Who's Listening to Modernism? BBC Features and Audience Response

Abstract

This article focuses on three literary features—A Room of One's Own (1946), centred on the work of Virginia Woolf, an adaptation of David Jones’ epic poem In Parenthesis (1946) and Herbert Read's verse play Moon's Farm (1951)—in order to examine how they reflected on and adapted various aspects of modernist innovation. It also examines the range of listener response offered in the BBC Listener Research Reports for these programmes—from surprise and delight to outright bewilderment, with many listeners pleased in principle with the challenging literary content, but looking for pointed guidance on how to approach it, whilst others who were receptive to avant-garde writing were quick to identify lapses in quality. This article therefore traces how literary modernism functioned, and was experienced, when adapted into an aural experience in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the most innovative period of the Features Department.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• BBC radio
• modernism
• listeners
• Virginia Woolf
• David Jones
• Herbert Read

Notes

1 Whitehead, Third Programme, 119.

2 Gilliam, BBC Features, 9.

3 Cleverdon, Growth of Milk Wood, 17.

4 Briggs, Golden Age of Wireless, 67.

5 Whitehead, Third Programme, 53.

6 Silvey, Who's Listening?, 32.

7 Page numbers in brackets in this section refer to the script which can be consulted in the BBC Written Archives Centre.

8 Listener Research Report for A Room of One's Own, 5 September 1946, LR/6073, BBC Written Archives Centre.

9 Page numbers in brackets in this section refer to the 1946 script which can be consulted in the BBC Written Archives Centre.

10 **Eliot reference to follow.

11 **Another Eliot reference to follow.

12 Crawford, British Poets, 228.

13 Jones, In Parenthesis, 155–6.

14 Listener Research Report for In Parenthesis, 2 December 1946, LR/6740, BBC Written Archives Centre.

15 Jones, In Parenthesis, 52.

16 Macaulay, “Critic on the Air,” 1.

17 Listener Research Report for In Parenthesis.

18 Jones, In Parenthesis, x.

19 Listener Research Report for In Parenthesis.

20 Page numbers in brackets in this section refer to the 1951 script which can be consulted in the BBC Written Archives Centre.

21 Listener Research Report for Moon's Farm, 13 February 1951, LR/51/181, BBC Written Archives Centre.

22 Cleverdon, “David Jones and Broadcasting,” 73.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Lawrie

Alexandra Lawrie, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.