Table Of ContentRadio in Small Nations
Production, Programmes, Audiences
Edited by
Richard J. Hand and Mary Traynor
University of Wales Press
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Global Media and Small Nations
RADIO In
SmAll nATIOnS
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RADIO In
SmAll nATIOnS
ProductioN, ProGraMMeS,
audieNceS
Edited by
richard J. haNd and Mary trayNor
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
CARDIFF
2012
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© The Contributors, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form
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the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication
should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk,
Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2543-8
e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2544-5
The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been
asserted by them in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Printed by MPG Group, Bodmin, Cornwall
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General editors’ Foreword
L
et us start with the obvious question. What is the definition of a
small nation? The honest answer of course is that there are many
approaches to such definitions, ranging from the more obvious meas-
ures of population and geographic scale to more subtle measures such
as Gross National Product or Miroslav Hroch’s notion of ‘subjection
to a ruling nation for such a long period that the relation of subjection
took on a structural character for both parties’ (cited in Hjort and Petrie,
2007: 6).
This series’ conceptual framework is much closer to the last of these
definitions and, in some ways, chooses to take the idea further in the way
that it leaves open the opportunity for volumes on different forms of
media and culture to adopt subtly different approaches. In Mette Hjort
and Duncan Petrie’s collection, The Cinema of Small Nations, the authors
illuminate a similar debate of their own by citing a section in David
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s definitive Film History: An Introduction
entitled ‘Smaller producing countries’. This included work on the
cinemas of Mexico, India, Colombia, New Zealand, Australia and
Canada (2007: 3). Here is not the place to debate the validity of this
specific list, but it illustrates the problem as well as the useful and inter-
esting challenge of considering the concept of small nationhood in
different ways.
Fundamentally, the series is most interested in the nation as a key
site of power and, in turn, how artists and policy makers negotiate the
question of power in different kinds of national contexts. Therefore, if
Hroch’s definition above is slightly too rigid for this purpose it never-
theless indicates the general terrain on which this series operates. It
attempts to give contributors the opportunity to write about national
contexts within which particular art forms have had to negotiate sig-
nificant questions of power relations with close neighbours at key points
in recent history.
The form that such ‘negotiations’ have taken obviously varies. For
example, very close to home, here in the United Kingdom, the issue of
language has been a powerful factor in the relationship between Wales
and England in particular. The same is true to a greater or lesser extent
within other European countries such as Spain and Belgium.
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vi Radio in Small Nations
By contrast, in the context of ‘First Nations’, which we have taken
the decision to include in this series, language is frequently just one
dimension of a long history of much broader struggles characterized
most pressingly by various forms of material inequalities and fundamen-
tal disputes over land and ownership.
At this point it is very important to state that this series is not con-
cerned solely with the disadvantages of small national contexts. If any-
thing the balance is somewhat in the other direction, though there is
no question that many contributions will analyse the challenges of the
kinds of power relationships outlined above. However, one of the first
inspirations for the editors’ involvement both in the series and in the
study of small nations in general was the idea of the advantages of small
national contexts, particularly for certain kinds of creative endeavour.
Hjort and Petrie quote Olaffson from a work that was one of the first
to make a significant intervention in this direction: ‘the citizen of a
small state has a better possibility to influence decision making than a
citizen in a large state’ (2007: 7). For the socially and politically engaged
artist or cultural thinker this offers the most potent of opportunities and
is one of the key reasons why the contributions to this series have the
potential to offer such important insights.
At the time of writing, the volume of academic work on the media
and culture of small nations is relatively slight. We have already men-
tioned Hjort and Petrie’s collection on cinema, and the bibliographies
of all the collections in this series will attest to a number of outstand-
ing smaller-scale insights in different disciplines. The aim of the Small
Nations and Global Media series is to bring some of that work together
in a single recognizable source that hopes to make a significant contri-
bution not only to debates specifically on creative endeavour and small
nations, but by extension to the relationship between the idea of the
‘national’ and the media and culture that is produced in different kinds
of national contexts.
Steve Blandford
and Gill Allard
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contents
General Editors’ Foreword v
About the Contributors ix
Radio in Small Nations: An Introduction 1
Richard J. Hand and Mary Traynor
1 In Search of Access, Localness and Sustainability: Radio 7
in Post-devolutionary Wales
Steve Johnson and Philip Mitchell
2 Voice of a Nation: The Development of Radio and Ireland 27
Rosemary Day
3 We Don’t Talk Any More: The Strange Case of Scottish 40
Broadcasting Devolution Policy and Radio Silence
Ken Garner
4 New Zealand – A Radio Paradise? 61
Brian Pauling
5 Radio as an Expression of Nation and Sub-nation in Laos 75
Mary Traynor
6 Training for Life: The Contribution of Radio Training 88
to Indigenous Education and Well-being in Australia
Ioana Suciu and Kitty van Vuuren
7 CHOU Arabic Radio in Montreal: Finding Unity 102
in Diversity
Martin LoMonaco
8 Regional Radio and Community: John Lair and
the Renfro Valley Barn Dance 115
Jacob J. Podber
9 Community Radio for the Czech Republic – Who Cares? 126
Henry G. Loeser
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viii Radio in Small Nations
10 Radio in the Republic of Moldova: The Struggle for 140
Public Service Broadcasting
James Stewart
11 Radio in Wales: The Practitioner Speaks 155
Julie Kissick and Mary Traynor
Works Cited 171
Interviews 192
Index 195
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