Are you sure it’s a good idea? She goes on, ‘We never miss the show, could you please play him something from Jungle Book?’ I would be most happy to oblige,” says Ed in his friendly, nasal tone.

And off we would go, with “I Wanna Be Like You.” Keith West’s “Excerpt from a Teenage Opera” was a popular selection on Junior Choice, as was “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and anything from Mary Poppins. We were all putty in Ed’s hands whenever he played “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

At 10:00 A.M., the show was over and we would dress for the weekend shopping trip. On Sunday, we would dress for church. Strangely, even though Dad was not working Sunday, he still did not come into St. Jude’s with us, preferring to sit in the car and read the paper. Would this mean Dad would not be accompanying Mom and me to heaven?

Back home, it was the afternoon radio broadcasts that really caught the family’s ear. Dad had broken down and joined the hi-fi set in the early 1970s, which was a necessary development, in my view, like adding a vinyl roof to the Ford or buying nylon shirts. This meant we could now play music and listen to the radio in the TV room.

The hi-fi, or stereo, for this system had two speakers, had been put on a purpose-built shelf to the left of Dad’s easy chair, so it was clearly meant to be his domain. He started buying albums: Dvorak’s Greatest Hits and the great Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Mom and he would get together on some purchases, like the Max Bygraves Sing-Along-A-Max series—Max doing then what Rod Stewart would do later with The Great American Songbook. This was great party music for when my aunts and uncles visited and drinks were being served.

But the truth was, the Taylor household was a radio household, and we were a radio family.

After the boredom of Dad’s Sunday cricket had been suffered and slept through by all, including him, the Radio 1 Top 30 chart show would begin at 5:00 P.M. Dad and I—and visiting Nan—would gather around the living room table as Mom brought in our tea of sandwiches, cake, and, if we were lucky, her unequaled trifle. There wasn’t another event in the entire week that brought the three generations together with quite as much enthusiasm as the Top 30 show.

Let me qualify that. It was actually Mom’s and my enthusiasm that really got the party started; Dad and Nan could have taken it or left it. But they went with the flow, and it felt, at least, as if we were all as excited by the ups and downs of the pop world as we were by each other. It was one of our few family pastimes.

The highlight came at five minutes before seven o’clock when “the nation’s number 1 hit song” was played in full, unless it was a song as popular as George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” which sat at the top spot for seemingly months, in which case they just played a few bars of the song. After weeks and weeks of overexposure, this was a blessed relief.

I was beginning to notice that the songs I really liked rarely made it to “the top spot.” Mostly the number ones were a little too cheesy for my developing taste: “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” “Welcome Home,” or “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Talent show winners or songs from TV ads. The cooler songs seemed to sit a little outside the Top 10. After the number one song had been played, Radio 1 switched off and it would be time for The Shipping Forecast—that curiously interesting lesson in weather and European geography. What was Dogger Bite?—and after that, the airwaves were back in the hands of the controllers at BBC Light Entertainment for Your Hundred Best Tunes, all that maudlin stuff like “In a Monastery Garden” and “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” Dad would settle down in his seat, maybe with a drink of something from the front room, and Nan would doze off again, maybe singing along gently after a glass or two.

Number 34 Simon Road was a musical house, but not in the von Trapp family sense. Nobody could play a note and there were no instruments to be found anywhere. And other than Dad in his cups, no one had the nerve to sing out loud.

In addition to Mom’s transistor radio and Dad’s stereo, there was the trusty oak-paneled gramophone player, which had been sitting on the floor in the front room for as long as I could remember. It was an heirloom, something from my nan’s house, and rarely used by Mom or Dad other than as a tabletop for a drinks decanter and some whisky glasses. Stuffed into the shelves beside the turntable was a selection of scruffy 78s, remnants of the “dancing years”—Connie Francis, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee—parent toys that had been discarded long before I came along.

Two aspects of this old piece of furniture fascinated me. The first, since I was a toddler, was the turntable itself. It had been fun using it as a test site for my Matchbox cars, holding the tiny toys over the spinning felt, lowering them until the wheels bit into the madly spinning surface. I would duck down to get a close-up view of the tiny tires, accompanying the visual with some voice-activated sound effects: gears changing, engines growling.

The second element of the “radiogram” that would fascinate me in later years, as a boy, was the wireless radio, powered by tubes that took more than a minute to warm up. It picked up signals from all across Europe, places on the wave band such as Hilversum and Luxembourg that had an exotic allure, places I vaguely knew of from my home-school geography class. Sounds would come in spurts, sometimes consistent and soothing, sometimes loud and barking, stuttering in and out of reach. Was that a spy network? I loved the sounds of the out-of-tunedness almost as much as the broadcasts.