Addressing the People

Abstract

Priestley was a prominent author in the 1930s, but he reached the height of his fame and popularity in wartime with a great number of domestic and overseas broadcasts. In particular, his series of ‘Postscripts’ to the nine o’clock news, introduced to counter Lord Haw Haw’s Nazi propaganda, was so popular that over 50 per cent of the adult population regularly tuned in. If the BBC was the ‘voice of Britain’ at the time, Priestley embodied it, second only in this to the Prime Minister himself. In fact, Churchill and Priestley can be regarded as complementary radio persona in that the Prime Minister expressed a chivalric, high Tory ideal wheareas Priestley represented the ‘ordinary people’. It is often noted that Priestley was eventually taken off the air because his commitment to a socialist, or social-democratic postwar reconstruction of society was resented in some high places, and that the BBC and the Ministry of Information ended up accusing each other of being responsible for this action.’ The disgruntled Priestley is then said to have sought other channels for the dissemination of his political views.² While this account is acceptable in principle, it must be remembered, as I have shown above in some detail, that Priestley was no revolutionary. Jean Seaton also notes this in her history on broadcasting, concluding that ‘the most notable feature of Priestley’s talks was that a concern for ordinary people and their future emerged and was expressed by very traditional images of rural England, village communities, and nature.’³