A History of the BBC in 100 Blog Posts: 1929.

The Listener, the BBC's in-house magazine containing transcripts of radio programmes and latterly reviews of programmes and new books began publishing in 1929.  Although a project has been undertaking to make the issues available digitally unfortunately it's now behind a paywall apart from a few limited selections.

Also not available online (that I could see) are transcripts of EM Forster's talks so find below a review of the collected works to give you some flavour.  The Week in Westminster also began in 1929, so I've decided to link to a documentary from the 80th anniversary in 2009 which features clips from its history.


Westminster


"On 6 November 1929 listeners to BBC radio heard the first ever programme to analyse the workings of Parliament. The 15-minute scripted talk billed as The Week in Parliament was the first in a new series to be presented by woman MPs and aimed at women voters. In the words of its producer Marjorie Wace the notion was to have "a woman MP to give a simple explanatory talk on the week in parliament, every Wednesday morning at 10.45; a time we find most busy woman can listen best when they have their cup of tea.""
[Random Radio Jottings]

"The Week in Westminster, one of the longest-running radio programmes, celebrates 80 years of broadcasting. Peter Oborne looks back on its history."
[BBC Sounds]

Fascinating piece in which its revealed that after the Tories lost the 1929 general election, Winston Churchill offered to pay the BBC a hundred pounds out of his own pocket to allow him to speak for half an hour on politics.  Reith turned him down because it would lead to a US-style "time for money" scheme.  Churchill's reaction?   That "he preferred the American approach to “the present British methods of debarring public men from access to a public who wish to hear."
[International Churchill Society]

"The maverick Churchill and other critical voices were kept off the BBC in the 1930s."
[BBC Sounds][BBC Programme Index]

Places


"It is not, perhaps generally realised that, in one sense, time is the basis of all broadcasting, for time is the reference against which is measured the frequency of the electromagnetic waves used for radio transmission."
[British Horological Society via Transdiffusion]


Programmes


"Using BBC frequencies, John Logie Baird broadcast some of his first experimental television broadcasts from studios near Covent Garden in London. Pictures were in black and white, created by mechanical means, and flickered, consisting of just 30 lines definition."
[BBC Clips]

"John Logie Baird is rightfully regarded as the father of television, but the experimental “low definition” transmissions on medium wave that the BBC, after continuing lobbying of the Postmaster General, Sir William Mitchell-Thompson, by the Baird company, began, from September 30, 1929, to transmit on 2LO from Baird’s studio facility at Savoy Hill were hardly representative of the shape of things to come."
[Transdiffusion]

"The second of the booklets produced under the auspices of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English deals with the perplexing question of the English place name, and it is to be hoped that the information here published will be of interest not only to the English-speaking world, but to the ever-increasing body of foreigners who make English their second language"
[SOAS]

Forster began giving a series of talks on the BBC in 1929 and these were later published as The BBC Talks of EM Forster, 1929-1960.  Here in 2008, Zadie Smith reviews the collection for the The New York Review of Books.
[The New York Review of Books]


Politics


"Broadcasting is still in its early years, and there are no precedents to assist in forecasting its development."
[hathitrust]

"The Handbooks of 1928 and 1929 are now followed by the first issue of the Year-Book, which, it is believed, takes its place as an important auxiliary to the broadcasting service."
[World Radio History]

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