On 25 January 1954, Dylan Thomas’s great radio play Under Milk Wood was broadcast, with Richard Burton as its presiding spirit, First Voice. Thomas, who died two months earlier at the age of 39, had been developing it on the hoof for years. But its final destination – in the far from certain event that there would ever be one, given that he once left the script in a Soho pub – was clear from the title he chose when he first committed part of it to print: Llareggub. A Piece for Radio Perhaps.
Under Milk Wood became a landmark drama for the BBC’s Third Programme, now Radio 3, which is marking the production’s 70th anniversary next week with a daily series of five location-specific plays, reprised in a 90-minute omnibus on Sunday 28 January. The 21st century iteration of First Voice – connecting all five episodes – is Ruth Jones, co-creator and star of BBC television’s Gavin & Stacey.
The confidence of this week-long celebration of one of its own past triumphs might suggest that all is well in the BBC’s drama department. But though it remains the UK’s biggest single commissioner of plays – and the biggest producer of audio drama in the world – it has taken a battering since quotas protecting key genres on the BBC’s radio services were removed in 2017, when Ofcom took over from the BBC Trust. Since then, radio drama output has halved.
At a time when the BBC is under ideological siege, affecting every aspect of its vast operations, many will ask why radio drama still matters. It is certainly not the go-to medium it was in the 1930s, when Orson Welles threw America into a panic with an adaptation of HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Or in the 1950s, when The Archers was conceived to encourage farmers to increase productivity. Or even in the 1970s, when Douglas Adams launched one of the 20th century’s masterpieces, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
But those who question if radio could ever pack the punch of a television show such as Mr Bates vs the Post Office should note the impact of Simon Armitage’s Black Roses in 2010. It was a drama‑documentary, written in poetry for Radio 4, in the voice of Sophie Lancaster, a goth teenager who died in 2007 after being attacked in a Lancashire park. The piece has since been adapted into a stage play and an award-winning BBC film, and was influential in a successful campaign to extend police policy on hate crimes to cover sub-cultures.
In general, though, the strengths of radio drama lie elsewhere. Angela Carter, author of the Radio 3 hit (later a film) The Company of Wolves, described it as “three-dimensional storytelling” in which “the listener is invited into the narrative to contribute to it his or her own way of ‘seeing’ the voices and the sounds”. Unfortunately plays are long in gestation, and their voices and sounds are costly to hire and produce, which is why a big player such as the BBC is needed to ensure their safe passage into the podcast age.
Seventy years on, Under Milk Wood demonstrates why it matters: the evocative intimacy of radio enabled Thomas to animate the villagers of Llareggub with “rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams”. It is a reminder that drama has many different ways of touching hearts and changing minds. We need it in all its forms.
