‘Radio’s a Building in the Air’: Lord Cut-Glass, Poet of the Airwaves

Abstract

As a measure of the success of his first two volumes of poems, the twenty-two-year-old Thomas had been invited to make his first radio broadcast on 21 April 1937, a short feature of only fifteen minutes on ‘Life and the Modern Poet’ for Wynford Vaughn-Thomas at the BBC’s Swansea studio.¹ For this he would be paid the welcome sum of four guineas. On the day, however, Thomas forgot that the programme was to be recorded in Swansea and was still in London at the appointed hour, so John Pudney had to organize for him to broadcast from there. If we add to this the fact of Thomas’s failure subsequently to provide a script, it is hardly surprising that ‘He was not invited back for eighteen months’.² The occasion of his second BBC broadcast, on 18 October 1938, was a programme on ‘The Modern Muse’, with W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNiece. A canon of English poetry in the 1930s, this second occasion only confirmed Thomas’s standing in the literary world. What it could not anticipate, however, was Thomas’s eventual standing in the world of broadcasting, both as a writer and as a reader. By 1953 and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, television was fast becoming established as the entertainment of choice in most British homes, and before he died in the same year Thomas had made one doubtful appearance on television.

I like very much people telling me about their childhood, but they’ll have to be quick or else I’ll be telling them about mine.

— Dylan Thomas, ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’ (second version)