A ship heading West: Greek émigré writers and the BBC, 1946–51

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This article investigates the role of Greek émigré writers in the early ‘Cold War of the ether’ against the backdrop of the increasing youth mobility prompted by the Greek civil war (1946–49). It traces the itineraries of émigré writers in their 20s who contributed to the Greek-language programmes of the Overseas Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Through the study of unpublished broadcast scripts kept in the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), the following questions are explored: how was life in the West depicted in the radio features and plays transmitted to Greek-speaking listeners? To what extent do the transmitted texts betray the influence of literary modernism, on the one hand, and formal experiments in radio writing, on the other? In contrast to the literary productions of the Greek state radio (EIR), which excluded modernist works until as late as the mid-1950s, the BBC Greek broadcasts mirror the fresh outlook and modernist aesthetics of their creators, contributing to the belated modernization of Greek radio culture.