I don’t know whether to feel reassured or terrified by our Government’s advice on how to prepare for a national catastrophe. Either way, I’m taking it seriously. I can’t be the only citizen of the United Kingdom who has an unsettling sense of impending doom. I’ve checked my cupboards and there are enough tins of tuna and sardines to keep me (and my dachshund) going in the event of an attack by a hostile power, or being plunged into darkness by a cyber attack, or a natural catastrophe such as floods, pestilence or plague.
The Burnham administration has already shown its propensity to govern in everyday fixes rather than grand vision, and perhaps we should resist the temptation to poke fun at its “Be Ready” campaign, a checklist of seemingly banal measures to ensure the public is prepared should the worst happen. Notwithstanding, it’s mostly sensible stuff, and sounds like the list of things you might take on a camping holiday in Wales – make sure you have wet wipes, bottled water, essential medical supplies, and a torch, that sort of thing. But there is one eye-catching recommendation, in between having enough blankets and keeping a bit of cash in the house. Get yourself a wind-up FM radio.
No, this is not.. ahem.. a wind-up. “For updates during outages, write down frequencies of any national or local radio stations you use for news,” says the advice, and, in classic British style, wind-up radios immediately became the latest panic buy. The Daily Telegraph reported that seven of the most popular models of wind-up radio have already sold out. (Meanwhile, sales of tinned meat increased by 40 per cent over the weekend, and the purchase of torches have more than doubled, according to one retailer.)
It’s the radio, however, that struck me as the most interesting item on our emergency checklist. The sense that, even in this most digitally-connected, artifically intelligent, technologically advanced age, it’s the good old radio set – the crackling conveyor of breaking news of yesteryear – that will keep us alerted and well-informed. This is not just a practical measure, it’s a statement, too, that, when everything that we have come to rely on has stopped working, radio is the one medium that we are able to trust.
Clearly, there is a market for retro items – vinyl records, 1950s style refrigerators, platform boots, for example – but this is not fashion advice from No 10. It effectively says that, as well as the Today programme, The Archers and Sara Cox’s Breakfast Show, a radio powered by your efforts, or by battery (get plenty of those in, by the way), may be the only way of finding out what’s going on around you.
Now, for those of us who are tired of being assaulted by non-stop information, all heat and no light, or who feel oppressed by on-line “content”, this is a vision of a simpler, tuned-out world which sounds like bliss. Radio? It’s the future. Hard to believe, I know, particularly in the context of the cuts the BBC has made to its radio output as a response to budget pressures.
The Radio 4 consumer affairs programme You and Yours is destined for the axe, but isn’t that exactly the sort of show we’ll need when the shops have run out of luncheon meat and we don’t know how to wash our clothes by hand? Likewise, the archive channel Radio 4 Extra is being canned, but what would sustain the nation’s humour more in its hours of need than old episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour? Not exactly the stuff of mass demonstrations, or even online petitions, but the official endorsement of radio as a force for community cohesion should give the BBC pause for thought.
I’m all for the Be Ready campaign, even if I don’t know what it is I’m getting ready for. A few tins of tuna might be helpful if the shops are temporarily shut. Less so in the event of nuclear attack. But let’s look on the bright side. Andy Burnham has taken to heart former New York mayor Mario Cuomo’s advice to “campaign in poetry, and govern in prose”. There is unlikely ever to be something more prosaic to come from No 10 than the advice to make sure you have a pair of tweezers in the house (I’m not kidding).
The bigger message, however, is clear. Do your worst, Putin. Britain will be ready for you.
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