Mona Abouissa listens in as Ramadan fills the radio waves once again The streets are decorated with traditionally flamboyant lamps, or fawanees. As the long-anticipated sunset begins, the smells of Iftar fill the city, tables are made ready to sate fasters' hunger. The sense of community is at its highest and family gatherings become all-important. This Ramadan, most citizens are saving up to pay record prices for food, due to the recent inflation crisis. On the media level, it's a race for prime time and a moment of glory. Producers, directors, and script-writers all pull their best cards out, making moves they have been preparing for months in advance. Advertisement placement rates doubled in peak Ramadan viewing hours, as the audience is ready to give their senses over to the media. And after years of waning glory, it's time for the grandmother of Egyptian media channels -- radio -- to bring on the nostalgia. If television temporarily borrows its audience's imagination, radio certainly works hard to appeal once more. More than the last, this Ramadan's radio programming is delivering a broad palette of dramas, successfully attracting new listeners. The journey through the unwieldy, inaccessible skeleton of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union to explore the tale behind the microphone, is indeed a remarkable one. On the fourth floor of the union building, where radio network Sawt Al-Arab (Arabs' Voice) is housed, the corridor holds 74 years of radio history. Photographs of Egyptian radio's first president Arthur Dilani, the late president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, and media figures that had a true impact on television history fill the corridor. Among them are Ahmed Harag and Saad Labib, as well as the young Inas Gohar, current president of Egyptian Radio and the second woman to hold that position. Other household names, including scriptwriter Wahid Kamel, Zakaria El-Heggawi, Mohamed Fadel, Mohamed Ali and more, first hit stardom through Egypt's radio rooms. Meanwhile, radio has continuously evolved in tandem with the themes of the dramas it produced. When we think of radio drama, we remember El-Heggawi, pioneer of radio drama with his Pearl Necklace and the first to introduce a lyrical piece at the start and ending of each serial episode. When TV with its visual miracles had barely started to lure away audiences, the radio repertoire featured folkloric shows such as Mamalik, Samara and Awad Sold his Land. The popularity of these programmes and dramas in the 1960s and 1970s literally brought people to interrupt their daily routine, grab their transistors, and place them close to their ears to start listening and imagining. National Theatre actor and occasional drama script editor for the Radio and Television Union Ahmed El-Saadani remembers that period well. El-Saadani could not sustain his career as a television actor and retreated to radio, he explained, caressing his curly beard -- the reason for his shift. "I stubbornly hold to my beliefs," El-Saadani said. "I only feel that I exist when I am on radio." He added that he would never give up and return to television. Yet nostalgia overwhelmed him when he thought back of the times when radio drew from the imagination rather than the real world's problems, as in today's radio dramas. This Ramadan featured for the most part dramas relating to current issues, though many were tinged with folklore. Whatever the genre -- comedy or drama -- this year's dramas were centred upon current social or political issues. Among the issues were patriotism, democracy, the occupation of Iraq, gaps in education, problems of youth, unemployment and of course love intrigues. As Saad El-Kaleyi, a 37-year-old award-winning TV and radio script writer, explained, "recently there have been many problems, which explains this special interest in current affairs. Besides, there are not too many writers with a rich folkloric background. At the moment there is a new generation of writers who are interested in what's happening now." Shocked by current events in Baghdad and driven by his admiration for Abbasid history, El-Kaleyi wrote a radio drama series Qamar Baghdad (The Moon of Baghdad), directed by Fatima Hassan, and broadcast this Ramadan. The drama narrates a historically disputed love story allegedly dating back to the Abbasid Empire, between Baniya Al-Abbasiya, the daughter of Caliph Al-Mahdi Haroun Al-Rashid, and Jaafar Al-Baramaki of Persian origins. Despite the emperor's esteem for Jaafar, the Abbasids keenly preserved the purity of their Arab-Hashemite bloodline. The love story has a tragic ending, and merges historical facts with the writer's imagination. Such has been El-Kileyi's success that his colleagues at the Radio and Television Union are certain that either Qamar Baghdad or El-Kileyi's latest radio drama Zeina will win an award at the 14th Radio and Television Cairo Festival, set to be held in November. Also amusing is the fact that this year has featured a strong interest in celebrity-endorsement in radio serials. Two examples spring to mind right away. For one, Mimi Arabeyat (Mimi Cars) broadcast by Nogoum FM was directed by Abdel-Maqsoud Mohamed and written by Sadeq Sharshar, and starred Hani Ramzi and comic actress Hala Fakher. Studio 36 delivered another radio serial with a starry line-up -- Ya Mehani Deil Al-Asfoura -- starring movie actress Nelly Karim and rising star Khaled Saleh, written by a famous scriptwriter Osama Anwar Okasha and directed by Safieddin Hassan. The music for this series too was composed by prominent figure Ammar El-Sherei. Since 1995, the number of radio networks has gone up from four to six. Each network has more than one radio channel, and each has introduced several radio serials this Ramadan -- certainly making them more numerous than they were last year. And although television has its obvious appeal, radio still manages to capture the hearts of many artists. "An artist is always moved by the set of ideas that our surroundings inspire," said radio and theatre director Ibrahim Abdel-Salam. "Beauty is not the point here," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Instead, it's about content." He recently directed a Ramadan radio comedy Shaker wa Shakeer, written by Mohamed Abul-Nasr. The story revolves around two young characters -- singer Shaker who studied music, and amateur actor Shakeer who pursued his career whilst disregarding learning. The morale is simple: knowledge brings success while ignorance breeds failure. Abdel-Salam says the comedy reflects current social problems whereby the young generation chooses the route of trying without thinking, believing that this way they will satisfy their ambitions. "Ignorance is an accumulated phenomenon, layer after layer it condenses until one day we realise that we have a serious problem," he said. On the question of whether a comic approach towards such a serious issue will distort the message, he replied that comedy reaches listeners' minds while drama targets the emotions. "The hero is there to deliver the idea, not only to make you laugh," Abdel-Salam told the Weekly. On a more personal note, he said that although he enjoys working on radio programming, his heart belongs to the stage -- unlike his colleague, radio series director Tamer Hosni Ghanim, whose heart belongs to the radio. For his part Ghanim also directed a comic radio series for the same network, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. His serial centres around the deficiency of imported Chinese products, and is called Halazoni TV. Written by Ayman Abdel-Rahman, the series stars movie actors Hassan Hosni, Ramez Galal, Donia Ghanem and Edward. Ghanim has a strong faith in radio, though it is a tough medium as "it depends 99 per cent on the voice," he said. "The radio director has a hard task to transform the visual picture into sound so you can enjoy the story through your ears." Radio drama director Mohamed Ali also believes it is a tough job. "Television has the advantage of visuals, facial expressions, body language and decoration, but radio has only the voice to depend on, rendering it a far more difficult medium to direct," Ali told the Weekly. This Ramadan he directed Sharq Al-Nakheel, or East of the Palm Trees, based on a novel by prominent Egyptian author Bahaa Taher, starring Ahmed El-Saadani and Hanan Matawe, and broadcast on the radio's main network of general programming. The drama is about the meaning of land across different social classes, as portrayed through two families having disputes about a piece of land. The setting is the hardship of the great depression of the 1960s and the days of the Israeli occupation of Sinai. In effect it is a symbolic drama made to guide listeners' attention towards current political instabilities in the Middle East. Ali, like his colleagues, has eight to nine years' experience in radio, although he is looking forward to enter the world of television, simply because it's financially more lucrative. "A radio director may earn around LE1,000 monthly, while a TV director gets paid 10 times more. So it is effectively like moving from the ground floor to the penthouse," Ali said. Meanwhile, he added that this Ramadan's dramas were mostly directed by young directors. So in spite of the weaker salaries enthusiasm remains strong, it appears. The young directors' passion also showed in the warmth they showed the media, as they tirelessly explained the nuances of radio drama producing -- unlike their older peers who mostly stuck to modest comments and the framework of their busy schedules. Fatigue brought on by fasting showed on the faces of personnel at the Radio and Television Union, yet life is pumping 24 hours a day, with people running up and down the stairs and going on and off the air, doors opening and closing, and meetings beginning and ending. Indeed it appears that Ramadan is still very alive behind the radio microphone.
