It was one of the most distinguished titles in British journalism for more than six decades, nurturing the careers of literary talent including Virginia Woolf, Phillip Larkin and TS Eliot, and home to what became regarded as the toughest cryptic crossword in any weekly publication.
But 20 years after the closure of the Listener magazine, all 3,197 issues are to be made available online as part of a major new digitisation project. Initially due to be opened to universities, schools, libraries and research institutions, BBC Worldwide has spent 18 months collaborating with digital archive specialists Cengage Learning to scan and index 130,000 pages in colour, making the every issue of the Listener fully searchable.
Established in 1929 by Lord Reith, the first director general of the BBC, the Listener was designed to be the intellectual counterpart to the more populist Radio Times, a cultural and intellectual record of the corporation's programming.
Jean Seaton, professor of media history at the University of Westminster and official historian of the BBC, described the Listener's "profound literary role", from its roll call of contributors to the quality of the editorial.
"It was edited with a real eye, a testament to the power of the editor, intelligent and constructive and with a style driven by the urgency and topicality of the BBC, but about as real an insight into what the serious minds of the time were thinking about," she said. "At that time in the 1930s the Listener was part of the immense ambition of the BBC to be part of British life, and early on established a tone more bohemian than the BBC."
Just as today, that immense ambition attracted scorn from the BBC's commercial rivals at launch, with the Newspaper Proprietors' Association claiming the Listener represented "an illegitimate stretching of official activity".
Nonetheless, the title was published for 62 years until, after a period of declining interest and suffering from competition from weekend newspapers and their supplements, it finally closed in 1991. The first decades of the Listener are particularly significant because live shows were not usually recorded, and tapes of radio shows were usually wiped.
As well as more recent contributors including Stephen Fry, Ian Hislop and John Peel, the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy is covered by Anthony Burgess, King George VI's speech at the outbreak of the second world war – as featured in The King's Speech – is transcribed in full, and Larkin makes his national weekly publication debut at just 18 with his poem Ultimatum.
Time is less kind to other pieces in the Listener's collection. Reporting from Berlin in March 1933, Vernon Bartlett describes how nobody he has seen in Nazi Germany has "suffered any inconvenience".
He writes of the failure of France, the US and Britain to help moderate Germans after the first world war, and how the allies knew the treaty of Versailles would put Germany in a position of lasting inferiority that would "inevitably be disputed by a young and vigorous race".
"The outline of [Hitler's] programme must have done a good deal to allay anxiety in Poland or France ... I am inclined to think that the Nazi revolution was an inevitable step towards the recovery to German greatness and influence."
For more information on the project click here
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