Giles Cooper was an Irish-born dramatist whose radio plays have been celebrated by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as innovative and experimental writing eminently suited to the sound medium. Such was his influence that for many years the BBC ran an annual radio playwriting awards program in his memory. His first broadcast play was Thieves Rush In on the Home Service in 1950. This was followed by more than 60 scripted programs of adaptations and original plays on the old Light, Home, and Third national radio networks. It is claimed that the creative use of sound in the play The Disagreeable Oyster on the Third Program in 1957 inspired the formation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Under the Loo­fah Tree was the first play officially commissioned for it.

     The Disagreeable Oyster is seen as the first of his radio plays to demonstrate the unusual quality of Cooper's imagination, fully utilizing the medium's capacity of facilitating leaps from objectivity to subjectivity. Cooper developed his voice and vision during a period when the Theatre of the Absurd and the phenomenology of existentialism were influential. This is reflected in the disquieting and pessimistic themes of horror expressed through hilarity in plays such as Unman, Wittering, and Zigo; Pig In The Middle; and Without the Grail. Unman, Wittering, and Zigo was later made into a film with David Hemmings and the other two were adapted for television.

     Much of Cooper's work could be described as the investigation of meanings and motives beneath everyday normalities. He characterized a world or consciousness in which the sinister and the terrifying hid behind smooth polished surfaces of action and witty, hilarious dialogue. His London Times obituary writer stated that he showed "an almost frightening apprehension of the modern world and its ailments." The Times also claimed that he "was the most prolific and arguably the most original dramatist of our mass communications." As a stage dramatist, his first success Never Get Out! and other plays, including in 19 50, Everything in the Garden, Out of the Crocodile, The Spies Are Singing, and Happy Family, have not stood the test of time. Unlike younger contemporaries such as Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Joe Orton, Giles Cooper's literary dramatic reputation has not gathered the necessary momentum to achieve powerful cultural resonance. Despite attempts by BBC Radio Drama to keep his reputation alive, his work is virtually unknown outside the United Kingdom and has not enjoyed any renaissance through association with contemporary styles of production. However, it is worth noting that the British Chichester Literary Festival held a reading of his radio plays Unman, Wittering, and Zigo and Under the Loofah Tree in July 2000. Unman, Wittering, and Zigo, which is understood to have been based on memories of his former school, Lancing College, with its nearby racetracks and cliff­ tops, was also produced by Charterhouse independent school students in 1999. His son Ric Cooper said at the time of writing that amateur royalties for Everything in the Garden, Happy Family, and Out of the Crocodile continue to be paid for performances around the world. The Edward Albee version of Everything in the Garden sells in the U.S. and the school version of Unman, Wittering, and Zigo generates several hundred sales a year.

     Cooper's radio plays have also received limited academic attention, although what has appeared has been of high quality. It is somewhat ironic that his name is remembered primarily for the BBC awards given in his honor. On 9 December 1966, the Times published a tribute emphasizing that he was "kind and helpful to new writers learning their trade, he was a most sympathetic listener and conversationalist and he had one of the most generous laughs in London." It stated that "a half hour's chat with Giles was a wonderful tonic because of his infectious cheerfulness and good humour."

     The radio drama producer Donald McWinnie wrote in his introduction to the collection of six Giles Cooper radio plays, published in 1966, that he was introduced to his work by the editor of BBC Radio Features, Lance Sieveking. McWinnie said Cooper was "usually several steps ahead of current fashion without being sensationally avant-garde." McWinnie observed that Cooper "deals with inadequate human beings-or at least with people who by trying to resolve their problems create further problems for themselves."

     Frances Gray defines Cooper's unique contribution to radio drama as creating a language "capable of depicting the twilight zones between illusion and disillusion." She also said that Cooper could "move from the real to the unreal and back again; he can leave us unsure whether we are hearing illusion or reality, he can even, in seconds, change our perception of what has already happened." She concluded that listening to a Giles Cooper radio play was akin to listening to a medium and that he demonstrated a "moral view in perfect harmony." Radio drama enabled Cooper to exploit the vision of large-scale nudity in The Disagreeable Oyster that would have been impossible on television at the time and to use the process of having a bath as an entire moral universe in Under the Loofah Tree.

     Louise Cleveland compares Cooper's radio plays with the works of Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett. Her analysis draws on interviews with BBC radio drama editors and directors Martin Esslin, John Tydeman, Richard Imison, and Donald MacWhinnie, and is based on reading and listening to hundreds of scripts and archive recordings. She also invests Cooper's work with significance in the development of radio drama, proposing that his work led to the medium's acquisition of styles and techniques that separate writing and production practice from the theatrical origins of the genre.

     Gray points out some of the intertextual themes of Cooper's writing across radio, television, and stage theater. Cooper's adaptability was a key factor in BBC television's successful introduction of Georges Simenon's character "Maigret" to mainstream British television audiences as one of their Sunday­ Night Theatre presentations-"Maigret and the Lost Life," which debuted on 6 December 19 59. Cooper adapted the first radio script from Simenon's 1954 novel; the drama was produced/directed by Campbell Logan. The actual Maigret series began in October 1960, the first of what would become four series totaling 51 episodes, each 45 to 5 5 minutes in length. The BBC had acquired the rights, with Simenon's blessing, against worldwide competition, making it their most ambitious series production to that date. Cooper's work on the series (he wrote most of the television scripts) was recognized by a Guild of Television Producers' and Directors' Award in 1961. He also adapted Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy of war novels and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables for television, both of which were broadcast posthumously.

     On 2 December 1966, Giles Cooper fell out of the open doorway of a fast-moving railway car near Surbiton. He had been returning home to Sussex from a writers' dinner in Central London. Upon investigating the bizarre circumstances of his death, the inquest jury returned a verdict of misadventure after a pathologist revealed that Cooper had consumed the equivalent of half a bottle of whiskey that evening.