ABSTRACT

Summerson's wireless tour of the representative examples of ill-fated artifacts began in Warwickshire at the crumpling Compton Wynyates where visitors complained of "the smell of dry rot combined with damp and dirt". The series was a big success and established Summerson as a regular fixture on British domestic airwaves. A labor-intensive and expensive program-type, it birthed most of his future broadcasting strategies. Summerson is widely recognized as one of the most brilliant architectural historians of the twentieth century. At the same time that radio began to revive oral travelogues, scholars like Milman Parry and Walter Benjamin began to think through its attributes. Oral travelogues were the most archaic form of storytelling. The pioneering generation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), then armed with the legislatively protected monopoly over national and imperial airwaves, took the participatory mystique of radio as a precious gift for reconciling democracy with culture.