Karl Whitney: Don’t touch that dial: Talking about books on the radio

Writers don’t really get tutored in the art of talking about their book on the radio, where conversations thrive on small talk

Karl Whitney: ‘When I do retune the radio it’s often to go from one local station to another. There’s a significant amount of pleasant, banal chatter on them.’

Recently I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the radio. It’s been a companion as I move house, burbling away happily in the background as I wait for a delivery or struggle with the mass of cardboard that builds up in the corner of the room once furniture has been assembled.

I bought a new radio specifically for this purpose: An AM/FM radio that’s largely unremarkable. It’s analogue in the extreme. It hasn’t heard of Bluetooth and, frankly, doesn’t want to know about it. 

It switches on. It switches off. It has a dial to tune into stations, a volume control, you can switch between bands — and that’s it.

Occasionally the signal wavers and I need to get up from what I’m doing to retune it, but that’s become part of the whole process. A slight tweaking. 

Mostly it just sits there and makes noise, and that noise is the background to my day that’s otherwise spent wrestling with self-assembly furniture or wondering if the sound I just heard outside is the next delivery.

When I do retune the radio it’s often to go from one local station to another. 

There’s a significant amount of pleasant, banal chatter on them — one programme I heard came live from a local garden fete, another from a park where the presenter asked passersby about the good weather.

There’s also a preference for the radio-friendly music of ’80s stars like Phil Collins, although plenty of nostalgic ’60s tunes filter through: I’ve heard Motown records several times.

It’s a truism to say that radio has a unique intimacy, in which it somewhat resembles the conversations we might strike up in everyday life, but it also has the same clumsy banality of life as we live it. 

Presenters stumble over their words; interviewees clam up. Dead air isn’t an option, so it’s better to fill it with words no matter how wrong they might be. Just say something!

I heard three presenters discuss the works of Alfred Hitchcock. None had an in-depth knowledge of his films and perhaps only one of them had actually seen a film by the director. 

But they knew he had a reputation: 1) as a great director; 2) as a controlling presence, and they were able to spin a cheery couple of minutes out of that unpromising knowledge without it getting weird. I found it strangely enjoyable.

A lot of communication, especially verbal, consists of what linguists call phatic communication: Small talk. 

In the long gaps between meaningful information being imparted we refuse silence and instead chat about this and that, bulking conversations out with the sawdust of triviality. I’m not against it.

It’s something to remember when it comes to actually being on the radio.

Karl Whitney: 'Radio, as I’ve pointed out, thrives on small talk, and if you’re too tense it’s unlikely that you’ll take the opportunity to communicate with people in a warm and engaging way.'

When I published my first book, I ended up being interviewed on radio stations, answering questions that I hadn’t really thought about and that only had a tangential relationship to the book that I had written. 

I soon realised that this was a different game. By the time I found myself on a breakfast show answering questions about whether the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lived in the sewers under Dublin, I had learned to go with the flow.

Writers don’t really get tutored in the art of talking about their book. You either learn on the job (which isn’t really a job as you don’t get paid for promoting your work) or you don’t. 

While you might be able to put together an intellectually stimulating, even moving, piece of literature, can you talk about it in 30-second soundbites? And can you make those soundbites sound sincere and unrehearsed?

The fact is there’s a balance to be struck between getting information across (the key points that you want the listener to take away with them) and being relaxed and, well, yourself. 

Radio, as I’ve pointed out, thrives on small talk, and if you’re too tense it’s unlikely that you’ll take the opportunity to communicate with people in a warm and engaging way.

In the late ’80s, there was a community radio station near my primary school, at the top of the Greenhills Rd in Tallaght village in Dublin, where my mam presented a programme a few times a week. 

The studios were in a terraced cottage that had a huge mast on top — quite incongruous, but that added to the charm.

There were, I think, two rooms inside, the main one being the studio itself. It was rudimentary: There were some shelves holding vinyl records and a desk from which sprouted a microphone.

There was a heavy phone with a dial which you’d use to laboriously call a number, but mostly it was there to take calls from listeners.

While my mam was on air I’d sort out records and soak up the atmosphere. It was a unique thrill to realise that the sound from this room could instantly be heard in homes and workplaces across the area.

When I came to promote my second book, I was recalling this thrill of communication. 

Talking about your work can be an alienating process. You sit and repeat the same things to busy presenters who probably haven’t given your book more than a cursory glance. 

You’re in salesperson mode, which is probably not your natural state. How can you make this process enjoyable?

By the time of the second book, I was living in Sunderland in north-east England. 

Various outposts of the BBC in England

The book itself, Hit Factories, was about the history of pop music as produced in UK regional cities, so it seemed to me that it would be good to talk to some presenters across the country. I emailed a few people at various outposts of the BBC.

This is how I found myself, during the period I was promoting my book, traipsing past grazing cattle, across Newcastle’s Castle Leazes, a common to the north of the city centre, a couple of times a week.

I was on my way to the studios of BBC Newcastle, from which I spoke remotely, tucked away in a little soundproofed cupboard with a microphone in it, to an assortment of presenters from Humberside, Manchester, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. 

I was on BBC Merseyside twice, guesting on their weekly hour-long Beatles show.

One evening I sat in the building’s deathly silent reception, waiting for someone to bring me to the tiny studio. But no one showed and the building appeared empty, so I had to do the interview on my mobile phone.

Desperate to use the toilet before going on air, and with no way of getting through the security gates (behind which were the bathrooms), I vaulted the desk, then returned to the couch refreshed and ready to talk. I wondered what the security footage looked like.

For another interview I travelled to Middlesbrough to appear on a presenter called Bob Fischer’s evening show on BBC Radio Tees. 

The plan had been to talk for maybe half an hour, but it was fun, so I stayed on, chatting. 

That discussion, interspersed with a selection of records mentioned in the book, became the whole programme.

I had wanted to make talking about my book on the radio more enjoyable, something that captured the possibility of communicating more than merely rehearsing a list of talking points. Being open to it being enjoyable helped to make it enjoyable.

After my appearance on BBC Radio Tees, I realised that I had missed the last train, so Bob fetched his Citroen Picasso, apologised for its messiness, and drove me 30 miles up the A19 to my doorstep, chatting all the way.

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