The following is taken from the Sunday Times, August 19, 2012:

by Paul Donovan

A year ago, I championed the idea of a “World Radio Day” on August 14. It was in support of a proposal by Tom Lodge, the former Radio Caroline DJ and grandson of the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, who transmitted what many regard as the first radio signal on that day in 1894.

This was intended only as a pebble cast into the pond of public debate. However, it transpired that others were throwing even larger rocks in exactly the same direction. World Radio Day has now moved from suggestion to substance, and no longer requires inverted commas around it.

Last November, Unesco  formally adopted a proposal, from Spain, of a World Radio Day as a celebration of the medium and a way of raising awareness of its global potential in education, emergencies and disaster relief. It has its own website, worldradioday.org, and its existence will be endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations next month.

The date that has been chosen is not August 14 but February 13, the anniversary of the establishment in 1946 of UN Radio (which is, unfortunately, a well-kept secret). The few gatherings that took place this year in Britain received virtually no publicity, but any next year may be harder to ignore, partly because they will have received the UN’s imprimatur by then and, more significantly, because the joyous Olympic Games have made us more internationally minded.

Will World Radio Day have any more impact than Pi Day, World Poetry Day, World Peace Day or even downmarket equivalents such as Sausage Month, however? That depends on whether broadcasters seize the opportunity. I think they will. There is enough time to prepare, and Tim Davie, the BBC’s head of audio and music, has said: “A day focused on celebrating radio can only bring joy to the world.”

February 13 is quite an interesting day: it was when Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened, the first Barbie doll went on sale and The New York Times published its longest-ever sentence (1,286 words, more than twice the length of this column). So programme one on February 13 next year, which happens to be a Wednesday and could thus get puffed on Midweek in the morning, could be a what-happened-on-this-day-in-history anthology.

Programme two, as an addition or alternative, could be an hour’s roundup of radio events from this day. February 13, to take only a few examples, is when the BBC first dramatised a Barbara Cartland novel (The Enchanting Evil on Radio 4 in 1995, one of those bodice-rippers about wholesome young virgins and rancid old noblemen); when Willie Rushton played Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows; when Gregory Hines started his history of black Broadway musical theatre, One Mo’ Time, and Ludovic Kennedy started his of the American railroad, Behind the Iron Horse.

Whatever the broadcasters think of these ideas, World Radio Day should be in their diaries now. Sadly, it will all be too late for Tom Lodge: he died of cancer in March, at the age of 75.