Why radio tunes us into happiness; The grumpiest man on the airwaves on...(Features)

Byline: by John Humphrys

MY NEW boss took me to one side after the formal welcome and lowered his voice. This was not only my first day in the job: it was a new post altogether.

The BBC had never had a reporter based in Liverpool covering the North-West for both regional and national news bulletins and in those days there was an awful lot of news in the region -- what with endless docks strikes and The Beatles and so on -- and I was a bit worried about how I'd cope. 'Look,' said the boss, 'you're meant to be responsible for both radio and television coverage but, between the two of us, I wouldn't worry too much about radio. It's on the way out. It's yesterday's medium. Television is It's yesterday's medium. Television is what we need to care about.'

It seemed to make sense. The main television news programmes on the BBC and ITN were attracting audiences of nine or ten million. The Today programme -- the biggest of the radio shows even then -- struggled to get half that. TV was soaring away. Radio was in decline.

That was 40 years ago. My boss, it turns out, was spectacularly wrong. The figures have been reversed. The latest figures show that radio listening in Britain has reached a record high.

My own programme, Today, has just passed the seven million mark -- the biggest audience it has ever registered. The main television news programmes often struggle to get half that figure.

Now this is very odd when you think about it for even a moment. We have never been subjected to so many moving images. There are so many television channels that I defy you to name more than a fraction of them.

But who needs television when you can get even more stuff on your laptop? And who needs to be tied to a laptop when all you need do is pull your smartphone or iPad out of your pocket and watch a Hollywood film or a million clips from YouTube while you're on the bus?

Surely there is no way that boring old radio -- which has scarcely changed in the past half-century -- can presume to challenge the might of the instantly available moving image. True, we now have digital, but it's struggling to make the big breakthrough and most of us are perfectly happy with good old FM or even hanker after the ancient, mellow sound of Long Wave.

As it happens, part of the answer lies in that single word: 'happy'. A report published yesterday showed that people who listen to radio are happier and have more energy than those who don't. There are some similar benefits from watching television or using a computer, but radio has far and away the most potent mood-enhancing effect.

The report, based on interviews with more than 1,000 people, said: 'Radio is chosen as a lifestyle support system to help people feel better as they go about their daily lives. Rather than the peaks and troughs that people have claimed to experience with TV and the internet, radio provides a consistent environment themed and shaped to suit the listener's needs at any given time of day and one that is generally upbeat in tone.'

THAT strikes me as a fairly odd conclusion. Do you listen to radio to help you 'feel better'? No. Neither do I. And if that's what you're after -- feelgood broadcasting -- there's plenty on the telly. No, I think the startling success of radio over the past decade or so is precisely because so much of it doesn't set out to make you feel better. It sets out to make you think, to challenge you in one way or another. That's why people say their energy levels are raised by radio.

The great trap so many TV schedulers have fallen into over the years is to assume that if a particular format pulls in the punters they must reproduce it -- again and again ad infinitum. Big Brother was a massive success, so let's flog it to death, finding endless ways to try to titillate an increasingly bored audience with increasingly outrageous, pathetic inadequates acting out lives that have as much to do with reality as the 'house' has to do with a semi on a council estate in Newcastle. Or let's find another reality TV format. Doesn't matter what it is so long as the poor saps out there on the sofas know what to expect. Talent show television inevitably began to follow the same trajectory.

Radio doesn't do that. Let's be sceptical and suggest that it doesn't because it can't afford to. The budget for an hour of peak-time radio is a tiny fraction of even pretty low-life TV shows.

But I'd prefer to believe radio doesn't follow that route because it has more respect for its listeners than some of the more cynical TV moguls have for their viewers. And, in case you haven't guessed, I am a Radio 4 addict. I happen to believe that Radio 4 is one of the nation's great -- if not its greatest -- civilising influences.

This is not meant to suggest that there's no rubbish on the radio. I can happily live the rest of my days without ever hearing another one of those frantic and foul-mouthed disc jockeys who seem to forget occasionally that children are listening at breakfast time.

NOR do I believe that all television is rubbish. How could I? I've been presenting Mastermind for eight years and successive controllers have resisted the temptation to dumb it down. If you don't believe me, try sitting in the black chair yourself. I wouldn't dare.

The best stuff on telly is as good as it's ever been, if not better. If you didn't see The Killing -- the Scandinavian crime drama which captivated millions of BBC4 viewers -- when first broadcast, you have a treat in store. The notion that we have a thousand channels and nothing worth watching is hogwash.

But it's the watching that's the problem and this takes us back to the curious survey finding in relation to energy levels.

There was a time when the family would actually sit around the old Bakelite wireless set and listen (I can remember doing that with my parents during the Suez crisis), but we lead different lives now. When we listen to radio we tend to be on the move in one way or another. We are not slumped on a sofa. That must be part of the explanation. But it's much more than that.

It is the intellectual effort that good radio demands that gives us energy and, yes, enhances our mood. I try to imagine a television producer going to her boss with an idea for a new series.

'What we'll be doing,' she says, 'is getting together a group of academics most people have never heard of and talking to them at great length about, say, Maimonides or maybe the Taiping Rebellion in China or the age of the universe or the ancient enigma of free will or ...'

She's still frantically reeling off ever more obscure subjects, hardly noticing that the boss is edging closer to the door so that he can signal to his secretary to summon the men in white coats.

But that was precisely the offer presented to Radio 4 more than a decade ago and the series was not only commissioned, it's still running strong. It is called In Our Time. It's chaired brilliantly by a sometimes irascible but always enthusiastic Melvyn Bragg and it attracts an audience of a million people.

I suspect half of them (including me) have no more than the haziest notion of the subjects under discussion, but they want to know more. Most of us -- despite what the most cynical of the prime-time TV moguls might believe -- have an instinctive curiosity. We don't need endless -- and often profoundly irritatingly simplistic -- visual gimmicks. We want to be forced to use our brain from time to time.

That's what gives us energy. And that's what enhances our lives.