I saw the Pet Shop Boys on TV last night and it is the first time I had seen them for ages.....they were older and different from how I remember them and yet the voices were the same.

I guess we all hold an "image" of people we only listen to and it often surprising when we see someone whose voice we know from radio or the telephone. We might say 'It's good to put a name to the face' but often we are surprised as our imagined version and the real thing may be very different.

I can't recall exactly when the Buggles sang "Video Killed the Radio Star" but there is something in the lyrics that is true. But it is not just the Radio Star, but their audience's imaginations too that are killed, or at least weakened.

As a child we did not have TV in the house and the soaps were all on the radio, their original home. I have hazy recollections of 'Mrs Dale's Diary' and 'Waggoner's Walk' and, of course, the longest running radio soap of all, 'The Archers'. Listening I had to imagine how the people looked, the rooms or other scenes they were in. I imagined the colours and the action. I knew they were really in a studio but I suspended reality and imagined.

When I had children of my own, long car journeys were made exciting by listening to books like Wind in the Willows or Alice in Wonderland being read by the likes of Alan Bennet or Stephen Fry. Again our imaginations ran riot and I remember sitting in the car, having arrived at our destination, listening to the last few 'pages' of a chapter.

Now it is all presented to me on TV, DVD, CD, PC or whatever and my imagination is almost redundant. 

Progress must be made and life must change; I am not against modern things nor change, but we need **************** will be the life-blood of what pulls us out of this "crunch" of the economy. Who has the imagination to think differently, boldly, 'out of the box'?

Where will this revitalisation come form? I can't imagine.