By Clive Freeman, DPA
Berlin : Raina Konstantinova, president of the powerful European Broadcasting Union (EBU), has claimed in Berlin that radio continues to attract “ever-increasing numbers of listeners throughout Europe and the world”.
“Right now you have in Europe almost 95 million people who listen to the radio almost three hours a day,” the EBU boss told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) in a weekend interview in Berlin.
Far from dying, radio listenership is increasing, she insists, “with statistics proving this.”
Impressed by the sheer number of radio, TV and internet productions entered for the 21st Prix Europa event in the German capital Oct 13-20, Konstantinova spoke cheerfully of radio’s achievement in managing to “reinvent itself” in the digital age.
Internet was a natural ally of the radio, she said, and had helped it gain new media platforms.
“You work on your PC and you listen to the radio; you also have the radio on your mobile and listen to radio on digital,” she said.
Konstantinova claimed radio traditionally depended on the spoken word and music, two elements that were “important for intelligent, thinking people.”
Some public and commercial TV stations had tried to maintain high quality programme content, but this was difficult because “it is more and more expensive, whereas radio is very cheap.”
Statistically and realistically, radio was doing better and better, she argued, ridiculing rumours of a few years back that it was “a dying industry.”
Konstantinova said her message to Prix Europa participants and to the 45 major participating stations across Europe was that “radio could be a bridge of understanding.”
“Culture is not just a matter of the elitist arts, but is also about people wanting to live in harmony together in a continent becoming more and more diverse, more and more multi-cultural,” she added.
In a message sent to Berlin, Hans-Gert Pottering, the president of the European Parliament, spoke of Prix Europa becoming the continent’s most “integrative television, radio and internet festival” in the past two decades, and proving an important link for Europe’s media culture.
Programmes in the Berlin festival cover a bewildering range of themes. Among them are entries about climate change, recycling and terrorism.
A Ukraine TV documentary titled Children Against Chernobyl is about a children’s musical ensemble that tours the world, helping to raise money for medicine and equipment for Ukrainian hospitals – some 21 years after the nuclear power plant explosion at Chernobyl.
A Polish radio documentary, March of the Living by Waldemar Kasperczak, focuses on an event last year at the former Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in which wartime camp survivors’ recollections are to be heard, interlaced with prayers, songs and the impressions of present-day youngsters.
A second Polish radio documentary, Georgia – Fragments of Memory by Malgorzata Zerwe, is about Bulgarian-born Georgia Peet, who spent her childhood in Warsaw but was later transported to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp during World War II, even though she was not Jewish.
After the Soviets liberated the camp, she remained in what was to become communist East Germany, working later as a translator and journalist, and getting to know literary luminaries like Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Busch while standing, as she puts it, “on the left side” of the political fence.
Author-director Malgorzata Zerwe visits Georgia Peet, now 84 years old, in her Friedrichstrasse apartment in Berlin, recording her impressions of life among the prominent in the former German Democratic Republic.
Georgia’s late husband, John, a Reuters news agency correspondent based in West Berlin in the late 1950s, made headlines when, in a dramatic action at the height of the East-West Cold War, he fled from West to East Berlin after falling in love with Georgia.
Later he was to become a communist propagandist and editor of a magazine in the east.
The Prix Europa organizers say by staging the Berlin event they hope to promote the trademark – made in Europe – and to reflect the complete spectrum of European productions, as well as being a forum for “quality” programmes.
Winners from among the 255 radio, TV and internet programmes nominated for the festival from 671 entries are to be announced at an awards gala in Berlin Saturday at which cash awards totalling 110,700 dollars (78,000 euros) are due to be distributed.