Radio drama.

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30Radio dramaHugh Chignell

A media historian interested in British radio drama might be surprised by the absenceof any published history of the subject or the lack of relevant articles in academicjournals. In his survey of British radio drama, Priessnitz (1981) laments the paucityof reviews in the press (compared to theater reviews) and the poor quality of radiocriticism, which is often merely “personal preference”. Asa Briggs, in volume five ofhis history of British broadcasting (1995), covering 1955–74, a volume of over 1,100pages, barely mentions radio drama at all. He does mention the great radio dramatistGiles Cooper, but for his television not his radio writing. There is no mention at allof Val Gielgud (Head of Drama at the BBC from 1934 to 1963) or Samuel Beckett.We should not be tempted by this omission to think that there is nothing of interestfor the media historian in radio drama; far from it – from its invention early in thetwentieth century drama has been used in a variety of ways on radio and the story ofits development is instructive for students of both radio and drama.

The historical study of radio drama presents a problem of classification. Somedrama heard on radio is an adaptation of a stage play or a book or even a film. Thismay differ from the drama written especially for radio and the latter often makesfuller use of radio’s unique qualities. There is also the ‘radio feature’, which com-bined documentary with creative and dramatic elements and was a very importantpart of BBC radio output in the last century. It will be examined here. Then thereare long-running radio serials (most notably The Archers since 1951) not to mentionvarious types of radio comedy. For the purposes of this chapter I will not discussradio comedy in any depth and I will confine my remarks to the twentieth century.In effect this is a schematic account of radio drama in the analogue, as opposed tothe digital, era, a theme I will return to in the conclusion. This is also, for reasons ofspace, only a history of BBC radio drama; a fuller account would have to acknowl-edge, for example, drama broadcast by Radio Luxemburg in the 1950s and duringthe era of Independent Local Radio from 1973 to 1990.

The early years

Following radio drama experiments of different kinds before the arrival of the BBCin 1922 (see in particular the account by Alan Beck, n.d.), it did find a place

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alongside talks, music and religion in the early days of BBC radio. It is generallyaccepted that Richard Hughes’ experimental A Comedy of Danger (15 January 1924)was the first play written for BBC radio. The fact that this was set in a coal mine inthe dark suggests the early caution and uncertainty attached to radio drama – if thelisteners cannot see anything then perhaps there should be literally nothing to see!Early BBC output also included extracts from stage plays (only extracts were allowedby West End theatres and even these were denied after April 1923) so on 16 February1923 there were scenes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser, Henry VIII and Much AdoAbout Nothing. Early plays written for radio took different forms and some werecharacterized by a particularly fast-paced delivery with rapid scene changes. This wastrue of the work of Cecil A. Lewis, the titles of whose plays suggest their action-packed nature: Pursuit, The Night Fighters and Montezuma (all from 1928). Similarly,L. du Garde Peach’s often historically based plays exploited radio’s ability to shiftscenes in the blink of an eye. A rather more serious contribution to early radiodrama was to be heard in the work of Lance Sieveking, described in glowing termsby David Hendy as a modernist whose experimental The Kaleidoscope (1928) pushedat the boundaries of drama production (Hendy, 2013: 170). Here radio drama wasrichly symbolic and expressed not only Sieveking’s wartime experience but also hisartistic connections. This is what the unsuspecting listener might have heard:

Fragments of dialogue, poetry, and music, clapping melting into the soundof the sea, the passionate avowals of a lover melting into the sweet singing ofa choir, dance tunes melting into the symphonic grandeur of Beethoven.Vignette after vignette drifted out of the loudspeakers, interspersed seamlesslywith the impressionistic sounds of cafes or countryside or battlefield.

(Hendy, 2013: 170)

The well known theatre producer Tyrone Guthrie was another important radioplaywright and in his Squirrel’s Cage (1929) and The Flowers Are Not For You To Pick(1930) he developed his non-realist approach to radio drama. As Ian Rodger put it,“Guthrie’s radio plays do not pretend we are listening to an actual event in real life.The characters are social archetypes and they are brought to the ear so their socialand political dilemmas may be discussed” (Rodger, 1982: 16).

As the BBC became more established after its incorporation in 1927 (as the BritishBroadcasting Corporation) and then its move to the magnificence of BroadcastingHouse in 1932, the Drama Department settled into better equipped studios andacquired a culturally conservative head of department, Val Gielgud. The technologyof radio drama production and reception at this time was in rapid development. Thephysical conditions of both were developing as the listener had access to improvedradio sets and greatly improved reception with the installation of the Daventry longwave transmitter in the early 1930s. Patchy local radio services were replaced byregional medium wave transmission at the same time, all of which conspired toimprove the experience and quality of radio listening, an essential component ofeffective radio drama. Meanwhile, in Broadcasting House drama producers coulduse the ultra modern Dramatic Control Panel which enabled production using anumber of studios (all live) including actors, music and effects.

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Typical radio drama of the pre-war period included the stage classics, especiallyShakespeare, and also historically based dramas. In his account of the BBC and theBritish Empire at this time, Thomas Hajkowski describes the eight-part adaptationof A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Feathers (BBC Home Service, 13 December 1939)which “dramatized the life of the imperial hero” (Hajkowski, 2010: 19). In a similarvein Gordon of Khartoum (1935) was a ninety-minute dramatization of Gordon’s laststand and other dramas were made about Lord Kitchener and the explorer DavidLivingstone.

A picture emerges, therefore, by the beginning of the war of a rather safe andideologically conservative sphere of production and artistic output, but that is reallyonly part of the story. Enter the Features Department. In 1936 a features departmentwas created in the BBC to produce this now largely defunct, factually based genre ofradio. The (near) impossibility of recording on location produced a hybrid programwhich attempted to be partly documentary but was scripted and acted in the studiooften with musical accompaniment. Features producers, many of whom were politi-cally radical (including Archie Harding, D. G. Bridson and Francis Dillon), developedan interest in the working class and political subjects. D. G. Bridson’s The March ofthe ‘45 (1936) was a groundbreaking feature which described the march of the Scottisharmy in 1745 but set against the social and political landscape of the thirties. Someof the most important musicians and poets of the time were drawn to the work ofFeatures including Benjamin Britten and William Walton (the former’s first com-mission was for Bridson’s King Arthur in 1937) and then one of the most influentialfigures in the history of the BBC, the poet and classicist Louis MacNeice.

The war and post-war

Even in this brief survey of the history of radio drama it is worth pausing to con-sider the influence and output of Louis MacNeice who began work at the BBC in1941. His work was mainly produced in the Features Department and its importanceis hard to overstate. His first major production for Features was Alexander Nevsky(broadcast two days after Pearl Harbour) based on the Eisenstein film and featuringthe BBC chorus and the actor Robert Donat. It was followed in October 1942 byChristopher Columbus which celebrated the 450th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘dis-covery’ of America. Written as a verse play, Columbus had two main influences –Bridson’s The March of the ‘45 and the American poet Archibald MacLeish’s TheFall of the City (1937) which had established, at least in America, the potential ofverse drama. Columbus was an epic production, starring Laurence Olivier, withmusic by William Walton and performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and aChorus conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. According to Briggs it “created a sensationin artistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic” (1970: 585). It is a sign of the fluidityof the BBC at that time and the generic uncertainty attached to drama that MacNeicemade his most celebrated radio drama not for his friends in Features but for ValGielgud in the Drama department. Widely seen as a triumph and a defining momentin BBC history, MacNeice’s The Dark Tower (1946) was a verse drama, a poeticparable in which Roland is a ‘quest-hero’ (Coulton, 1980: 80) destined to fight the

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nameless evil. The music was composed by Benjamin Britten (Cyril Cucask wasRoland) and the result not only confirmed MacNeice’s place in the BBC but alsoinspired the next generation of radio dramatists.

A fellow poet who MacNeice knew well, both for his poetry and for his radioacting, was Dylan Thomas. In his account of Thomas’s career in the BBC, RalphMaud estimates that between 1943 and his early death in 1953, he was a radio actoror performer on 145 separate occasions including in eight dramatic roles for Mac-Neice (Maud, 1991: xii). Maud suggests that although they were close, Thomas wasat times envious of the critically acclaimed and probably much more financiallysecure MacNeice. And yet it was Dylan Thomas, not his distinguished and laudedcontemporary, who wrote the most famous British radio drama of the twentiethcentury. Under Milk Wood (25 January 1954, BBC Third Programme) is “easily themost celebrated full-length play for radio” (Lewis, 1981: 72) also referred to as “quitesimply the best radio play ever written” (Walford Davies in Lewis, 1981: 72). The playwas produced by Douglas Cleverdon, one of the stars of the Features Department,and describes a day in the dreams and lives of the characters of the little Welsh townLlareggub (famously ‘bugger all’ backwards). Although the original stage versionfeatured Thomas himself as the First Voice he was replaced for the broadcast byRichard Burton. If the curse of radio drama is its evanescence, its ‘here today butgone tomorrow’ impermanence, then Under Milk Wood emphatically overcame thisby its repeated broadcasts (repeated three times in three months on the Third Pro-gramme and then on the Home Service and six times on the General Overseas Service).This is not to mention its publication as a book, its release in 1954 on record, variousstage performances, endless repeats and reworking on radio and even a film.

The war had a powerful impact on radio; both news and talks were radicallytransformed, as I have argued elsewhere (Chignell 2011), and while MacNeice andothers were making epic ‘drama features’ a much more populist form of drama wasemerging, also the result of American influence. Radio ‘soaps’ were a staple ofAmerican radio and they filled the daytime schedule. The radio drama serial had noplace in Reith’s BBC but the need to persuade Americans of all classes to supportBritain and back American entry into the war overcame these scruples. The NorthAmerican Service had been set up in 1941 as a means of talking to America anddrawing the US into the war. Frontline Family was first broadcast to America inMarch 1941 and depicted the life of an ordinary British family in the Blitz. The daily15-minute episodes were very popular (Hilmes 2012: 148) but their broadcast toa domestic audience was, unsurprisingly, strongly resisted by Gielgud. FrontlineFamily was subsequently broadcast on the General Overseas Service and so becamea hit in Australia and parts of Africa but was unheard in the country whose life andtribulations it represented. Despite internal BBC resistance the serial did haveits admirers and after the war morphed into The Robinson Family on the newly laun-ched Light Programme. The Drama Department succumbed to the inevitable andestablished a serials section which then produced the action serial Dick Barton from1946 and the replacement for The Robinson Family, the resolutely suburban MrsDale’s Diary. Then from 1950, The Archers, ‘an every day story of country folk’ (as itwas originally billed) began its extraordinary journey; it remains hugely popular tothis day.

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A Golden Age?

The crucial post-war development for radio drama was the launch of the uncom-promisingly cultural Third Programme in 1946. In her influential account of thenetwork, Kate Whitehead wrote:

Virtually every creative writer in Britain during the period 1946 to 1970 hadsome contact with the Third Programme, whether as a contributor ofmaterial or as part of the audience influenced by its frequently avant-gardebroadcasts.

(1989: 16)

In the first week of the Third Programme there were broadcasts of Shaw’s Man andSuperman (three and a half hours uncut) and an unabridged version of Satre’s HuisClos. The ‘Third’ became the home of ‘difficult’ dramatic works including classicalGreek drama and foreign plays (Brecht, Camus and Ionesco). The more adventurousapproach to radio drama was encouraged by the appointment of Donald McWhin-nie as Gielgud’s assistant in 1953; this was generally seen as a turning point in thedevelopment of BBC radio drama and an encouragement for avant-garde work(Whitehead, 1989: 139). Perhaps this was the golden age of radio drama as listenerswere exposed to work influenced by the Theater of the Absurd at the end of the1950s (the term itself was coined by Martin Esslin, Gielgud’s successor as Head ofDrama from 1963). Writers such as Harold Pinter (A Slight Ache, 1959; The Care-taker, 1962) and Samuel Beckett (All That Fall, 1957; Embers, 1959) pioneered thisapproach. Although Beckett wrote mainly for the stage, as well as various novels, hisfew radio plays and those adapted from the stage were well suited to the ‘blind’medium of radio. As Sean Street has written, Beckett was “a dramatist for whomradio and poetry come together potently in his finest writing” (2012: 20). Beckett’sspare, non-visual and word-driven drama was somehow ‘radiogenic’ and was also acultural highpoint in the post-war BBC. For Katharine Worth, Beckett’s “rare andcurious” plays “had an impact out of all proportion to what might have beenexpected” (1981: 192). One consequence of his work was the need for complex andsophisticated sound effects, requirements that eventually led to the creation of theRadiophonic Workshop which was to become a powerful aid for imaginative andexperimental radio drama (Wade, 1981: 241).

Beckett was certainly not the most important radio dramatist of the 1950s and1960s. Even more important was the work of a dramatist for whom radio was theprimary medium, probably the greatest of all radio dramatists, Giles Cooper, whowrote 31 original radio plays, nine of them for the Third Programme. Cooper wasanother writer influenced by Absurdism and he exploited radio’s apparent weak-ness – the lack of pictures. The listener could not be sure what was real and whatwas fantasy. Cooper explored the world between the everyday and absurd, dream-likefantasy. In Under the Loofah Tree (1958) we encounter a man in his bath dreaming ofwinning the Victoria Cross then trying to drown himself before returning to hisbanal existence. In Mathry Beacon (1956), described by Frances Gray as his ‘master-piece’ (1981a: 64), a group of soldiers guard a secret weapon and at the same time

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create a perfect community. Ignorant of the end of the war they carry on in a poly-gamous fantasy before eventually succumbing to materialism. Cooper often dealtwith ordinary people trapped in unremarkable domestic locations. This bland state-ment of the human condition is strangely reminiscent of the comic radio and televi-sion situation comedy Hancock’s Half Hour in which Hancock plays an endlesslyfrustrated and trapped suburbanite.

Decline and fall?

There can be little doubt that by the mid 1960s radio drama had proved the case forits existence as a substantial cultural force. But this was also a difficult decade foradmirers of the form. MacNeice died in 1963 as a result of pneumonia and pleurisycontracted while recording underground for his last radio play, the autobiographicalPersons from Porlock. Soon after that the Features Department itself was closed and itssixteen producers were sent off to work in Drama or Talks. Giles Cooper died as aresult of falling from a train in Surbiton in 1966. But the greatest challenge to radiodrama was undoubtedly the success of television. Television drama had obviousadvantages over the radio equivalent and there were some brilliant examples on boththe BBC and ITV – from policy changing realism (Cathy Come Home, BBC, 1966) toiconic fantasy dramas (The Prisoner, ATV, 1967–68) or popular long-running seriessuch as The Avengers (ABC TV, 1961–69) and of course the 26-part sensation onBBC 2 in 1967, The Forsyte Saga, to mention a very few indeed. The radio criticDavid Wade suggested that after a golden age of radio drama in the 1950s and early60s, a decline set in (1981: 225). As someone whose job it was to listen extensively toradio drama it is hard to ignore his remark about the “wretched state of mind Ifound reflected in the drama of the late sixties and early seventies” (ibid.: 227). Wadeput this decline down partly to the loss of listening ability in the audience who nolonger had the ear for serious and sustained listening. In addition he blamed thefailures of dramatists themselves, no doubt lured by the temptations of television.The BBC’s response to the declining radio audience in the 1960s was to publish thehighly influential policy document “Broadcasting in the seventies”, which took fur-ther the reorganization of radio networks into Radios One, Two, Three and Four byproducing a more specialized or ‘format’ style on each. So Radio Four became thehome of drama (and other forms of speech-based output) while Radio Three turnedits attention to classical music. Wade pointed out that the result of this was to createa more predictable and organized drama schedule with long-running ‘slots’ including‘Drama Now’, ‘The Monday Play’, ‘Thirty Minute Theatre’ and ‘Saturday NightTheatre’. Although Wade believed that the standard of plays on Radio Four hadimproved, the result was still what he called “plays for clearing up the lunch to”(1981: 222). He saved his greatest disapproval for the output of Radio Three whichin the 1970s produced about two plays a week. He felt that some of these plays“combined in equal measure negligibility and pretentiousness” (ibid.: 240), decidinglater in his article to stop pulling his punches and just call it “junk”. His final judg-ment was: “I consider that what ought to be a beautiful and exciting garden at bestmaintains a tolerable show, at worst looks faded and run-down” (ibid.).

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The case for the decline of radio drama is clearly a strong one but there is alsoevidence that despite the inadequacies of the listener and the rivalry of television,radio drama did adapt and survive in the final decades of the last century. Gray(1981b) provides an in-depth critical analysis of two remarkable historical dramas ofthe 1970s – David Rudkin’s Cries from Casement As His Bones Are Brought to Dublin(1973) and John Arden’s Pearl (1978). In Rudkin’s play the audience is taken fromCasement’s grave in Pentonville Prison to his heroic reburial in Dublin and along theway we hear the voice of the murderer Dr Crippen. The ambition of the play isstriking, “an exploration of what it means to be an Ulsterman and of how peopledefine their social, political and sexual selves” (Gray, 1981b: 71). Possibly yet morecomplex and ambitious was Arden’s Pearl which speculated about an unlikely alli-ance between English Puritans and Irish Catholics against the crown in the 1640s.Arden exploited radio’s ambiguity as the listener was invited to see a stage playwritten and performed within the drama from a variety of points of view. The playfeatured complex changes of point of view and time as it morphed from fiction tofact. Both of these radio plays exploited to the full the potential of radio to create alife-world in the mind of the listener. Both required considerable acts of imaginationand neither was for the uncommitted listener or the culturally faint-hearted.

David Hendy’s definitive account of the history of Radio Four (2007), arguably thesingle most important work of British radio history, deals with radio drama in afairly cursory manner. It probably says something about the unremarkable nature ofmany radio plays that Hendy found little reason to discuss them. His main argumentis to identify something of a crisis in the 1970s. Following the brilliance of radiodrama in the 1950s and 60s, few playwrights were attracted to radio drama in the1970s, discouraged by the bad pay (roughly one quarter of the rate paid for televi-sion drama) and also the lack of radio reviews in the press. There was, however, apossible solution in the creation of a more cinematic approach to radio drama(Hendy, 2007: 195). Hendy contrasts the safe ‘middle ground’ of radio drama, full ofadaptations of well-loved classics (P. G. Wodehouse, Just William, Dickens and soon) with a growing body of work based on a fascination with stereophonic or hi-firadio. One of the most interesting and celebrated dramatic productions on RadioFour was not produced by the drama department but by Light Entertainment. Thiswas the comic science fiction serial The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978) byDouglas Adams and featuring ‘The Book’ played memorably by Peter Jones. Theproduction made use of the Radiophonic Workshop and extensive post-productionto create a “richly textured comic-book style of production” (Hendy, 2007: 194). Itssuccess with a younger audience helped to change commonly held views of RadioFour and attract younger listeners. The combination of comedy and science pro-duced a drama serial which was both ‘low brow’ and ‘high brow’ (ibid.). Otherexamples of large-scale even epic radio drama include the work of the eminent fea-tures and drama producer Michael Mason (The Marriage of Freedom and Fate, 1974;The British Seafarer, 1980). Similarly, the epic 26-part serialization of Tolkien’s TheLord of the Rings (a total of 13 hours) starred Ian Holm and Michael Hordern and,reminiscent of the golden age of radio drama, featured some notable original music.The work has had a long life in cassette and CD form as well as rebroadcasts inother parts of the world.

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Conclusion

It is instructive to look at the history of analogue broadcast radio drama from theperspective of our contemporary digital culture. Digital technology has enormouslyincreased the range of media available to us all and perhaps an archaic form likeradio drama should not survive the icy winds of interactivity and social media.The irony is, however, that digital audio makes possible not only the niche broad-casting of Digital Audio Broadcasting (BBC 4 Extra) but also the experimental andculturally rich world of podcasting. To take a contemporary example of this renais-sance in radio drama the BBC production of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (2013) isstrongly reminiscent of radio drama in its golden age with its extraordinarily stellarcast of actors. The drama was produced by Dirk Maggs whose commitment tocinematic audio, inspired by Hitchhiker’s, placed Neverwhere in that tradition of epicradio. The availability of drama online and its promotion on websites such as RadioDrama Revival gives audio drama a new lease of life and extra promotion to aglobal audience. So digital media has undoubtedly been good for ‘audio drama’ aslisteners can access a huge variety of contemporary and classic drama on mobiledevices but, as in Neverwhere, it was the legacy of twentieth-century drama whichinspired and made possible today’s success. There are two further reasons for thesurvival of the form. Even though the stage or film might be the preferred platformfor some dramatists’ work, radio (or audio) seems to remain attractive as part ofa palette of opportunities. So, for example, despite the great stage successes of wri-ters such as John Mortimer, Alan Plater, Tom Stoppard and David Edgar, they allalso wrote for BBC Radio Four’s ‘The Monday Play’ in the 1980s. Perhaps thespeech-centric nature of radio drama allowed them to work in a slightly differentway and try out new approaches. It is interesting to track the life of some of theseplays as they appeared in some cases on radio and the stage at different moments intheir lives. So David Hare’s Knuckle (Monday Play, 1981) was originally written forthe stage whereas John Mortimer’s Edwin (Monday Play, 1982) transferred to thestage after its radio performance. A similar argument is suggested by the veteranradio critic Gillian Reynolds, who claims that great actors are attracted to work inradio (alongside stage, television and film careers) by the freedom it gives them andbecause there are more opportunities and more scope (Daily Telegraph, 26 March2013).

For the media historian, radio drama lacks the wider political significance of radionews and current affairs or the social and cultural impact of, for example, televisiondocumentary. Having said that, radio’s invisibility has allowed the production ofplays and adaptations which were culturally significant and at times compellinglyadventurous. Radio drama also provides yet another way of understanding how theBBC, arguably the world’s most famous cultural institution, interprets its publicservice role. Early in its development, before the Second World War, radio dramawas an opportunity to give a relatively uneducated population access to plays for thefirst time. After the war, the BBC’s place as a site of cultural innovation and thehome of the avant-garde took priority. Radio drama’s ‘decline’ after that can be seenas the result of seeing radio drama primarily as a form of entertainment. And so inradio drama’s analogue history it served to express the full variety of public service

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functions. Contemporary digital audio drama has the potential to educate, informand entertain but it does so drawing on a twentieth-century legacy.

Further reading

Three books published in a very short space of time are essential reading for thestudent of radio drama: Ian Rodger’s (1982) Radio Drama is an inspiring and per-ceptive introduction and the two edited collections British Radio Drama (Drakis,1981) and Radio Drama (Lewis, 1982) are both full of historical detail. Althoughhighly eclectic and perhaps over-ambitious, Tim Crook’s (1999) Radio Drama: Theoryand Practice contains some provocative historical observations. The recent floweringof radio history has produced some focused writing on moments in radio dramahistory including Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and AmericanBroadcasting (Hilmes, 2012) on early BBC radio serials and Hendy’s (2013) article onLance Sieveking, “Painting with sound: The kaleidoscopic world of Lance Sieveking,a British radio modernist.”

References

Beck, A. (n.d.) “‘The invisible play’: BBC radio drama 1922–28.” Retrieved from http://www.savoyhill.co.uk/invisibleplay/index.html

Briggs, A. (1970) A History of British Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. III: The War ofWords. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——(1995) A History of British Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. V: Competition. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Chignell, H. (2011) Public Issue Radio: Talks, News and Current Affairs in the Twentieth Century.Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Coulton, B. (1980) Louis MacNeice in the BBC. London, Boston, MA: Faber and Faber.Crook, T. (1999) Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.Drakakis, J. (ed.) British Radio Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Gray, F. (1981a) “The nature of radio drama.” In P. Lewis (ed.) Radio Drama. London andNew York: Longmann (pp. 48–77).

——(1981b) “Giles Cooper: The medium as moralist.” In J. Drakakis (ed.) British Radio Drama.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. 139–57).

Hajkowski, T. (2010) The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press.

Hendy, D. (2007) Life on Air: A History of Radio Four. Oxford: Oxford University Press.——(2013) “Painting with sound: The kaleidoscopic world of Lance Sieveking, a British radiomodernist.” Twentieth Century British History, 24(2), 169–200.

Hilmes, M. (2012) Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting.New York and Abingdon: Routledge.

Lewis, P. (1981) “The radio road to Llaraggub.” In J. Drakakis (ed.) British Radio Drama.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. 72–110).

——(1982) Radio Drama. Harlow: Longman.Maud, R. (ed.) (1991) Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts. London: J. M. Dent.

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Priessnitz, H. (1981) “British radio drama: A survey.” In P. Lewis (ed.) Radio Drama. Harlow:Longman (pp. 28–47).

Rodger, I. (1982) Radio Drama. London: MacMillan.Street, S. (2012) The Poetry of Radio: The Colour of Sound. London and New York: Routledge.Wade, D. (1981) “British radio drama since 1960.” In J. Drakakis (ed.) British Radio Drama.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. 218–44).

Whitehead, K. (1989) The Third Programme: A Literary History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Worth, K. (1981) “Beckett and the radio medium.” In J. Drakakis (ed.) British Radio Drama.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. 191–217).

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Radio drama.

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