Life on Air: A History of Radio Four

by David Hendy

Radio Four has been described as "the greatest broadcasting channel in the world", the "heartbeat of the BBC", a cultural icon of Britishness, and the voice of Middle England. Defined by its rich mix, encompassing everything from journalism and drama to comedy, quizzes, and short-stories, its programs, such as Today, The Archers, Woman's Hour, The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, Gardeners' Question Time, and The Shipping Forecast, have been part of British life for decades. Others, less successful, have caused offence and prompted derision.

Born as it was in the Swinging Sixties, Radio Four's central challenge has been to change with the times, while trying not to lose faith with those who see it as a standard-bearer for quality, authoritativeness, or simply 'old-fashioned' BBC values.

In this first major behind-the-scenes account of the station's history, David Hendy, a former producer for Radio Four, draws on privileged access to the BBC's own archives and new interviews with key personnel to illuminate the arguments and controversies behind the creation of some of its most popular programmes. He reveals the station's struggle to justify itself in a television age, favouring clear branding and tightly-targeted audiences, with bitter disputes between the BBC and its fiercely loyal listeners. The story of these struggles is about more than the survival of one radio, Radio Four has been a lightning rod for all sorts of wider social anxieties over the past forty years. A kaleidoscopic view of the changing nature of the BBC, the book provides a gripping insight into the very nature of British life and culture in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

518 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

I'm a writer, broadcaster and Emeritus Professor of Media and Cultural History at the University of Sussex, England.

I studied history at St Andrews and Oxford before joining the BBC in 1987 as a trainee reporter, later working as a producer on The World Tonight and Analysis. After leaving the BBC in 1993 I taught at the University of Westminster and the University of Sussex, and held visiting fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and Indiana-Bloomington.

'The BBC: A Century on Air' (published in the UK as 'The BBC: A People's History) is my latest book. My four previous publications include 'Life on Air: a History of Radio Four' (2007), which won the Longmans-History Today Book of the Year Award and was nominated for the Orwell Prize.

In 2010, I co-wrote with Adrian Bean 'Between Two Worlds', a Drama on 3 for the BBC based on the life of the Victorian scientist and spiritualist Oliver Lodge. Since then, I've appeared regularly on BBC Radio. For Radio 3 I wrote and presented the five-part series of essays, 'Rewiring the Mind', as well as 'The Power of Three', which featured seventy highlights from the Third Programme’s archives. And in 2013 I wrote and presented the thirty-part series 'Noise: A Human History' for Radio 4.