This volume is a cultural historical study, aiming to introduce its reader to the most important radio engagements with ancient Greek culture from the foundation of the BBC to the 1960s. It is also a classical reception study – although W. early on rejects the ‘reception’ label on the grounds of its implied passivity and presumed neglect of audience reception (à la S. Goldhill 2002 and 2011 respectively). W. advocates a common-sense approach – taking into account all available evidence pertaining to the creation and public reception of the new ‘classical’ piece of work. In the case of BBC radio receptions, there is a glut of paratextual materials, including Radio Times previews and features, reviews in The Listener, internal memos of various sorts, listeners' letters (‘from Tunbridge Wells’ and elsewhere), the more familiar critical heritage and – W.’s pièce de résistance – ‘Listener Research Reports’. These voces populi have the potential to play a crucial role in our understanding of the cultural impact and (dare I say?) value of the works under investigation. When presented with a record of listener numbers, an ‘Appreciation Index’ and supporting listener comments, we can see not only how successful a programme was, but also the details of its receptions at the time of broadcast and across categories of class and (as noted) sometimes gender.

This is important, and – as W. states – such noisy evidence, collected by the BBC from its earliest days, stands as a cautionary reminder of the stony ‘silence’ of this element in the majority of classical reception studies, where no such evidence exists. The reports give vibrant contemporary colour to the accounts, and their cumulative effect certainly drives home the enormous diversity of reception of each programme discussed – for the feedback presented is always mixed. Further analysis of the reports, focusing on the social class of their contributors, might well reveal how different classical texts, and/or their handling, worked among different constituencies of listeners (identified in the reports by their occupation). That said, the focus of the present book is such that little attempt is made to draw wider conclusions from the reports.

W. draws on the leading scholarship on radio from such benchmark texts as A. Briggs's five-volume The History of British Broadcasting (1961–95) and K. Whitehead's ‘literary history’ of The Third Programme (1989), through to more recent works produced by an expanding and energetic research community, on show at W.’s conference in the British Library, ‘Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC’ (2016). The book is therefore an excellent launch pad for further study and an essential companion to Louis MacNeice: the Classical Radio Plays (2013), edited by W. and S. Harrison, which prints ten of MacNeice's radio scripts for the first time. In the encouraging spirit that W. foments, the crucial online databases for students and researchers to orientate themselves in this nascent field of British broadcast classics are: Oxford's APGRD (http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk), The British Library's Sound Archive (http://www.bl.uk/subjects/sound) and the BBC Genome project (http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk), which contains BBC listings recorded in the Radio Times (1923–2009). W.’s production chronology in the appendix will also prove indispensible.

The volume is very much a book of two halves, and the first – with its sometimes laborious methodological wrangling – repeatedly pins its arguments on evidence provided in the second, which can frustrate. It is, however, a genuinely groundbreaking study, achieving the not small task of opening up a new realm of research. Part 1 begins with a chapter containing the aforementioned methodological provocation. Unnamed zealots from the school of Hans Robert Jauss are beaten back to make way for more egalitarian and syncretic studies of ‘engagements’ with classical culture. It should be said that the field of classical reception has diversified dramatically in recent years, and W.’s practical approach (irrespective of factional nomenclature) appears sensible, rather than new. Some fresh challenges to dominant trends have been set out in S. Butler (ed.), Deep Classics (2016).

Chapter 2 provides some useful context for those unfamiliar with the early BBC. W. takes on the bushy subject of ‘brow height’ and its perceived relationship with a person's educational background and overstatedly consequent capacity to engage with more challenging cultural artefacts. The BBC's attempts to target particular audiences according to their ‘high-lowbrow stereotypes’ were, as W. demonstrates, repeatedly confounded. Chapter 3 is divided in two, but united by the subject of ‘Listening in’. The first section assesses the medium of radio in terms of its ‘practical accessibility’ to Greek culture; and the second discusses the more ethereal ‘imaginative accessibility’. Particularly valuable is a subsection of the first, headed ‘The educative medium’, in which W. introduces the use of radio broadcasts in formal educational settings from the classroom to variously affiliated listening groups. The chapter closes with discussion on the unique intimacy of ‘listening in’ and the radio's ‘potential to bring the modern listener in close psychological engagement with the characters and the stories first told and performed in antiquity’ (p. 113).

With Chapter 4 we reach the much-heralded case studies of Part 2. First, a discussion of the ‘Radio Hellenism’ of Gilbert Murray – covering his verse translations of Greek plays, and then his numerous radio talks about Classics and their intersections with contemporary international politics. Chapter 5 focuses on the ‘Wartime Propaganda’ of the poet Louis MacNeice. The extraordinary, radio-born, musical drama – with libretto from Edward Sackville-West and original score by Benjamin Britten – The Rescue (1943) occupies the first half of Chapter 6. The second is given to Robert Graves's The Anger of Achilles, which becomes in the hands of Raymond Raikes a prize-winning radio production of the same name (1965). Chapter 7 examines the radio adaptations of Aeschylean tragedy beginning with MacNeice and Val Gielgud's 1946 Agamemnon – the inaugural Greek tragedy on the Third Programme – before proceeding to Gabriel Josipovici's experimental ‘re-texturing’ of Richard Lattimore's translation of the Agamemnon, entitled Ag (1976). From tragedy to comedy: W., in Chapter 8, discusses in turn the Aristophanic works of Louis MacNeice (Enemy of Cant, 1946) and Patric Dickinson's 1950s and ’60s popular adaptations, on both radio and television.

W.’s most enduring insights will perhaps be those she offers into the aptness of radio as a medium for the imaginative transportation of the listener into the narratives of the classical world, irrespective of their educational background. One contextual ingredient that might have been a welcome addition to the case studies is the influence of the energetic leftist cultural response to the fascist threat, which would find its bloody conclusion in WW2. If few were card-carrying members of the CPGB, many of the creative practitioners whose work is discussed in this book were deeply influenced by leftist discourse, particularly in the ‘Popular Front’ period.Footnote ¹

Class and socialism constitute something of a haunting presence in the volume. That Louis MacNeice in 1943 put in a proposal for a programme entitled ‘Freedom from Want’, centred on the example of Vladimir Lenin, is at least suggestive of a steeper political inclination than is generally accepted. The proposal was rejected. To give another example: the leftist poet D.G. Bridson in 1934 wrote a radio play entitled Prometheus the Engineer with music by the communist theatre-maker cum folk singer, Ewan MacColl (p. 43). The play may never have been broadcast, but it nevertheless demonstrates the keen presence of leftist and communist cultural practice in and around the BBC, and its perhaps surprising attraction to the classical. Such presences of class and left-wing politics rise with some regularity to the surface of the volume, but they are generally left for others to fish.

The somewhat understated hero in this fascinating story appears to be the pioneering radio producer Raymond Raikes (1910–1998). Leaping from almost every section of the book, his contribution to early classical radio clearly requires a full-length study of its own. About Raikes, who adapted dozens of dramatic and literary works for the radio, John Tydeman wrote in his obituary that ‘A scholar would note that the hand of Raikes is evident in most of the Shakespeare texts he directed. For the average listener this blasphemy would only make things clearer’ (Independent, 7 October 1998). The same could no doubt be said for his classical texts.