Radio Times at 100: a "vivid running commentary" on a century of British life

• Read more | The history of the BBC

The first edition, priced modestly at 2d for 36 pages of closely typeset text and a smattering of pictures, ran to a quarter of a million copies – and quickly sold out. Its central offer was a bald day-by-day list of output from the BBC’s six stations in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Newcastle and Glasgow.

The listings expanded in lockstep with broadcasting’s wider evolution. In the 1930s, readers could enjoy a choice between the ‘National’ and ‘Regional’ Programmes, and the first output of experimental late-night television. During the Second World War, the Forces Programme appeared. In the 1960s, BBC2 (now BBC Two) and local radio arrived. More recently, a plethora of satellite and digital channels were launched, competing since the 2000s with streaming services such as Netflix.

The growth in column inches was not quite unceasing. Paper rationing during the Second World War meant drastic cuts in size and quality, not fully reversed until the 1960s. There were stripped-down issues for the 1947 fuel crisis, too, and none at all during later industrial disputes.

There were also dramatic shifts in layout. When the BBC’s first regular television service began in November 1936, and despite all the razzmatazz of the launch at Alexandra Palace, the magazine allocated just two back pages for its schedule. In 1953, television was integrated with the daily radio schedules. Then, in 1957, it leapt confidently on to the front pages – as clear a sign as any that Britain’s ‘television age’ had arrived.

Media rivals

By then, ITV had been running for two years, and the BBC no longer enjoyed a monopoly. Nor did Radio Times: even in the 1930s, glossy rivals such as Radio Pictorial appeared on the newsstands. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all came in 1991, with the deregulation of television listings. This allowed Radio Times to feature the schedules of commercial rivals for the first time – but also, of course, allowed any other publication to feature the BBC’s. Purely as a source of information about the week ahead, Radio Times was increasingly redundant.

Circulation figures, though, had always been impressive: 1 million in 1928, 3 million in 1939, and 8 million in 1950. For decades, Radio Times remained Britain’s biggest-selling weekly – an advertiser’s dream and an editor’s nightmare. Even before the war, Maurice Gorham, general editor from 1933 to 1941, grumbled that readers had to “turn over 10 or 12 pages to get to one day’s programmes”. Those pages now offer a fascinating timeline of consumer life. A 1923 issue is stuffed full of adverts for the arcane paraphernalia of early wireless receivers; a 1945 edition offers a Ministry of Food sandwich recipe – “Choose one-day old bread, and cut fairly thin” – that drives home the grinding reality of postwar austerity.

Snappier and peppier

In fact, Radio Times was always going to be so much more than a printed programme schedule. Its four prewar editors – Leonard Crocombe, Walter Fuller, Eric Maschwitz and Maurice Gorham – were all cultured men with valuable connections in the arts and media, and commissioned the best writing and artwork they could afford.

Articles typically came from BBC insiders who were leaders in their own fields, with graphic art supplied by renowned illustrators such as Arthur Watts, Frank Brangwyn and Austin Cooper. In May 1937, Christopher Nevinson – who’d achieved great fame as a war artist – painted the cover for Radio Times’ ‘Coronation Number’; in November, Rex Whistler did the same for a ‘Woman’s Broadcasting Number’. Such special editions culminated at the end of the autumn ‘fireside’ season with a lavish Christmas double issue, the creative and commercial highpoint of the Radio Times year. By the end of the 1930s, Gorham boasted, it was “the most catholic illustrated paper in the country”.

Among its riches, the letters page performed a distinctive service. Lord John Reith, the BBC’s first director-general, saw Radio Times as “the connecting link” between broadcasters and their audience, so publishing correspondence – even from the most disgruntled of listeners – would offer reminders of the harsh realities of public taste to those sequestered in the company’s ivory tower. The very first issue printed a missive by ‘P.J.’ from Birmingham, complaining about the dreariness of talks programmes – lectures such as ‘The Decrease of Malaria in Great Britain’ or ‘How to Become a Veterinary Surgeon’. The BBC, ‘P.J.’ concluded, was for those who “own expensive sets and pretend to appreciate and understand only highbrow music and educational ‘sob stuff’.”

In May 1926, the magazine even published a mauling from the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, accusing the BBC of causing “pain and indignation” across Britain through its lopsided reporting of the General Strike. “I feel like asking the Postmaster-General for my licence fee back,” she wrote menacingly.

Over the long term, the trend was for snappier articles, more pictures, more celebrity puffs. By the 1970s, broadsheet newspapers were starting to vacuum up some of the best long-form feature writing with their rapidly expanding Sunday supplements, and every weekly publication had to adjust – as did broadcasters.

In the 1970s, Radio 4 merged several much-venerated Home Service programmes into cheery catch-all series. A glance at the Radio Times revealed that The Critics, which had once served up rarefied conversation in the classic ‘talks’ manner, would be replaced by Kaleidoscope. This programme took a breezier, more fragmented approach: a three-minute interview with Joan Baez, a short studio discussion about Picasso, musical excerpts from Diana Ross. The Times labelled the trend “magazinismus”, while the celebrated critic Richard Hoggart used the 1971 Reith Lectures to revive a theme he’d introduced in his 1957 classic The Uses of Literacy, bemoaning a media landscape in which “everything is interesting – as interesting as the next thing – if only it is short, unconnected and pepped-up”.

Editorial teams were encouraged to personify their target customer as ‘the cabman’s wife’

Complaints about a steady dumbing down were, though, exaggerated. Radio Times had always sought a mass-market appeal, with editorial teams of the 1920s and 30s encouraged to personify their target customer as ‘the cabman’s wife’. Staff were told that this fictional everywoman would buy Radio Times for its programme listings – but, as long as the writing avoided “being highbrow”, she might read the rest of the magazine, too. In fact, Radio Times’ founding philosophy was clear: just as Reith’s BBC operated on the principle of the maximum benefit to the maximum number, its house magazine embodied the belief that the more people who could be educated through reading its pages, the better.

Changing times

Educated about what, though? About the world at large, naturally, but also – and above all – about broadcasting itself. Radio Times – published since 2011 by Immediate Media, which also produces BBC History Magazine – aimed to create a more discriminating audience: one that might better appreciate what the BBC’s own programme-makers were trying to achieve.

Over the past century, article after article has taken readers behind the scenes at the BBC. ‘Both Sides of the Microphone’, a regular column almost from the start, was the template for countless others featuring mildly propagandist gossip about programmes and personalities. In 1966, when pirate radio ships were the rage, an item entitled ‘Why No Continuous Pop?’ provided a lengthy exposition on the agonising ‘needle-time’ restrictions facing the corporation. Elsewhere, articles have explained everything from the art of radio drama to the challenges of filming wildlife in remote locations.

This kind of output, part of the magazine’s vast range of informed but accessible writing, has helped shape the public image of the BBC – indeed, the whole place of broadcasting in British life – for 100 years. For a modestly titled ‘timetable’, that’s an important and dangerously underappreciated role. With the BBC under increased pressure, one suspects that Radio Times – or something very much like it – will continue to be needed over the years ahead.

The BBC has a searchable archive of previous editions of Radio Times

This article was first published in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine