This story was originally published in The Conversation.
If the news of former ABC Sydney radio presenter James Valentine's death hit you hard, and you're wondering why, it makes sense to me.
For many listeners, the strange part is not just the grief but having to account for it. He wasn't your friend. Or was he? He wasn't someone you'd meet for coffee. And yet it can feel like that kind of relationship. The sense of loss is real.
I'm in that position too. I didn't know James personally. I knew him the way listeners do, through the radio. I did speak to him once, years ago, when I was a junior broadcaster trying to get better at the job. He agreed to talk to me about how he thought about his work in a project that became a PhD.
Vale James Valentine. Picture: Australian Broadcasting Corporation
What struck me then, and has stayed with me since, is how clearly he understood his connection with his listeners. He understood it was a strange asymmetrical relationship, but that didn't mean it was one-sided.
The first question I asked him was how different he was off-radio compared to on. He told me:
I don't think [it's] very different at all. People walk up to me in the street and start talking to me like they're my friend and in fact they are. They are my friend. I don't know them very well but they know me extremely well.
He didn't see this as something mistaken. He understood how the relationship worked and it was as important to him as it was to his listener. It wasn't something to correct. He had a way to hold the tension. He told me:
I conceive of them as a collective mass, one at a time.
A relationship over the airways
The affection James had for his listeners was genuine. "I love the audience. They're my people."
It might not look like other kinds of reciprocal friendship, but for James the connection wasn't abstract or imagined – it drove the way he made radio.
What mattered to him, he told me, was what the program did for listeners in the middle of the mundane. To lighten the load. To make people laugh. To bring a bit of joy, or, as he liked to say, whimsy, to an otherwise unremarkable afternoon.
"It's all about them," he said. "If I make it all about them, I get my jollies."
Listening back to the interview now, what also comes through is how deliberate that way of being on air actually is. It sounds easy, like someone simply talking. But that's the work. As he put it,
you become experienced at drawing on yourself … finding the bits that you're comfortable about bringing in […] well aware of the areas you don't want to touch upon.
Knowing what to say, what to leave out, how much of yourself to bring in and how much to hold back. Done well, a voice starts to feel familiar. Part of the rhythm of the day. Something you return to without really thinking about it.
There is a word for this kind of relationship: parasocial . It's used to describe that sense of friendship you feel with someone on the radio or TV. But we don't often get to hear about it from the other side. What came through in the way James talked about his work was that he understood it and valued it.
As a listener it can feel weirdly one-sided. You know a lot about someone who doesn't know you at all. But that isn't how he understood it. He knew exactly what was going on. He knew you knew him. And he knew you were real. Not in some abstract sense, but as a person who had made space for him in their day, who had let his voice become part of their routine.
He could only ever encounter his audience as a collective, one at a time. But he didn't reduce them to that. He worked with the relationship as it was.
It was about the listener
When I asked him what he takes from the work his answer was simple. It was about the listener. Sometimes people told him "I love it when you're back after the holidays". Or "I missed you the other day". Or "I'm always happy when I've got to do the laundry at that time because I know I can listen to you".
James' response to that was:
Thanks! That's a pretty good thing to carry away … you create a great lasting sense of having done something for somebody that's quite a nice thing to have done.
It can feel strange to grieve someone you never met. To try to make sense of why it matters. But from what he told me, I don't think James Valentine would have questioned it. He understood the relationship he had with you, and he took it seriously. He recognised it. So if it feels real, that's because it is.
