ABSTRACT
‘There is a grumble and a cause of complaining if the crofter in the North of Scotland or the agricultural labourer in the West of England has been unable to hear the King speak on some great national occasion.’ 1 These, the opening words of the chapter on the function of broadcasting in John Reith's book, Broadcast Over Britain, written in 1924, express a concern, in the earliest years of broadcasting, to employ radio to forge a link between the dispersed and disparate listeners and the symbolic heartland of national life. It is true that in the same sentence Reith went on to mention news, music and scientific ideas as items which wireless should bring to people ‘as a matter of course’. But it was those programmes which brought the words of the monarch and the sounds of ceremonies of state or which celebrated national festivals, that came to hold pride of place in the annual cycle of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s. Such programmes were often technically ambitious, stretching the resources of the BBC to their limits in order to display the versatility of the microphone in capturing the different stages of a procession or the power of radio to leap continents and unite an empire in the space of a few minutes. Many were remarkable for the very regularity of their appearance in a schedule that otherwise avoided routinization. They were exceptional because, as Reith once put it, they offered the possibility of ‘making the nation one man’. 2
