Audio interviews
Listen to clips from oral history interviews conducted by Dr Eve Colpus on the research project in 2021 and 2022. Interviewees who volunteered to do an interview were children and adolescents during the years between 1984 and 1999, and lived in the UK. The interviews record childhood memories of telephones and telephone use.
Click on an audio button below to listen to a short memory and read a description.
Clip 1
Interviewee remembers making personal phone calls as a teenager to friends, and discusses the importance of phone calls to a friendship with one female friend in particular.
Clip 2
Interviewee recalls the answering machine in their childhood home (and checking it for messages), as well as a device the family used to store telephone numbers, which sat next to the home phone in the hallway.
Clip 3
Clip discusses telephone directories, including the Yellow Pages. Interviewee remembers paid advertisements in directories standing out. Also recalls having a Rolodex at home listing key telephone numbers, and knowing friends’ telephone numbers by-heart.
Clip 4
Interviewee discusses having one telephone in the family home in the lounge and the lack of privacy as a teenager to use the phone. Remembers parental expectations that the phone line should be kept free for work calls for father’s business.
Clip 5
Clip recalls the phone number of the Saturday morning children’s television programme, Going Live! (BBC One, 1987-93). Interviewee remembers watching the programme and seeing the phone number advertised and television presenters answering the telephone to children who phoned in.
Clip 6
Interviewee discusses getting a mobile phone aged 15. Recalls playing in a Sunday League football team with a friend and being mocked by other teammates for having a mobile phone.
Clip 7
Clip discusses media anxieties around young people’s phone use. Interviewee remembers seeing chat line telephone numbers in advertisement breaks of late-night television music programmes, and the likely concerns about the costs incurred by calling those numbers.
Clip 8
Interviewee discusses having limited memories of telephones in their first family home up to the age of 13. Main memory is of having to speak as a child on family phone calls to relations in New Zealand.
Clip 9
Interviewee describes their first mobile phone (Nokia 3310) which they got in 1998/1999. Clip discusses the game Snake on the mobile phone and memories of text messaging and text language.
Clip 10
Clip discusses animated television adverts for telephone numbers for the emergency services. Interviewee also remembers written instructions to dial 999 in an emergency that were printed and attached to landline telephones.
Clip 11
Clip recalls a promotion aimed at university students setting up a new bank account which was offered by the bank Natwest in 1998. The promotion included either a free mobile phone or cash.
The audio clips have been published with the permission of research participants (interviewees), and with the ethical approvals in University of Southampton ERGO number 56966.
Copyright and reuse
These oral history clips are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) .
Please see the Creative Commons FAQ page for further information:
https://creativecommons.org/faq/
To cite any of the interviews on this page, please use the following format: 'Clip Number [add number of clip]' [audio recording online], Audio interviews page, Telephonic Youth website <www.telephonicyouth.co.uk>, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/>
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