The ‘History of Everyday Life’ on BBC Radio

Abstract

The second part of this book, which starts with this chapter, is about the ‘history of everyday life’ in practice. This opening chapter is about the broadcasting of history on BBC radio before the 1960s, drawing on programme schedules, scripts, and production documents. The ‘history of everyday life’ flourished as part of the BBC’s educational, citizen-making project, underpinned by the ethos of John Reith, the BBC’s first Director-General between 1922 and 1938. This chapter reveals how the ‘history of everyday life’ was bound up with the concentration of female talent within the inter-war BBC and the emergence of new radiophonic technologies during the 1930s. Sound effects, music, and femininity helped to construct a genre of ‘light’ social history broadcasting, designed to appeal to ordinary listeners across both schools and general programming. This trend is highlighted through a focus on the work of Rhoda Power, a BBC educationaist. A particular shift is identified during the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, when history content on the radio became stratified between the ‘expert’ and the ‘popular’ due to gendered and professionalizing impulses within the BBC. As a consequence, the ‘history of everyday life’ came to be regarded as history for leisure in the post-1945 period.