Three of the BBC’s most famous radio shows (two of which are still running on Radio 4) are launched, plus the prototype of a 21st-century TV sensation and some startling Russian content.
1942 – Desert Island Discs
The celebrity castaway show debuted on the emergency wartime service For The Forces (which ran programmes for soldiers at home and overseas). For some of those listeners, being stranded on an island was a plausible outcome. The first castaway for the creator and launch host Roy Plomley was Vic Oliver, an Austrian-born, UK-resident musician.
1943 – War and Peace
A common scheduling dilemma has always been whether to give audiences shows that take their minds off bad times or channel them. Spectacularly taking the latter approach, the BBC, four years after war was declared and two before peace, made an eight-part radio dramatisation of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel. Celia Johnson – soon to be cast in the movie Brief Encounter – played the romantic lead, Natasha. After a 1939 radio reading of Tolstoy’s novel by an actor, this was the second of nine BBC adaptations of the book on radio or TV, the most recent in 2016.
1944 – National Day of Prayer
Archives show that King George VI personally requested that Thursday 3 September, the fifth anniversary of Britain’s entry into war, be dedicated a national day of prayer, with a morning service for broadcast in workplaces and an address by the archbishop of Canterbury. This intervention shows the significant influence crown and church had over the BBC. The royal grip endures to this day; the religious grasp has slackened but lives on with Songs of Praise, on TV since 1961, and Thought for the Day, on Radio 4 since 1970.
1945 – Red Army
A primetime BBC celebration of Russia’s Red Army on its 27th anniversary, including a formal tribute to Marshal Joseph Stalin, seems extraordinary now, but reflects UK gratitude to the USSR as an ally against Hitler. The declaration of the cold war in 1947 prevented future Red Army landmarks being hailed, but performances by Red Army dancers and singers aired regularly well into the 1970s, when they further inflamed Thatcherite suspicion of the BBC’s alleged leftism and were dropped.
1946 – Woman’s Hour
Postwar, the services For the Forces (which had picked up many civilian listeners) became the Light Programme, while the classical musical strand of theHome Service was hived off into the Third Programme. At 2pm on 7 October, the Light schedule introduced a “daily programme of music, advice and entertainment for the home”. Because the men who ran the BBC feared female listeners would “resent” a female presenter, Alan Ivimey hosted, introducing talks by women on tricks for keeping their husbands’ suits crease-free and makeup tips to put “your best face forward”. When women were allowed to front the show, they formed a hall of female radio fame: Jean Metcalfe, Marjorie Anderson, Sue MacGregor, Martha Kearney, Jenni Murray, Jane Garvey, Emma Barnett, Anita Rani.
1947 – Rope
Resuming after a wartime break of nearly seven years, BBC Television was soon severely disrupted again by national fuel shortages but, even with all the interruptions, the medium as we know it was taking shape, including the big Sunday night drama. This adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s true-crime play starred Dirk Bogarde, a recently demobbed soldier who soon became a movie star. To allow use of theatre actors, dramas, at this stage all performed live, went out on Sundays – West End theatre’s night off.
1948 – Television Dancing Club
The little-known grandparent of a later BBC superfranchise, this Monday night hit extended the corporation’s mission to teach ballroom dancing. Under dance-band leader Victor Silvester, professional hoofers demonstrated one step a week. It ran for eight series, with the genre swelled from 1949 by Come Dancing, which was a professional competition rather than amateur instruction. On radio, BBC Light Programme’s Show Time began another unstoppable phenomenon by introducing, among “up and coming talent”, Lancastrian comedians called Morecambe and Wise.
1949 – How Do You View?
British TV’s first half-hour comedy show – launching another juggernaut genre – starred Terry-Thomas, a comedian whose stardom was built on the persona of a raffish, toffish bachelor about town. This pioneering sitcom purported to show scenes from his week, but it had an unexpected postmodernist twist, with the star seen walking around the Lime Grove studios where the show was made.
1950 – Cookery Lesson
The earliest TV schedules had prototype food shows, though they were compromised by postwar rationing. Culinary programming in a form we still recognise began with chef Philip Harben giving (as Delia Smith later would) weekly lessons in the basic principles of cooking.
1951 – Crazy People
As competition from TV increased, the wireless Home Service was still launching glories of broadcasting. One 1951 debut – the rural soap opera The Archers – would take time to build impact, but Crazy People was an instant hit, though better remembered under its later name, The Goon Show. The original cast – Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine – all had significant individual careers but, as a quartet, understood the surrealistic possibilities of a medium in which an actor could become anyone or anything through vocal ingenuity. Only three when it started, the future King Charles III would become one of the sketch show’s many obsessive fans.
• Coming up tomorrow in part four (1952-1961) – the class of 1926 change TV.
