At home with academic and author David Hendy
I had a meeting in Oxford with David Hendy today. He’s a Reader at the University of Westminster and the author of some very fine books about radio, including the highly acclaimed Life on Air: A History of Radio Four.
His book Radio in the Global Age (2000) was immediately a prescribed text for my class back in Auckland, and it was that book that really gave me permission to take seriously some of my own ideas about digital radio, the internet, and media in general.
It was also the book that encouraged me to stop simply being a radio tutor, and try my hand at actual research. All in all, it’s probably fair to credit David with a large portion of my academic trajectory (or, at the very least, the inspiration thereof), and the fact that I ended up in the UK doing what I do now.
I first met him at an international academic radio conference in Madison, Wisconsin in 2004 – where I was giving a paper on Internet Radio. It’s also, incidentally, where I met Tim Wall, who was on the same panel as me, and is the person to thank for getting me over here. But it was David’s ideas that got me that far.
Amazing thinker, a really beautiful writer – and just a thoroughly nice man. Sometimes you meet your heroes, a decade on, and they make you gnocchi for lunch.