22 April 2008 / Utrecht

A live radio broadcast of Steve Rushton’s radio play, The Germ, which imagines the meeting of the ghosts of Louis Pasteur and Henriette Roland Holst, whom two streets on this site are named after.  

Act One: Transmission – prayer and radio 
Act Two: Transmission – disease 
Act Three: Radio Utopia – flying 

Archive: [1] Lux Radio Theatre, advert for Lux Soap (1936) — [2] Voice one [3]: We’re on the corner of Pasteurstraat and Henriette Roland Holststraat in Utrecht. Tonight we will use the medium of radio to engineer a meeting between the ghosts of the chemist Louis Pasteur and the radical poet Henriette Roland Holst, after whom these streets are named.  

Archive: [4] extract from Story Of Louis Pasteur, Lux Radio Theatre (1936), Pasteur’s speech to the Scientists of the future [5] 

Voice two [6]: Such a meeting is possible because of the close association that has always existed between the technology of radio and the world of ghosts…  

[1] Fade in
[2] fade out after ‘ladies and gentlemen Mr Cecil B. DeMille…
[3] exterior/street
[4] Cross fade to
[5] fade into
[6] interior/ studio