“Radio North Sea International! The sound of Europe! The voice of the world!”
Immediately this is going too far, the actual sound of Europe probably being more like a Romanian lady reading from the European Constitution or a Spanish boy singing The Final Countdown. But Radio North Sea International really believes in what it says; it’s a relic of an old battle, a cloned reincarnation of the libertarian, swashbuckling pirate stations of the 1970s, when the pleasing choruses of pop music were to the British as Twitter is to latter day Iran. The original RNI operated out of a psychedelically painted ship and like many such outfits flirted with genuine piracy, or rather was flirted with: an attempted hijacking repelled in 1970, a bomb hurled onboard a year later from a passing vessel in search – according to arrest warrants – of “money and adventure”.
Now it is just another pop radio station, or perhaps the true median of every pop radio station in existence – the voice of the world! It doesn’t have any human content; there are no DJs, there’s no news. The name, the playlists – they bring to mind a freighter somewhere, abandoned all of a sudden, Mary Celeste-style, with no time to turn off the mains, the broadcasting equipment, or Terry Wogan’s permashuffling ipod.
Or it’s run by simple robots, and will continue to broadcast long after we’re all dead from swine flu, its output worshipped as a sound-deity by an ascendant race of cockroach men who pick it up through their quivering, spindly antennae.
But really, what am I doing? Why have I written so much? Who is listening to this? Who cares? “Just for you!” says another, far more believable, jingle of theirs.
