[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":127},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-livy-wijemanne":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":90,"description":91,"died":92,"era":93,"extension":94,"heroImage":95,"imageCredit":96,"imageLicense":97,"imageSource":98,"meta":99,"navigation":100,"notable":101,"path":102,"roles":103,"seo":105,"sources":106,"stem":125,"translated":100,"url":109,"__hash__":126},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Flivy-wijemanne.md","Livy Wijemanne",null,1917,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":82},"minimark",[11,15,18,23,26,29,32,36,39,42,45,49,52,69,73,76,79],[12,13,14],"p",{},"On 2 June 1953, in Westminster Abbey, one seat in the section reserved for Commonwealth broadcasters was occupied by a young man from Baddegama in the Galle District. The BBC had chosen him to cover the coronation of Elizabeth II. He had arrived in Britain only months earlier, in the very first batch of Colombo Plan scholars sent from Ceylon, and had spent the spring learning the trade in Scotland, Wales and London alongside John Arlott, the most famous descriptive voice in English broadcasting.",[12,16,17],{},"Three years later, Livy Rajasinghe Wijemanne was running the most listened-to radio service in South Asia.",[19,20,22],"h2",{"id":21},"the-announcer-who-was-given-a-desk","The announcer who was given a desk",[12,24,25],{},"He was educated at Royal College, Colombo, and joined the station as an announcer. On 31 October 1948 the Postmaster-General — who in those days was also the Director of Broadcasting — appointed him Assistant Controller of Programmes. He was thirty-one, and it was the start of a management career at the oldest radio station in South Asia.",[12,27,28],{},"The station had just moved from Cotta Road to Torrington Square and, in the words of the journalist Noel Cruz, \"needed drive and Wijemanne provided it. He identified talent, welcomed new broadcasters and any experiments in presentation. It was Livy who first mapped out the logistics of 'Outside broadcasts', especially of the entertainment programmes relayed from the big hotels.\"",[12,30,31],{},"That last sentence is the whole reason a broadcasting administrator belongs in a history of Sinhala song. Before magnetic tape was cheap and before a Sri Lankan record industry existed, the only way most of the island could hear a live performance was if the radio station sent equipment out to it. Outside broadcasts turned hotel ballrooms, town halls and open-air stages into recording venues by proxy. A band that could hold an audience at the Mount Lavinia or the Galle Face could, on a good night, be heard from Jaffna to Matara.",[19,33,35],{"id":34},"succeeding-dodd","Succeeding Dodd",[12,37,38],{},"In 1950 the Australian broadcaster Clifford R. Dodd arrived under the Colombo Plan to run the newly created Commercial Service. Dodd was abrasive — a colleague recorded his credo as \"hire and fire\" — and he was also transformative. He drilled the staff to a professional standard the region had never seen and turned a small government station into a commercial powerhouse, selling advertising to Indian sponsors at a time when All India Radio would not broadcast film songs at all. Sri Lankan cartoonist Aubrey Collette immortalised him as \"Odd Man Dodd.\"",[12,40,41],{},"Wijemanne was Dodd's closest Ceylonese colleague. He was made assistant director of the Commercial Service in 1955, and in 1956 succeeded Dodd as its Director — the first Ceylonese to hold the post. What the two of them built together was, above everything else, a recruiting and training machine. They went looking for voices and then taught them the craft: the roll-call of announcers who came through Radio Ceylon in those years includes Vernon Corea, Thevis Guruge, Mervyn Jayasuriya, Eardley Peiris, Greg Roszkowski, Pearl Ondaatje, Chris Greet and Prosper Fernando, among many others. A generation of Sri Lankan broadcasters learned their trade from two men, one Australian and one from Baddegama.",[12,43,44],{},"The reach was extraordinary and is not exaggerated in the retelling. Radio Ceylon was picked up across the subcontinent, from Pakistan to Burma, and occasionally as far as the United States. When Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay turned on a transistor after coming down from Everest in May 1953, what they heard was Radio Ceylon's All Asia Service.",[19,46,48],{"id":47},"what-that-power-did-to-sinhala-song","What that power did to Sinhala song",[12,50,51],{},"A national broadcaster with that kind of monopoly does two things at once: it makes careers, and it decides what a country is allowed to hear. Radio Ceylon did both.",[12,53,54,55,59,60,64,65,68],{},"On the making side, a single broadcast could turn an unknown into a household name, and the station's grading and audition system determined who was allowed near a microphone at all. On the other side, the same institution had officials with firm views about taste. When the guitar-and-harmony bands of the early 1960s began putting Latin American rhythms under Sinhala words — the La Ceylonians with ",[56,57,58],"strong",{},"හෝයියා හෝයියා"," ",[61,62,63],"em",{},"Hoiya Hoiya",", a song about fishermen, and Los Caballeros with their Spanish guitar lines — the new sound was dismissed in some quarters of the station as ",[61,66,67],{},"thuppahi sangeethaya",", half-caste music, and kept off the air. Annesley Malewana of the Moonstones has said it took Vijaya Corea, giving the bands airplay on the English service, to break the embargo. No source names Wijemanne in that particular argument, and it would be unfair to place him on either side of it; but it is the world he ran, and the story of Sinhala pop is unintelligible without it.",[19,70,72],{"id":71},"chairman","Chairman",[12,74,75],{},"He went on being useful to the institution for another three decades. He was the founder president of the Colombo Plan International Society, the alumni association of the scholars he had been among the first of, and he worked as a mass communications consultant for the rest of his life. In January 1984 he was appointed Chairman of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, the body Radio Ceylon had become in 1972, and he served as its Director-General. He was instrumental in starting the corporation's FM service — the appreciation published after his death calls him the founder of \"the very popular Radio FM Service\", the round-the-clock music channel that most Sri Lankans under fifty now think of as what radio simply is.",[12,77,78],{},"He was honoured with the title Kalasuri. He was a senior vice-president of the Royal College Old Boys' Union, and his funeral was crowded with old boys, staff and students. Livy Wijemanne died in Colombo on Sunday 24 November 2002, aged eighty-five, after a brief illness. He left his wife Gladys, three daughters and a son.",[12,80,81],{},"There is no biography of him and no archive of his programmes under his own name, which is the usual fate of the people who run things. The evidence of what he did is indirect and enormous: every Sinhala song that reached a village in the 1950s and 1960s reached it through a transmitter, on a schedule, read in by an announcer somebody had auditioned, trained and put on the payroll. Wijemanne was the man who did the auditioning.",{"title":83,"searchDepth":84,"depth":84,"links":85},"",2,[86,87,88,89],{"id":21,"depth":84,"text":22},{"id":34,"depth":84,"text":35},{"id":47,"depth":84,"text":48},{"id":71,"depth":84,"text":72},"1917","The Radio Ceylon announcer who became the first Ceylonese to run its Commercial Service, built the outside-broadcast and talent-finding machinery behind Sinhala song, and ended as chairman of the SLBC.","24 November 2002","1940s-1980s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Flivy-wijemanne.webp","Laksara","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.laksara.com\u002Fradio-ceylon-page1\u002F",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Flivy-wijemanne",[104],"Broadcaster",{"title":5,"description":91},[107,110,113,116,119,122],{"title":108,"url":109},"Livy Wijemanne — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FLivy_Wijemanne",{"title":111,"url":112},"ලිවි විජේමාන්න — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%BD%E0%B7%92%E0%B7%80%E0%B7%92_%E0%B7%80%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%A2%E0%B7%9A%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%8F%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%B1",{"title":114,"url":115},"Appreciations: Kalasuri Livy Wijemanne — Daily Mirror, 3 December 2002 (archived)","https:\u002F\u002Fweb.archive.org\u002Fweb\u002F20050318105400\u002Fhttp:\u002F\u002Fwww.dailymirror.lk\u002Finside\u002Fapp\u002F021203.html",{"title":117,"url":118},"Radio Ceylon: King of the Airwaves in the Mid-Twentieth Century — Gaston de Rosayro, Daily News, reposted on Thuppahi's Blog","https:\u002F\u002Fthuppahis.com\u002F2021\u002F09\u002F13\u002Fradio-ceylon-king-of-the-airwaves-in-the-mid-twentieth-century\u002F",{"title":120,"url":121},"Songs and sarongs: The birth of Lankan calypso — The Sunday Times, 5 May 2013","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F130505\u002Fplus\u002Fsongs-and-sarongs-the-birth-of-lankan-calypso-43067.html",{"title":123,"url":124},"Clifford Dodd — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FClifford_Dodd","en\u002Fpeople\u002Flivy-wijemanne","erqp7RiauOipMlpv3HNxpMF7Evnf-ftrd37PmoGJnKU",1787999332417]