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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. + 67 +
