The second day of the workshop opened with network member Rebecca Scales discussing the achievements and the shortcomings of Radio Nations, the shortwave broadcaster inaugurated by the League of Nations in 1932. The station aimed to promote peace and understanding among nations, thus echoing a utopian vision on cross-cultural communication.  Since its inception Radio Nations had to deal with serious difficulties caused mostly by its complicated legal and financial status and it was far from being a huge success. Nevertheless, as Scales convincingly demonstrated, this did does not mean that the station was a failure as it did manage to attract listeners that were particularly engaged in the broadcasts, namely through writing letters to the station. The paper questioned the criteria used to measure the success and failure of broadcasting projects, opening the discussion on how listener engagement, and not only the number of those listening, should be taken into account when evaluating broadcasting operations.

The utopian idea that broadcasting would bring people together, that marked the first decades of radio, was also at the fore of the creation of “Basic English”, a program of the World Wide Radio Foundation transmitted through shortwave in the mid-1930s. The paper presented by Michael Krysko discussed the context that led Walter Lemon to establish the program that aimed to create a common language that would boast understanding and economic exchange. Financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, “Basic English” was based on the idea of American exceptionalism and presented itself as being able to reach the language while resorting to a small number of words. Like Radio Nations, despite being considered a failure, the producers also received enthusiastic letters from listeners mostly from Latin America.

Derek Vaillant’s paper, “I Suppose You Might Say I’m Something of a Mulligan Stew: Gender Repair and Other Queer Behavior on U.S.–French talk radio” dealt with issues related to gender and queer on the program “Bonjour Madames”, a US-French transatlantic post-war talk radio program financed by the US State Department. Recorded in Paris, “Bonjour Madames” was targeted to women. The host Majorie Dunton regularly invited fashion designers and artists that celebrated women’s agency while discussing high French style and taste. Many of these guests were men that openly spoke of their artistic work while echoing liberal and queer lifestyles. The paper opened the discussion on how broadcasting can actively impact on taste and promote alternative cultural practices. These themes were also present in Christina Baade’s presentation on the post-war career of Vera Lynn, the English singer, screenwriter, and radio DJ. Entitled “Housewives’ Choice?: Vera Lynn as Lady DJ in the 1950s and 1960s”, the paper described Lynn’s representation as a DJ in the afterwar years in which she assumed a significant role on radio and television at a time during which the two media were mostly dominated by men.

During the discussion, Vaillant and Baade noted the impact of women’s voices on air in this period. For overseas British war broadcasting, Baade said, women’s voices were used on air to provide comfort – women were seen as bringing the voice of home to troops stationed overseas. They could be seen in a romantic or companionate light, in heteronormative terms, but they were not employed as news readers. Vaillant noted that women’s voices were not heard often in US domestic radio broadcasting, except in the sub-field of fashion news. They suggested the importance of raising new considerations about women’s voices in mid-century British and US radio: historians are accustomed to the narrative that there were no women’s voices on air, but it is important to ask and assess where and how they did appear. Further, the voices on and not on the air need to be further contextualized: the voices on air were not only male, but white. Class considerations need to be considered with voice as well: Baade noted that Very Lynn clearly and openly identified as coming from a working-class background. Unusually, she was not portrayed as a figure of fun, but as a serious and potentially even romantic voice. She was framed as unrelentingly sincere and sentimental, or earnest. Was this a way of making working class positionality acceptable to audiences?