One of the unusual aspects of the film is its unromanticized view of 1970s England. No criticism of the film I have yet read has not mentioned the adjective "Ballardian" to describe the early shots of the capital, a London not of the Ritz and Buckingham Palace, but of ugly industry, dreary tower-blocks, and somehow menacing motorway flyovers. These early shots, coupled with the later similar views of Bristol are oddly reminiscent of the Paris of Godard's Alphaville (1965), or possibly the corner of Rome in Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962) — the use of contemporary architecture to predict a dystopian future.
More in common with the latter of these cinematic references, the film's somewhat nightmarish urban geography gives us the context of the film's making, Britain of the late 1970s, as do other cues: the Krautrock soundtrack of Kraftwerk and Berlin-era Bowie, the filtering in of new technologies such as audio cassettes and video games. Snippets of radio news reports offer the further context of ongoing IRA terrorist campaigns, anti-pornography raids, and violence underlying an England far removed from the austerity of the Fifties or the Swinging Sixties. If the film's title is a reference to Jonathan Richman's song Roadrunner, then it does not appear to share the singer's being "in love with the modern world".
This urban decay is in stark contrast to the pastoral countryside we see on the journey between the two cities, and the difference between these two Englands becomes a further point of interest. In a later scene, we enter an older lady's very middle-class household, the formality of her matching china teacups the epitome of picture-postcard British bourgeois living, and in direct contrast to the lives of everybody else we have seen in the film so far. Radio On feels a companion piece to post-punk's musical prediction of the civil unrest to follow under the Thatcher regime in the coming decade, in that it flags up the dichotomy between the vision of a supposed classless social ideal and the unfortunate reality of such a folly.
There is a wider point also here, regarding Britain's place in the world. On the one hand, there are many references to the closeness with Europe, in particular Germany, not just in the score, the visual aesthetic, and the prominent presence of German actress Lisa Kreuze, but also in more subtle ways, for instance the quiet paralleling of experiences of IRA and Baader-Meinhof terrorism. Even the credits appear bi-lingual in both English and German. And given that this is an existential road movie, is not existentialism itself a strictly European invention? At the time, Britain was seeing rising Euro-scepticism, and perhaps the film was calling on people to move closer rather than pull away from their continental cousins.
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