We wanted to let the players listen to the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day, and so decided to built several radio sets so they could listen to 1950s programmes.
To do this I bought 3 old radios from Ebay and gutted them, putting an MP3 player and speaker inside each. I wired the speaker cable through the old power switches on the radio.
Then we put together a single MP3 track of about 14 hours of audio programme a day, and set it playing at about 8am every day. The players would be able to switch the radio’s power button and the speaker would switch on and switch off, but the MP3 would keep playing whatever happened. This meant that programmes would play at the right time.
So we found lots of old BBC archived programmes and mixed in recordings of our own radio announcer and our own news programmes, where we were able to reference events that involved the family. We were also able to find an archive copy of the Queen’s Speech and add that into the mix.