I read this post in another thread :
and it got me to thinking - what if there were radio stations in 12th century Europe? Who would run them and what kind of programming would they feature? The radio transmitters and receivers operate using Merlin’s magic in case anyone is curious.
They’d probably have been run by feudal lords, with the overriding goal of exhorting peasants to work harder for less. Programming might have been fun, though.
The Church
“You’re listening to radio NAVE – all Gregorian Chant, all the time!”
In my time-travel novel The Traveler I have Tenobius speculating about radio stations in the Roman Empire – “You’re listening to radio SPQR !”
“This is radio NAVE spinning the hits YOU want to hear [lute pluck]! Coming up this hour, we have Vespers! But first a word from our sponsor, Crazy Williams Apothecary…”
There’s a series of SF novels featuring immortal cyborg agents in the past who are not changing things, but are collecting things that would otherwise be lost (for the profit of a future corporation) - and those cyborgs do have radio, covering the contemporary gossip.
“Come to Village Idiot Carts – his prices are INSANE!!!”
“Traffic pile up at the intersection of Dung Street and Maiden’s Lane, we’ll have more on this as soon as our eyes in the sky traffic reporter climbs down from the tower.”
On a serious aside, consider effect of a private radio station. Weather reporting would get a huge boost once real-time reports from large geographic regions could be consolidated. If the radio was propagating over a long distance (shortwave), ships would have a method of getting time signals, and calculating longitude. News of crop failures and regime changes would be real time. (I believe there was a book about something similar - the effect of the first telegraph systems.)
“Come on down to the Inquisition Lounge. This Friday evening is Damsel’s Night, where Witches Brews are free for the ladies and half price for squires…”
^I expected that^
“Crier #1:Joustmania XXI is coming to town!
Crier #2: Friday FRIDAY FRIDAY!!!
Crier #1: [drum roll on a bodhran] Featuring The Bloody Baron
Crier#2: Versus THE SORCERER!
Crier#1: Two farthings gets the whole family in
Crier #2: See the Oxen Pull Contests
Crier #1: Come to Newcastle Square
Crier#2: Friday FRIDAY FRIDAY!!!”
“1-8-7-7-Karts-For-Kids…”
There would be an interminably long drama serial about the adventures of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, scripted by Chretien de Troyes, with a cliffhanger at the end of every episode. The Church would condemn it, and the new medium more generally, until one of their own had the brilliant idea of launching “Herbology with Hildegard” in a competing time slot, and then branched out into writing radio plays of her own to educate the audience about virtue. Religious drama serials would eventually be reluctantly embraced by the Church hierarchy, and would evolve into a wildly popular genre.
Oh, and there would be a troubadour-lyric channel with programming that consisted of about 1/3 music and 2/3 gossipy speculation about the people who wrote the songs, the people who were possibly being addressed in the songs, and the secret meanings of various details. William IX of Aquitaine would become the world’s first bad-boy megastar, and, like Mick Jagger, would continue to cultivate that image long after he ought to have aged out of it.
Crier #3 (ultra-deep voice): "You pay for the whole sgabello seat BUT YOU’RE ONLY GONNA NEED THE EDGE!!!"
“…I see something has been tossed from the tower. And another. And a third… can’t make out what they are…OH MY GOD! THEY’RE CHICKENS! They’re hitting the ground like sacks of wet quicklime! One just went right through a hand cart! Peasants are running everywhere!”
Later:
“As god is my witness, I thought chickens could fly.”
I had to take a course on medieval music history in the 1980s, as part of my music composition degree.
While Gregorian Chant was all the rage in the first half of the middle ages, even the Church became bored with it after a while. As early as 895 A.D.*, they were experimenting with “parallel organum”, an early form of harmony in which two voices sang the same melody an octave (or a perfect 5th) apart. By the 12th century, Leonin and Perotin were doing their “melismatic organum”, which stretched out the main melody as a long bass line and had the other voices singing in ever-changing harmony above it.
If we assume that using Merlin’s Magic [TM] to broadcast a radio signal was expensive, so that only the wealthy and influential could afford to do it, you’d probably be hearing organum.
*) Note that the B.C./A.D. system had only caught on in some places by that time. It wasn’t ubiquitous until the 15th century.
There would be an Oscar-winning film about this guy’s big radio address:
A 1980s PBS series, Newscast from the Past.
Note the background music for the commercial. The instrument hadn’t been invented yet, but perhaps multiple sets of necessary objects could’ve been used.
And for an earlier era, BBC B.C..
“Our tenth carrier pigeon will receive two free tickets to Geoffrey of Monmouth!”