Among a certain constituency of television fans and celebrants of newer media, it may be the case that, as Sasha Frere-Jones claims, “radio has lost relevance” (“Idolatry: Everybody's a Critic,” the New Yorker, 19 May 2008, 74). But even in the Internet age, radio remains the most widely attended mode of mass communications in the world. A host of recent and forthcoming studies of radio indicates, too, that the original electronic mass telecommunications medium is not only alive and well in the academy but also experiencing a literary-critical and historical renaissance, nearly a century after its institutionalization in the United States and Britain. As Roger Simpson argues in his conclusion, “The genre of radio … has proved remarkably resilient” (129). Simpson is speaking specifically of the BBC's impact on the preservation and dissemination of “Arthurian tradition in the popular imagination” over the course of British broadcasting's more than eighty-year history (137). While recognizing that radio has had a “very much smaller” influence on this process of cultural preservation and transmission than either film or literature, Simpson nevertheless proposes that “the cumulative mass of Arthurian programmes suggests that they occupied a significant role in the cultural life of many listeners” (137) and, by extension, in the cultural life of twentieth-century Britain as a whole.

Published in a series that includes such related titles as Film and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages and Medievalism in Technology: Old and New—as well as Simpson's own Camelot Regained, a study of Tennyson's role in the nineteenth-century Arthurian revival—Radio Camelot is a meticulously researched and wide-ranging “survey of the programmes that dealt with the Arthurian legends … from the birth of the BBC in 1922 up to 2005” (xiv). In the first sentence of his introduction, Simpson calls radio “one of the last zones to be explored for Arthurian interest”; as such, radio in general, and the BBC in particular, has remained “largely terra incognita” (xiii). It is an impressive survey. It draws on a large amount of published as well as unpublished and long-unheard material in the BBC's Written Archives Centre; it unearths a stunning wealth of material related to the BBC's persistent engagement with Arthurian legend in a variety of forms including music, drama, fiction, poetry, documentary features, and scholarly analyses; and, for good measure, it expands beyond the written and spoken word, with thirty-five black-and-white illustrations from Radio Times, to show that, with respect to twentieth-century understanding of Arthurian legends, “the aural medium is … firmly linked with printed text and pictorial illustration” (xiii).

Simpson amply fulfills his intention to “notice” and “understand” the ways that Arthurian legend has “evolve[d] into new forms” in the age of radio broadcasting (xv). He traces this development from (to take a random sampling) the BBC's early promotion of Wagnerian opera and its commissioning of Arthurian drama in the 1920s and 1930s to the heyday of (pretelevision) radio in the 1950s, the pre-Raphaelite revival of the 1960s and 1970s, and the late twentieth-century “blooming” of Arthurian radio drama (104). In six chronologically ordered chapters, each arranged in permutations of set themes—“Music,” “The Historical Arthur,” “Reading and Adapting: Medieval Literature,” “Reading and Adapting: Post-medieval Literature,” “Reading and Adapting: Drama,” and “Making It New”—and in five appendixes comprising lists of “Major Radio Programmes”; performances of “Wagner, Purcell,” and other composers; performances related specifically to the “Tristan” theme and to that of “The Lady of Shalott/Elaine”; “Versions for Children”; and, finally, “Arthurian Illustration,” Simpson has produced both a thorough overview of “the extent of penetration consistently achieved by the legend within a modern medium” and much raw evidence of how BBC radio “continued, preserved and helped to recover an Arthurian tradition in the popular imagination” (137).

Radio Camelot, along with other recent contributions to the rapidly expanding field of radio studies like Margaret Fisher's Ezra Pound's Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (2002) and Timothy Campbell's Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (2006), as well as the forthcoming Broadcasting Modernism (2009), provides an invaluable service to students of twentieth-century British literature and culture, especially those interested in the often fruitful cross-pollination between high and mass culture—not to mention medievalists attentive to the persistent appeal of Arthurian legends in the world of technological modernity and postmodernity. If the critical stakes of his project are less clear than those of these other writers, Simpson's scope is wider than theirs, as he describes the entire history of the BBC's engagement with his subject. Indeed, a description of that history is his subject. He makes available for the first time a great quantity of information previously accessible only to other cultural archaeologists with ready access to the BBC's Written Archives Centre. The book's one failing is that, with some brief exceptions—such as when Simpson reads legendary BBC producer D. G. Bridson's 1937 radio play King Arthur (with score by Benjamin Britten) as “blatantly designed to reflect the politics of the contemporary European crisis” (21) and as an indirect commentary on the Edward VIII abdication crisis (22)—it fails to explain satisfyingly the cultural, social, and political correspondences and stakes of the evolution of Arthurian legends at the BBC. Simpson provides the who, what, when, and where of his material in unprecedented detail, but he omits, to a great extent, to show why the material is significant in these broader arenas. To return to the archaeological metaphor: Simpson has dug deep into his terra incognita, exposing over eighty years of rich strata; others can now, with his help, explain more precisely why Arthurian legends have evolved in the ways that they have on air across nearly a century of “gleaming technological modernity” (1).