The key changes in the content of the BBC's national radio stations and the development of BBC local radio came about as a result of implementing the policy document Broadcasting in the Seventies, published in 1969. The idea was to establish a coherency of programming. Radio 4 was transformed from its old Home Service style of mixed speech and music into a wholly speech-oriented station where journalism would be allowed to bloom, current affairs would have a central role, and drama, comedy, science, and coverage of the arts would have a national platform. The current affairs and discussion programs The World Tonight, PM, and Start The Week all began in 1970. Radio 3 tried to abandon some of the aspects of its previous incarnation in 1946 as the Third Programme. It would become a national station concentrating on music and the arts. In 1969 BBC Radio I and BBC Radio 2 simulcast programming during many periods of the day. From 1970 the stations developed separate identities for different audiences. Radio I targeted the youth culture audience in popular music. Radio 2 tried to keep in step with the musical tastes of people in their forties and fifties. Stations in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have maintained separate centers for radio programming that seek to reflect the politics and concerns of their communities.

     At the time of writing the development of digital radio has resulted in the addition of five more national stations. 1 Xtra, launched in August 2002, is dedicated to playing the very best in contemporary black music for a young audience. 6 Music launched in March 2002 with a remit to draw on the best music from the past through to today and look for the best music of tomorrow. The station claimed it played contemporary songs that other networks would deem too daring. Five Live Sport Extra launched in January 2002 as a supplement to Radio Five Live and offers sports fans the option of listening to more football, rugby, cricket, tennis, and Formula I racing. The Asian Network was launched as a national digital channel in October 2002 providing speech and music to Britain's Asian ​​communities that are concentrated mainly in the Midlands and South East. BBC 7 launched in December 2002 and specialized in a mix of BBC comedy, drama, book readings, and children's radio programs.

     In its 1949 BBC Year Book, an attempt was made to set out the objectives for originating and commissioning BBC radio drama. This manifesto or "cultural agenda" provides a useful framework to define, evaluate, and categorize the history and contemporary nature of many aspects of BBC radio program­ ming. First, the BBC sought "to maintain whatever the basic quality, interest, or importance of the individual production may be, a generally high professional level both of acting and technical interpretation." Second, it sought to provide a balanced schedule of plays and drama programming. This includes classical plays of established international repute, which are "susceptible to microphone treatment," and have entertainment as well as cultural value. Third, BBC radio has sought to encourage interested authors to write plays conceived specially in terms of the broadcasting medium. Fourth, BBC radio has striven to fulfill the demand of the listening public for "popular dramatic entertainment," and this has been developed through Listener Research and the continued investment and maintenance of soaps, series, and serials as well as adaptations of successful stage plays and films. BBC radio has also been committed to presenting dramatized serials or single productions of novels and short stories for radio "without unreasonable distortion either of form or of spirit." And fifth, the BBC expressed the desire to give to "the English listener some of the more outstanding examples of contemporary dramatic work from the Continent of Europe."

     These worthy aims do not give us much of a flavor of what it was like to make programs and how they sounded, particularly in the decades before systematic archiving. Most of the established histories of the BBC depend on the dry and rather stuffy content of the official written archives. The human side to the program making and listening is more likely to be found in private papers, manuscripts, and autobiographies. George Orwell worked as a producer in the BBC during World War II and described his time as trying to exist in a cross between a public (privately funded) girl's school and lunatic asylum. The actor Maurice Gorham in Sound & Fury: Twenty-One Years in the BBC (1948) said the BBC was blighted by petty hierarchies and suffocating bureaucracy. He described the 1930s as "the era of the stuffed shirts." The rather pompous and imperious image of John Reith and his colleagues is balanced by Gorham's moving observation that many of these survivors of World War I still suffered from shell-shock and tried to cope through excess drinking and clandestine affairs with their secretaries.

Drama and Literature

     The 1949 five-streamed approach to drama can be observed in other categories of BBC programming. The tensions of establishing these aims, or failing to achieve them, can also account for controversies over the development of BBC radio programming since 1922. The BBC has also extended the presentation of alternative cultures by producing plays and literature from Africa, Asia, South America and other parts of the world. BBC Drama director Val Gielgud established a regular drama slot, World Theatre, in the 1950s which is representative of the role the BBC played in fostering a creative reception of dramatic literature from overseas.

     Radio programming developed parallel to the modern movement in both art and literature. Authors such as H G Wells, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf not only set up a new story telling vision and rhythm, but also were dramatized and vocalized by the new radio medium. Joyce was exploring the phonetic qualities and resonance of written language in an era which was rediscovering the acoustic space of the oral tradition through radio. Socialist authors including Jack London and George Orwell introduced an increasingly iconoclastic and political style of writing. Modern poetry and prose were debated and introduced to a wider cultural constituency through BBC radio programming.

     Radio was found to be a natural medium for exploring the inner world of humans. The radio plays of Samuel Beckett on the Third Programme in 1957 formed a new genre of psycho­ logical subjectivity in audio drama. The director of such early Beckett radio plays as All That Fall and Embers, Donald McWhinnie, deliberately eschewed the production fashion of realism or pseudo-naturalism to paint a soundscape that used new electronic techniques, including the stylistic use of actors' voices to make animal and mechanical sounds. Thus the texture of the program's content articulated the abstract qualities of Beckett's absurd theater of the mind.

     BBC cultural programs were influenced by the way Bertolt Brecht and his Berliner Ensemble revolutionized the relationship between performance and audience in theater. This shift in the philosophical center of gravity could be identified in the development of more experimental, irreverent, and satirical forms and content in some BBC programming.

     Radio drama programming was initially derived from live theater and novels. A sketch from Cyrano de Bergerac and a telescoping of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in 1922 are among the first radio drama events. The first British play especially written for the microphone was Danger by Richard Hughes, first aired in 1924. The first head of radio drama R.E. Jeffrey developed the genre at the BBC until early 1929, when 28- year-old Val Gielgud took over from him as Director of Productions. Jeffrey may have been a casualty of a public row over the commissioning of Reginald Berkeley's play Machines, which was regarded as a breach of the BBC's then statutory prohibition on broadcasting matters of "political controversy." Machines had been commissioned by the BBC, but in 1927 they were reluctant to produce a drama that blatantly criticized industrial assembly line capitalism. The BBC clumsily tried to reject the work by implying it was badly written. Ber­keley responded by publishing his play and the correspondence he had had with BBC executives. The row was a devastating embarrassment for the BBC. Questions were raised in Parliament. Berkeley fired a ringing condemnation of BBC coward­ ice: "A great instrument of intellectual development is being blunted and misused for want of courage. It is no good reply­ ing that British broadcasting is better than any other. It ought to be. And it ought to be better than it is."

     The dramatist George Bernard Shaw created another storm when he took advantage of his role in chairing a live BBC radio debate in 1927 and declared: "If you find, then, an energetic force of military and police breaking into this hall, destroying the microphone and leading me away in custody, I must ask you not to offer any resistance. (Laughter.) Your remedy is a constitutional one. You must vote against the Government at the next election. (Laughter and cheers.)" The BBC tried to suppress reporting of his remarks, but the American journalist Cesar Saerchinger tracked down a shorthand note and published Shaw's witty attack on BBC censorship in Hello America!: Radio Adventures in Europe (1938).

     Landmarks in script development for the microphone play before World War II included Berkeley's The White Chateau, which dramatized the suffering and tragedy of World War I and became somewhat iconic for the veterans and their families when broadcast on Armistice Night 1925. It also became the first full-length radio play published in book form and promoted by the BBC. Tyrone Guthrie was another early radio drama pioneer. His play The Squirrel's Cage, broadcast in 1929, was about childhood fear and adult monotony with suburbanites getting no further than the animal rotating on its wheel. The lead actors were Mabel Constanduros and Michael Hogan, themselves accomplished radio dramatic writers. They had devised and acted all the parts in the BBC's first radio soap based on a London cockney family called The Buggins. Mabel Constanduros has been somewhat neglected by broadcast historians. Her ability to deliver improvised stand-up and scripted comedy and mimic a gallery of characters became evident during her first broadcast at the BBC's Savoy Hill studios in 1925. The Buggins series began in 1928 and was so successful it generated spin-offs in book and record sales. Constanduros helped found the British tradition of soap opera and situation comedy in both radio and television.

     More sound-based styles of dramatization and production also developed through adaptation of novels such as Compton Mackenzie's Carnival and Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. A faster paced, short scene-based structure of juxtaposing realistic sound backdrops and locations also contributed to advances in audio drama writing and performance. The BBC also supported the production of epic and literary stage classics. The 12-part Great Play series of 1928-29 introduced traditional texts from foreign cultures.

     During the 1920s and 193os, Peter Cresswell, Howard Rose, Val Gielgud, and Mary Hope Allen nurtured the development of radio drama as an art form. Gielgud transcended the period between 1929 and 1963. Donald MacWinnie, Barbara Bray, Nesta Pain, and Douglas Cleverdon are but a few examples of significant figures who combined with the talents of Martin Esslin, John Tydeman, William Ash, Jeremy Mor­ timer, Kate Rowland, and many others to populate a powerful culture of director/editors in BBC radio drama over the 50- year period between 1950 and 2000.

     Despite Val Gielgud's prejudices against popular soap operas, many series and serials became established during World War II, including Frontline Family, which became The Robinsons, and Mrs Dale's Diary, which became The Dales. The Archers, which began in 1951, has become the world's longest running soap opera. The program is a remarkable phenomenon in radio history. It attracts Radio 4's largest audiences, and through a constant process of reinventing itself with new characters and plot-lines it sustains substantial audiences and listener loyalty.

     The popular genre has also been represented in the adventure serial as Dick Barton, Special Agent (1946), Send For Paul Temple (1938), and in the comic science-fiction The Hitch­ hiker's Guide To the Galaxy (1978). The latter, created by the late Douglas Adams, became an instant cult classic after its first broadcast in 1978. Radio aficionados claimed the transfer to television was never as good. The series will be remembered for ironic and melancholic characters such as Marvin, the Paranoid Android, and Zaphod Beeblebrox.

     From 1939 onwards BBC radio drama was often described as "A National Theatre of the Air." During World War II, Dor­othy L. Sayers' The Man Born To Be King had a major impact as a radio drama event. In twelve parts between December 1941 and October 1942, Sayers dramatized the story of Jesus Christ in modern language. It was the first time Christ had been portrayed in a publicly broadcast serial. Sayers used colloquialisms to make sense of the New Testament. The Elders of the Synagogue were described as like those "found in every parish council, always highly respectable, often quarrelsome and sometimes in a crucifying mood." Matthew the Publican was "a contemptible little Quisling official fleecing his own countrymen in the name of the occupying power and enriching himself in the process till something came to change his heart, and not presumably his social status or his pronunciation."

     The postwar period was also rich in the number and variety of distinctive and original radio playwrights who were recognized as making a literary contribution through their radio plays. The poet and classical scholar Louis MacNeice specialized in writing and producing poetic features. Christopher Columbus, starring Laurence Olivier as Columbus, celebrated the 450th anniversary of the transatlantic voyage in 1942. MacNeice said he used vocal music to concentrate on "the emotional truth of the legend rather than let it dissolve into a maelstrom of historical details." The Dark Tower in 1946 was an imaginative fantasy about suffering and salvation with music composed by Benjamin Britten. McNeice described his work as a parable of spiritual quest "concerned with real questions of faith and doubt, of doom and free will, of temptation and self-sacrifice."

     Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, first broadcast in January 1954, is probably Britain's most celebrated piece of radio. Described as "a play for voices," it captures the thoughts, emotions, and dreams of the inhabitants of a small Welsh village, Llareggub. Many radio listeners are familiar with the rich and mellifluous voice of Richard Burton as the narrator purr­ ing the opening lines: "To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and Bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters' and rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeback, slow, black, crowblack, fishing boat bobbing sea."

     The radio plays of Angela Carter (1940-1992), directed by Glyn Dearman, have begun to attract considerable critical attention. Carter said she wrote for radio because it retains "the atavistic lure, the atavistic power, of voices in the dark, and the writer who gives the word to those voices retains some of the authority of the most antique tellers of tales." Vampire/la (1976) creates the nightmarish world of a female vampire. Come unto These Yellow Sands ( 1979) is a creative drama-documentary on the Victorian painter Richard Dadd. The Company of Wolves (1980) is a surreal reworking of the Red Riding Hood folk-tale, and Puss in Boots (1982) is an old comedy for radio that features a multiple orgasm accompaniment to the 1812 Overture (the program had to be approved by the controller of Radio 4 for transmission). A Self-Made Man (1984) is a fake radio documentary on the life of Edwar­ dian novelist Ronald Firbank. Carter described herself as a child of the radio age and she believed "it is par excellence, the medium for the depiction of madness; for the exploration of the private worlds of the old, the alienated, the lonely." While her scripts are readily available, the sound of her radio plays can only be heard by appointment at the National Sound Archive in London.

     The originality of voice in radio drama is certainly represented in the contemporary work of Tom Stoppard, David Pownall, and Lee Hall. Stoppard's successful stage play Indian Ink was an original radio drama commissioned and broadcast by the BBC as In The Native State in 199 r. In the Native State explores the relationship between an Indian painter and the European woman who poses naked for him. The story switches between England in the present day and India in 1930. Lee Hall's radio play Spoonlace Steinberg became a best-selling audio cassette and has been successfully adapted in film and theater. It presents the monologue of a 7-year-old autistic girl dying from cancer.

     BBC radio programming has also introduced literature and storytelling to the mass audience through such programs as A Book at Bedtime, which began on the Light Programme in January 1949 with a reading of John Buchan's The Three Hostages. The 15-minute episodic readings now broadcast at night on BBC Radio 4 have also provided a platform for popular and prestigious writers. Eight continuous hours of BBC Radio 4 on FM were given over to a reading by Stephen Fry of one of J.K Rowling's Harry Potter novels on a December day in 2000.

The Feature

     The idea of the radio feature was pioneered by BBC radio through the 1930s as a hybrid of drama and documentary, equivocating between reality and fantasy. In Manchester a production center including D.G. Bridson, Archie Harding, Joan Littlewood, and Olive Shapley extended an iconoclastic approach so that the feature form adapted itself to the social stresses experienced by the BBC audience during times of mass unemployment, insecurity, and depression.

     More mobile recording techniques enabled radio to reproduce phonically the dynamics of the documentary photography movement. Poetic features wove drama and music to provide creative representations of historical events such as The March of the '45 (1936). Dramatic features also engaged with contemporary crises such as Crisis in Spain (19 31) on the abdication of the Spanish monarchy, the six part Shadow of the Swastika (1940) on German anti-Semitism, and in historical commemoration such as Bomber (1995), an eight-part series blending documentary interview with a dramatization of Len Deighton's novel about the final mission of an RAF Lancaster bomber.

     A separate features department headed by Laurence Gilliam continued to cultivate avant-garde creativity up until its closure in 196 5. The work of Charles Parker and Dennis Mitchell was recognized in international festivals such as Prix Italia. Parker's Radio Ballads were inspired by the work of the U.S. radio documentarian and dramatist Norman Corwin. Human dignity and sympathetic characterization are the hallmarks of radio features produced by Piers Plowright and John Theo­caris. Editors such as Peter Everett and Richard Bannerman have originated new approaches to radio documentary form and content such as the Soundtrack series for BBC Radio 4 in 1983 and Take The Plunge in the 1990s, which empowered documentary subjects with audio-diary technology. Brian King and Sarah Rowlands have produced a genre of audio-verite that sought to tell the stories of institutions and professions through "microphone on the wall" montages, revealing secrets within those institutions. Human voice and musicology have been blended in the work of Alan Hall, which again has flown the BBC banner in international awards and festivals.

Talks

     Talks and cultural magazine programs have in the context of public service broadcasting made BBC radio a "university of the air." Beginning in 1941, The Brain's Trust explored complex philosophical and scientific concepts with brightness, spontaneity, and entertainment. The program was built around listeners' questions and with a panel that started with Dr Julian Huxley, Commander A.B. Campbell, and C.E.M. Joad. Although the radio version was last broadcast in May 1949, it has left its legacy in discussion programs such as Night Waves on BBC Radio 3 and Front Row on BBC Radio 4. The dramatist Arnold Wesker once said that for a working class boy without qualifications BBC Radio "was my university education."

Music: Classical

     The BBC's early commitment to "serving as a standard of excellence" meant that music programming policy was dominated in the early days through the celebration and promotion of classical music and opera. In 1928-29, the BBC mounted a special season of 12 Great Operas, accompanied by the sale of the score and libretto in published booklets. Before centralization of programming in 1927, the several centers of local production spawned a variety of orchestras and chamber groups that performed a rich and varied schedule of live concerts and series. The BBC assumed sponsorship of Sir Henry Wood's annual Promenade Concerts at the Albert Hall in 1927 (known as "The Proms") and founded its own symphony orchestra in 1930.

     The BBC became the most significant patron of classical music in Great Britain. The intensity of orchestral performance in programming was combined with explication and criticism through "Talks" series given by Percy Scholes and Sir Walford Davies. The 15-minute series The Foundations of Music ran between 1927 and 1937. The early foundation of a policy on "World Music" can be identified in 1929 with the inception of programs celebrating "The Negro Spiritual" and Paul Robe­ son's BBC debut in a live concert from Bournemouth. BBC radio used documentary to investigate and introduce new developments in modern music. BBC Radio 3 is now a platform for covering the pioneering and adventurous promotion of world music through programs such as Late Junction and the enthusiastic presentation of Andy Kershaw.

     The postwar establishment of the Third Programme guaranteed a location for high culture in musical expression and so enabled the BBC to serve the growing demand for separate formats of popular music on the Light Programme network as well as maintaining its cultural commitment to what was described as "the urbane and cosmopolitan." There was an undoubted overlapping in music genre and programming for­ mats. In one set of circumstances the classical could become very popular and in another, popular styles of music could be contextualized with classical legitimacy. The BBC Concert Orchestra founded in 1952 maintained a repertoire of classical, light opera, light music, and popular song. For example in 1989 it performed the entire Gilbert and Sullivan canon.

Music: Popular

     BBC Radio I in 1967 was a response to the cultural assault of pirate offshore broadcasters, which powerfully served the baby boom youth generation that had expanded the record market for rock and roll. The Light Programme (later BBC Radio 2) was a response to the World War II-era influence of Jazz and Big Band Swing music broadcast by the American Services Network in Britain and Europe.

     Most of the leading pirate DJs of the early 1960s were eventually paraded as BBC Radio i's first line-up of presenters. They included Tony Blackburn, Keith Skues, Dave Cash, Kenny Everett, and John Peel. The pirate dance music station Kiss 100 in London became legitimized by regulation and licensing and its success led to an acquisition of much of its DJ talent and music format in a reinvention of BBC Radio I in the middle 1990s. Advances in recording technology and reproduction and agreements on needle-time became a disincentive for the BBC to maintain a large range of live orchestras, and many BBC "light" orchestras were shut down in 1980.

     The writer Compton Mackenzie is sometimes referred to as the first DJ because he selected music discs and put together a live program from Savoy Hill in 1924. In 1927 the BBC's first regularly scheduled disc jockey, Christopher Stone, would present recitals rather than "gigs" or "jam sessions." His programs were a mix of recorded music and talk.

     A key musical program in BBC history is Music While You Work, which began in June 1940 as a non-stop medley of popular tunes played by a different live band each day. The objective was to provide light musical entertainment to a round-the­-clock sequence of shifts in the factories. Since many male workers had been called up during the war, many of the listeners were women; newsreels from the time depict them singing along to the hits heard in the program. Music While You Work continued on the Light Programme until 1967.

     BBC popular music programmers would battle with the music publishing and record industries over rights and royalties. This would lead to conflict and boycotts, but eventually they cooperate for mutual benefit. As in the U.S., there were payola scandals and legal disputes. But this would not stop the broadcasting of popular music from becoming a launch pad for the modern celebrity. Early bandleader Jack Payne was appointed Director of BBC Dance Music in 1926 and formed the BBC Dance Orchestra in 1928, two years before the creation of the BBC's first classical orchestra. When Payne left in I 932 to earn greater riches through touring and record sales, Henry Hall took over the role of BBC heart-throb and musical celebrity.

Sports

     Some of the early attempts to provide sports by means of radio were such events as the Derby for flat horse racing in 1921 and a prize boxing fight between Kid Lewis and George Carpentier at Olympia in May 1922. Lobbying by newspapers against the coverage by radio of sports meant that many attempts to orga­ nize such coverage during the early years of the BBC were frustrated. However, Royal Charter and incorporation in 1927 was followed by a breakthrough in outside broadcasts. Credit for this should go to producer Lance Sieveking, who successfully recruited Captain H.B.T. Wakelam. Wakelam brought spontaneity and excitement to ad-libbed sports commentary. This was evident at the first live coverage of a Rugby International between England and Wales at Twickenham in January 1927.

     Most media histories have a tendency to neglect the contri­bution of BBC sports broadcasting in enhancing the popularity of the medium and emblematize local, regional, and national identity through sports. Sports Report became a broadcasting institution. This hour-long roundup of sports news and results started on the Light Programme in January 1948, moved to Radio 2, to Radio 5, and to Radio Five Live. It retained its popular signature tune Out of the Blue for more than 40 years. One of the BBC's Directors-General, John Birt, once said: "The jaunty signature tune of Sports Report would summon the unpunctual from all parts of the home to hear the Everton and Liverpool scores before tea." Sports has also formed the basis for a wide range of popular quiz programs such as Sporting Chance, refereed by the popular cricket commentator Brian Johnston; the program aired Saturday afternoons on the Light Programme during the 1950s and 6os. The commentator John Arlott became known as "the voice of English summer" because of his cricket commentaries for more than 30 years. One of his producers once said: "You could smell the grass when he was talking."

     Arlott and Brian Johnston became associated with Test Match Special, the live, ball-by-ball BBC radio coverage of cricket Test matches. The BBC would assign an entire frequency from one of its national networks to accommodate an "institution in the sporting world." The competitive bidding for sporting rights in a more fragmented media landscape in the 1990s has made it difficult for the BBC to hold onto its exclusive commentary presence in a number of sporting events. Competition increases the costs, but at the time of writing, BBC Radio Five Live still dominated radio coverage of British soccer.

News and Public Affairs

     There is no doubt that World War II was the catalyst for building substantial audience loyalty for news programs. Prior to 19 39 the BBC had to break away from its dependence on the national news agencies and the successful lobbying by newspapers to block radio news broadcasting in the morning and during the day. The BBC had to indulge in independent news­ gathering during the General Strike of 1926 because the national newspapers could not be printed. Gradually the BBC acquired "observers" to act as reporters. During the Munich crisis of 19 38, the BBC was allowed to run bulletins during the morning and throughout the day.

     The crisis of world war enabled news to acquire a social value because it was a source of information. The Nine O'clock News in the evening, followed by War Report, built up record audience ratings. The BBC's reputation in journalism in Britain has been established around key programs established after the war on the Home Service, which became BBC Radio 4 in 1967. The Radio 4 schedule for news is punctuated by the strength and quality of the News Briefing at 6 A.M. followed by the Today breakfast program, The World at One at lunchtime, PM for drivetime, The Six O'clock News for evening listeners, The World Tonight at ten P.M., and News at Midnight, which has become a half-hour program of reports from correspondents and reporters on the day's events. Authority, variety, and quality in radio journalism were further extended when the Radio Five network became BBC Radio Five Live, a dedicated news and sports service, in 1994. Its first controller, Jenny Abramsky, successfully established popularity and reputation for a more rapid response to news events within Britain and abroad. Radio Five Live harnessed the global resources of BBC news gathering through the use of foreign correspondents and news bureaus.

     The Week in Westminster was established in November 1929 to meet the expanded franchise of women voters and the first generation of women MPs in Parliament. From Our Own Correspondent began in 19 55 as a forum for BBC reporters to give more personal firsthand accounts of their experiences of crisis and developing news stories. Alistair Cooke's Letter From America is in some respects a permanent From Our Own Correspondent dispatch from the U.S. Woman's Hour has developed a journalistic agenda for women since its inception in 1946. The first edition had a male presenter and contained a talk on Mother's Midday Meal and Putting Your Best Face Forward. However, with a growing confidence in women's rights and as feminist issues began to take center stage in mainstream media, Woman's Hour was able to bring a range of taboo subjects into the open. The magazine format has been a vehicle for establishing the broadcasting l'eputations of Jean Metcalfe, Marjorie Anderson, Sue Macgregor, and Jenni Murray.

Vaudeville, Variety, and Light Entertainment

     Light entertainment is the BBC's phrase that broadly defines show business, quiz, and entertainment programs. In BBC radio it owed its traditions and much of its early programming to theatrical vaudeville. In the early years the theater industry and vaudeville artists were wary of the new medium, just as they were in the U.S. Sketches, jokes, and routines that could be performed repeatedly on stage would be exhausted in the moment of only one broadcast. The racist stereotyping inherent in the genre of black faced minstrelling transferred to radio through the series Kentucky Minstrels, which ran from 1933 to 1950 and was the precursor for the TV Black and White Minstrel Show.

     Landmarks in BBC radio variety programming have been identified as In Town Tonight and Band Waggon, featuring comedians Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch. Between 1938 and 1939 Askey and Murdoch developed the world of an imaginary top floor apartment at Broadcasting House and built comic routines around sound motifs such as the Greenwich Time Signal. During World War II, ITMA ("It's That Man Again") became a vehicle for ideological entertainment. The comedian Tommy Handley was a master of ceremonies for an ensemble of surreal characters such as Mrs. Mopp, the cleaning woman with the bottomless bucket, Colonel Chin­ strap, Funf the German spy, Ali Oop and others. Mes Mopp's catchphrase was 'Can I do yer now, Sir?' ITMA attracted a peak audience of 15 million listeners a week and each show captured the attention of 40 percent of the population.

     The Goon Show, which began airing in May 1951, marked an exquisite extension of radio's potential for surreal comedy. Round The Horne written mainly by Barry Took and Marty Feldman and featuring performances by Kenneth Horne and Kenneth Williams, would be an example: of a successor to the Goon Show tradition. Other postwar light entertainment programs that attracted large followings include Much Binding In The Marsh, The Glums, Take it From Here, Educating Archie, The Navy Lark, Beyond Our Ken, and Tony Hancock.

     Most of the successful contemporary artists in British television comedy were first established on BBC radio through weekly satire programs such as Weekending, which ceased airing in 1997. Chris Morris collaborated with Peter Cook on improvised sequences on BBC Radio 3, co-wrote a series which satirized the cliches and conventions of news coverage on BBC Radio 4, and at the time of writing has established a large following of younger listeners with a surreal ambient world of dysfunctional characters in the series Blue Jam, broadcast on BBC Radio 1 after midnight.