Moving Up in Amateur Radio

In 1966 a group of determined young men defied the New Zealand government and launched a pirate radio station aboard a ship in the Hauraki Gulf.

Lurking under the sea is a global web of fibre optic telecommunication cables, the plumbing of the internet. It's how we talk, text and stream, connecting billions of people. These cables are also the frontline of a tech war.

The history and enduring legacy of one of the world's biggest and most influential radio stations.

The adventure of the minitel, a small cubic terminal with a folding keyboard that began in the 1970s in the labs of France Telecom, is closely linked to Alsace. Alsatians had then in hand the future tools of interactive communication. What remains today of all those minitel years? Like a nocturnal and intimate road-movie, this documentary went to meet the last people who are still interested in the minitel, this strange beige box of access to telematic services, corny today, but pioneers at the end of the last century.

Documentary about radio comedies primarily focused on Burns & Allen, Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, The Jack Benny Program, Fibber McGee & Molly, The Bob Hope Show, and The Fred Allen Show.

J.P. McCarthy was an icon of Detroit broadcasting who ruled the radio waves in the Motor City for thirty years. His story is the ultimate local-kid-done-good tale. Working extensively with the McCarthy family and conducting over twenty interviews with J.P.’s friends, family, co-workers and contemporaries, Detroit Public Television memorializes someone who was considered more of a family member than a voice on the radio to anyone who tuned in to hear his morning show or the Focus program over the years.

For 50 years radio dominated the airwaves and the American consciousness as the first “mass medium.” In Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Ken Burns examines the lives of three extraordinary men who shared the primary responsibility for this invention and its early success, and whose genius, friendship, rivalry and enmity interacted in tragic ways. This is the story of Lee de Forest, a clergyman’s flamboyant son, who invented the audion tube; Edwin Howard Armstrong, a brilliant, withdrawn inventor who pioneered FM technology; and David Sarnoff, a hard-driving Russian immigrant who created the most powerful communications company on earth.

Radio 1's longest-serving broadcaster Annie Nightingale takes us on a counter-cultural journey through the events, people and sounds that have inspired her illustrious career.

Mimmo Villari is 29 years old in 1975, lives in Calabria, has a dusty guitar in the attic and the sacred fire of music that once burned his stomach is now turning into embers. In that period the first experiences of pirate radio arose in Italy. Mimmo is thrilled by the rumors about it and wastes no time: he builds himself an FM transmitter and thus sets up Radio Perla del Tirreno, the first pirate radio station in Bagnara Calabra. The voices of the radio reflect on politics, philosophy, civic education, creating a discourse that is the portrait of a society and an era.

Mid Downs Radio is one of the longest-running hospital radio stations in the UK. This short documentary celebrates the eccentric and unlikely cast of volunteer presenters who keep the radio running, providing small moments of joy to patients that are spending their days in hospital beds.