Lost English by Roberts Chris

Author:Roberts, Chris [Roberts, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781843178255
Publisher: MichaeloMara
Published: 2012-01-26T22:00:00+00:00

Home Service and Light Programme

By as early as 1925 BBC Radio, with its lofty mission to educate, inform and entertain, reached most of the UK. It faced no national competition for nearly seventy years and no (official) local rivals until 1973. Even the unofficial opposition was overcome when the BBC poached the best disc jockeys, including Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis, from offshore pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline. During the preceding decades the BBC’s Home Service and Light Programme were listened to by virtually the entire nation. (The more cerebral Third Programme, now BBC Radio Three, was not launched until 1946.) The Light Programme emphasized entertainment although, unlike one of its successors, Radio One, it was not entirely music focused, giving the nation such programmes as The Archers (which is still with us, on BBC Radio Four) and Life with the Lyons, a 1950s sitcom on both radio and television (which is not).

In 1932 the BBC set up the Empire Service, which became the Overseas Service in November 1939, a few months after the outbreak of the Second World War, when broadcasts were made to Europe; these were taken over by the European Service, which started in 1941. In 1988 the name World Service was adopted for what had become known as BBC External Services, with a remit not so far from George V’s first-ever Royal Christmas Message to the Empire, to broadcast to ‘men and women, so cut off by the snow, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them.’ It did, and sometimes still does, offer an interesting portrayal of an almost vanished Britain. Programmes that the Home Service, in the form of Radio Four, would not consider broadcasting (Dave Lee Travis’s irksomely upbeat Jolly Good Show, say) were still being beamed abroad into the twenty-first century.

Both the Home and Overseas Sections of the BBC provided English-speaking people not only with news and topical comment – the first broadcast about the colour bar (q.v.) in Britain was in the 1940s – as well as music of many kinds, drama, comedy and much else besides, but also a large number of catchphrases, some of which remain a vital part of the language. These include ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ ‘After you, Claude’ and the subsequent Internet message-board favourite ‘TTFN’ (‘Ta-ta for now’). All of those came from Liverpool comedian Tommy Handley (1892–1949), whose own personal catchphrase, ‘It’s that man again,’ has, ironically, vanished. His comedy show of the same title, usually shortened to ITMA, ran on the Home Service from 1939 to 1949. It will be interesting to see if many of today’s favourites phrases from radio and television have the same reach.

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