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“RANDOM DOTTINESS”...
radio adaptations of theatre plays and new commissions for radio occurred
throughout both Beckett’s and Pinter’s careers, enshrining them in a canon
of significant twentieth-century playwrights. Ten years earlier, William
Haley, Director General of the BBC, sent a memo to the Director of Home
Broadcasting. It announced that program policy
rests on the community being regarded as a broadly based cultural pyramid slowly
aspiring upwards. This pyramid is served by three main Programmes, differentiated
but over-lapping in levels and interest, each Programme leading on to the other,
the listener being induced through the years increasingly to discriminate in favour
of the things that are more worth-while. At any given moment, each Programme
should be slightly ahead of its public, but never so much as to lose their confidence."
The problem Haley recognized was that the BBC’s representation of British
society did not coincide with the actual structure of society. While the
BBC’s pyramid image of taste was a way of expressing aspirational ideals, it
misrepresented national taste as it actually existed.
In the 1950s, radio was the dominant domestic media technology.
Following the BBC’s success in providing relatively impartial news and
popular entertainment during the Second World War, the Corporation
entered the post-war period with confidence. Britain was changing, with
peacetime reconstruction being followed by a consumer boom in the 1950s.
Key consumer durables (cars, washing machines, refrigerators) became
widely available, and sales of television sets were boosted by the BBC’s
broadcast of Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation in 1953. It became apparent to the
BBC hierarchy that British culture was changing rapidly, and there was much
discussion of the nature of change, and the proper response of the largest,
oldest and most respected broadcasting organization in the world. The BBC
changed the character of its radio services in peacetime, introducing the
Home Service and Light Programmes in 1945 and the Third Programme in
1946. The Home Service was a general, mass audience channel broadcasting
news, drama, entertainment, and music. The Light Programme was based
around popular music and comedy. The Third Programme was intended to
broadcast the best in arts and culture, including opera, classical music and
both canonical and newly-commissioned drama, and the Third was where
Beckett and Pinter’s work appeared.”
Val Gielgud, Head of Drama at the BBC from 1934 to 1963, pursued a policy
that broadcasting should present the classics every few years, regularly putting
William Haley: Home Broadcasting Policy, memo to B. E. Nicolls, Director of Home
Broadcasting, 15 March 1948, Caversham, BBC Written Archives Centre, cited in Ernest
Simon, Baron of Wythenshawe: The BBC from Within, London, Victor Gollancz, 1953, 80.
77 Kate Whitehead: The Third Programme: A Literary History, Oxford, Clarendon, 1989, 140.
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