ABSTRACT
This chapter hails from 25 years of making radio features inside the broadcast media industry. It is a chapter resulting from 25 years of working in, what Madsen refers to as, ‘one of those utterly repressed fields of radio’ (Madsen, V. (2005). Radio and the documentary imagination: thirty years of experiment, innovation, and revelation. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 3, p. 189). As such, these reflections are about how this sonic creative form of expression sits within the wider context of radio generally, a context which I see as dominated by the assumption that radio is ‘live’. This chapter, therefore, mulls over the following questions: What does the idea of ‘live’ mean for features? What does ‘live’ mean for recording? And how does a radio feature, built from recorded sound, continue to exist in a world where ‘live’ is the norm. Does it change our idea of what listening is? The aim of wrestling with these questions is to further understand the role of the radio feature and happily think through the work it does on air.
