Afterlives of BBC Radio Features

Abstract

An article published in Media History 24.2 (May 2018), a special issue on the theme of 'Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC' to the general case for radio as a medium worthy of serious study. Much important work has been done, and the valuable links forged between literary scholars and those with a more media historical perspective are mutually enriching.The fact remains, however, that a good deal of the output of the Features Department remains under-explored, whether as a result of long-term invisibility of works owing to absence of a creative afterlife, the lack of fame attached to the writer's name or issues relating to the preservation and accessibility of archival material. Even Louis MacNeice-whose radio writing has been published, investigated, interpreted and appreciated perhaps as much as, if not more than, any writer of features-was so prolific that scores of his features remain largely unknown. 4 The output of certain radio-writers has therefore achieved a kind of canonical status as a result of their literary standing beyond radio and because of the (not unrelated) revival and intermedial recirculation of their writing for radio. This essay seeks to illustrate the ways in which the sense of an informal canon of literary radio features may have arisen-for audiences past and scholars present-through an exploration of the rich intermedial afterlives of three literary features: Edward Sackville-West's The Rescue (1943), Louis MacNeice's The Dark Tower (1946) and Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood (1954). First, I outline aspects of the symbiotic relationship between radio and print forms-from the Radio Times, to The Listener, BBC pamphlets, books and libraries. Radio's close relationship with print-as demonstrated in all three examplessuggests that in some sense radio was ephemeral only in theory. Not only did the chronological framing of the audio experience (at least as it was planned up to the moment of printing) leave its trace in published listings (a 'modernist text' in itself, argues Kate Lacey in this volume) and the bare transcript of some features, sometimes with descriptions of sound, exist in magazines or books, but radio programmes were also remembered. They lingered in the imagination, became part of the collective fabric of cultural experience and stimulated the widely held desire for repeated engagements with interesting content. The experience of radio, then, is (or, at least, can be) quite the opposite of ephemeral. It was partly in response to this long-lasting imaginative impact of radio and the appetite it created for repeated or recalled experience that many features made it into the permanence of print. Writers with established relationships with publishers were, it seems, easily able to satisfy their own keen wish to see their radio-writing printed in books and the listener-reader's appetite for features-in-print was strong.The question of how we may achieve a fuller knowledge of features in this period, one that extends beyond the relatively well-known and accessible wor...