From the archives: Radio radio

Radio announcers’ tongue twister tests, the pirate radio station that broadcast while it sank, the radio play hoax attack twelve years before The War of the Worlds, and the broadcaster who was the last person in the UK executed for treason.

If you can say “For years she had stifled her risibilities with dour moods. His asthma caused him to sough like the zephyrs among the tamarack” you might have a career as a radio announcer.


William Joyce, the WWII Nazi broadcaster and propagandist, was the last person in the UK executed for treason – despite not being a British citizen.



1960s radio
Joe Haupt from USA [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The New Zealand pirate radio station Radio Hauraki once broadcast news of its own sinking, while it was still happening.


Broadcasting the Barricades was a 1926 “fake news report” radio play about a revolution in London. It, predictably, caused panic.

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