangue and hector the presumed oppressor (a devious recruiter, an unreasonable landlord, a wayward barangay official, a cheating employer, an abusive cop, etc.) with threats of not letting up on the complaint and exposé unless restoration was made. With the perceived slow machinery of government from the bureaucracy to the justice system, sometimes you wonder if erring on the side of the aggrieved via radio boorishness in order to get some results, might just be necessary.
So what for me are the delights, these days and nights, of radio? It could be my age (and my ailments), but my favorite programs include Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan’s highly informative daily Doctor’s Orders on DWWW 774, which also runs a round-the-clock repertoire of English and Filipino songs from the ’40s to the ’60s, my kind of music; DZRH programs Art to Art (Lisa Macuja’s interview series); Katumbas ay Biyaya (one of the most imaginative drama programs on radio, dealing with health, nutrition and well-being woven into fictionalized accounts of people suffering from various illnesses such as eating disorders and bad food choices, the always positive resolution epilogued by experts from the Nutrition Council and other health agencies); Concierto on Saturday, featuring opera singers Fame Flores, Sheila Manga, John Ocampos, Dondi Ong, Nonon Baang and Rondalla 89; DWBR 104.3 FM’s Harana Ng Puso presented by poet Michael Coroza, with the venerable Mabuhay Singers performing Filipino classics and the acclaimed mambabalagtas reciting the poems of Filipino literary greats, accompanied by guitarist Eddie Suarez; and other gems of Philippine radio.
