Freq Surfing
Early bedtime was not a problem for me. At least not on Sundays and Mondays. I was looking forward to indulging in my secret evening pastime: surfing the radio waves. The white plastic clock radio right next to my bed had a mono jack, so only the blue in-ear piece of my GameBoy headphones worked but it seemed like a practical feature because it allowed me to hear when parents would potentially come upstairs to bust me.
On Sundays I usually enjoyed the last minutes of the SWF3 Top 20 music charts and as a consequence a lot of the pop hits from that time have been burnt into my core memory. Then at 9pm sharp the news came on, which I usually followed with curiosity despite not understanding much of the complex world of grown-ups. But it was through that little radio that I lived through the weeks leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the slow collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Once the weather gave way to the traffic report, I knew it was time to turn the tuner dial.
Each Sunday and Monday after the news, I tuned in to SWF1 for the part of the evening I looked forward to most: the radio drama. I recall countless evenings in my bed listening to suspenseful nail-biters, from detective stories, murder mysteries to science fiction tales. The sci-fi nights were my favorites! The intro music was already so terrifying I could barely listen to it.
My vivid imagination turned those radio plays into thrillers far more vivid and intense than TV shows could ever depict (not that I would have been allowed to watch those anyway). Many of the plots and scenes stayed with me for weeks, sometimes years, and even today I still find myself researching the titles of stories I remember from my radio days. My favourite voice actor was, and still is, Christian Brückner, the German dubbing voice of Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper, and others, who lent his intimate, smoky, weathered baritone to many of my favourite detective characters.
Through the sci-fi dramas I encountered authors I would cherish years later when I read their books, such as Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov, and while I mostly enjoyed the otherworldly adventures, some of the darker stories absolutely terrified me. One especially troubling one revolved around a group of criminals sabotaging self-driving cars in a futuristic city to kidnap the passengers for harvesting their organs. I was barely able to sleep afterwards and the idea haunted me for years.
The radio dramas were usually an hour long, and depending on my levels of tiredness and terror, I sometimes felt the need to lighten the mood before surrendering to sleep. My usual routine was tuning over to AFN to listen to the syndicated Dr. Demento Show, a whimsical comedy program that introduced me to artists like Frank Zappa or Weird Al Yankovic.
On other nights I'd just sweep the whole FM band and get hooked on interesting music tracks or weird radio shows. When I felt very adventurous, I'd even switch over to AM and went exploring there. Stations in the late 1980s, early 1990s experimented a lot with the medium. I remember curious radio formats, like a live fantasy role-playing game with call-in adventurers and moderator dungeon masters, or late-night programs devoted to all kinds of arcane themes, explored through music and conversations with invited guests and callers.
One thing I often came back to was dialing the tuner down to the lowest setting, around 87 MHz, where I'd find a strange, repetitive series of warbling and beeping tones. I found them mysterious and fascinating, and that would send my imagination racing with theories about what they might be. Decades later, I remembered those strange sounds and even tried to recreate the experience, but there was nothing to hear around that frequency anymore. Some research eventually revealed that the transmission was from some kind of early one-way pager system called Eurosignal that broadcast between 1974 and 1997.