This is a very simple object. It is an object from an era that I hardly remember. It is one that perhaps represents the watershed between 1950’s “heavyware” and the new dawn that was just starting.
For this is the speaker extension that spent several years perched on top of a kitchen shelf giving out the soundwaves of the BBC’s Light Programme, whilst the less than lightweight Radio Rentals radio was firmly anchored to the floor in our lounge, sitting just beneath our black and white Pye television.
But when I was seven or eight years old, my mum decided to get “with it”. Much to my Dad’s utter disgust she bought herself a pink Perdio radio. This radio was rather special. It was one you could actually pick up and take into another room. I think what actually disgusted my Dad was that people would even take these ‘dreadful things’ on to the beach with them!

In one way, this speaker represents a certain age, one in which you had to make do, and I suppose this was a remnant from the aftermath of the war and all the austerity that surrounded that. It was about this time that the world began to change dramatically. Man had just put himself in space; consumer products such as fridges, washing machines, telephones and cars were suddenly becoming much more attainable to the average family; and The Beatles were just arriving to give such a revolution to the younger generation.

But it was also a time when my days as an innocent little child were numbered. Within a couple of years of this speaker falling out of use, I suddenly found that the school exams I had to take were quite important; I got beaten up at school; I was put in an isolation hospital for three weeks; and had to choose with which parent I was to go on holiday with.

Life would never be the same again, but I have hung on to this icon.