Public Issue Radio

Gender, Radio Broadcasting and the Role of the Public Intellectual: The BBC Career of Margery Fry, 1928–1958

“…It has been argued that some of Fry's Bloomsbury friends expressed distain towards popular culture. 72 This was not the case for Fry herself, who despite her decidedly uppermiddle class personal tastes, was not an elitist. While the small freelance income from her appearances was undoubtedly welcome, she maintained that media work attracted her mainly because broadcasting was a 'potent factor in extending the freemasonry of knowledgeable thought and reasoned ideas which used to be the almost exclusive possession of a relatively small (and emphatically social) class'.…”

“…Evidence suggests that Fry was able to master the softer, more conversational style of speech which was promoted by Matheson and her successors. 16 Her talk on Robert Owen began when she drew on the listener's imagination: 'let us imagine ourselves in the town of Shrewsbury more than 150 years ago. The night coach is starting for London…' 17 On Florence Nightingale and Lister, she started with a brief comparison of infant death rates in the time of Wollstonecraft, Nightingale, and in 1930, and asked rhetorically 'how many of us would have died in our cradles if health matters had stood still for a hundred years?'…”

“…As Chignell remarks, the 'central question [was]… who has the right to speak' to the nation? 5 This article examines the broadcast work of Margery Fry, one of the few women able to break through the gendered barriers and establish a reputation as an intellectual and cultural commentator on the BBC, as well as serving for a brief period as a BBC governor. It demonstrates the extent to which Fry's cultural capital and reputation as a public intellectual transcended her gender.…”

“…Although less well-known today than some of her male equivalents or her friend, Virginia Woolf, Fry does fit Chignell's criteria of a 'celebrity' who 'held dangerously radical views' yet was apparently welcomed onto the airwaves. 7 Her broadcasting career is well-documented in the 'talk' scripts held in her papers and at the BBC Written Archives Centre as well as in the Listener and other journals, documentation which demonstrates the extent of her exposure to the listening (and later viewing) public.…”

Universality Without Normativity: Interpreting the Demand of Kantian Judgements of Taste

“…As Andrew Chignell puts it, symbolism gives us a sense for whether a supersensible concept such as the good is possible "by drawing an analogy between its relationship to something we know to be really possible, and the relationship between two other things that we know to be really possible." 13 So, there is something analogous between the way we judge taste and the way we judge the morally good. But this does not show that judgements of beauty are (continued) that the universality of beauty is analogous to, not dependent on, the universality of morality.…”