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Advent Calendar Day 11: Tinsel-Free and not-so Joyous

2016-12-11T07:00:00+00:00

Rick Wakeman on Grumpy Old Men At Christmas, 2003

"The children get tired and fractious, Grandpa goes to sleep, Auntie gets indigestion, Dad complains about the expense and I do the washing-up!" - things aren't always joyful, joyful in the holiday season and BBC Genome listings reflect this.

Apart from the usual tragic EastEnders Christmas plots - which should by now be considered traditional, the reports about those having to work over the holidays, and the special programmes for the lonely, there's also the desire for a somewhat alternative celebration, either by slightly changing the menu or rethinking the decorations...

Radio DJs are also known to rebel against the festive overload. John Peel felt the need to declare his Home Truths programme a "tinsel-free zone": "no mistletoe, no fairy lights, just good wholesome fair". Tom Watts opted for an alternative collection of Christmas record that didn't include "Wizzard and Wham!, Slade and Spector", and Chris Moyles and his team offered seven hours of "their own sideways look at the world" on Christmas Day.

Grumpy famous men have also been offered the chance to vent against "pantos, nativity plays, false bonhomie and novelty socks", while grumpy women bemoaned "supermarket shopping" and "multi-tasking". Our favourite, though, is this Woman's Hour listing/song... no bitterness here...

Woman's Hour, Woman's Hour Women all the way.
Have a merry Christmas,
Don't work too hard today. Let him stuff the turkey, Let him fill your sack,
Stay in bed all morning, Let him break his back
With brussels sprouts and holly And artificial snow.
Let him change the fairy lights And buy the mistletoe.
So why not have a change of plan?
We've got the best solution,
Listen each day to Woman's Hour For your New Year's resolution.

Advent Calendar Day 2: Making Christmas Possible

2016-12-02T07:00:00+00:00

Rose-Mary Sands is seen here interviewing some of the workers at a London toy factory who are busily engaged in making crackers.

In the summer of 1949, reporter Rose-Mary Sands from Woman's Hour went out with her microphone to investigate the trades that "have to prepare several months ahead for the Christmas season." She interviewed factory workers making crackers and cotton wool snowball makers - all while Britain was being hit by a heatwave.

Fast-forward 1997, the Food Programme also had a look at the workers making Christmas possible: "Brussel sprout pickers, turkey pluckers, caterers...", while in 2007 a satirical radio play imagined the lives of three supermarket workers "as they confront the fact that consumerism, from St Valentine's Day to Christmas, now controls the shape of their lives."

Cottonwood snowballs makers in August...

70 years of Woman's Hour: the bouquets and brickbats

2016-10-07T06:00:00+00:00

The cover announcing the launch of Woman's Hour, October 1946

Woman's Hour first went on air in the Light Programme on October 7th 1946. It made it to the cover of the magazine, and a feature inside explained the programme would include "talks on household management, cookery, fashion, beauty culture, child care, housing, and pensions." The presenter was Alan Ivimey, a "London-born journalist who specialises in writing for and talking to women" - he was replaced three months later by Joan Griffiths.

The first week of programmes featured subjects such as "putting your best face forward', "how to take care of your feet", coupon savings and pensions. The listing for each day of that first week on air was highlighted in a beautifully illustrated box.

The listings for the first editions of Woman's Hour, October 1946

The first programme was followed by a special listeners' panel hearing the programme in Broadcasting House. The panel consisted of "Miss Margaret Bondfield, who was Minister of Labour from 1929-1931, Miss Deborah Kerr, the film star, and Mrs. Elsie May Crump, a butcher's wife from Chorlton-cum-Hardy."

Five years later, deputy programme editor Joanna Scott-Mancrief summed up some of the controversies stirred by the programme through their listeners' letters. She describes how an item in which Dr. Joad discussed English cooking "brought hundreds of brickbats and bouquets" including the letter from a listener at Gorleston-on-Sea: "Englishwomen cook what their menfolk want to eat. The average husband, faced by some delectable French concoction, will view it with grave suspicion and enquire: 'What's this?'"

She also highlights a letter asking Woman's Hour to start a "vigorous campaign". "We as women of the country are everlastingly referred to as 'housewives.' The Government, the newspapers, the BBC, the shopkeepers, all and everyone call us housewives. Couldn't we find some more attractive noun for ourselves? Please talk it over and see what you can do."

T. Holland Bennett interviewing Miss Deborah Kerr, Mrs. Elsie May Crump and Miss Margaret Bondfield

The deputy editor wrote again in 1956 about how the programme had evolved in the first ten years of life: "In 1946 housewives' problems were so many and pressing that the stress in the first programmes was inevitably on practical matters. In ten years listeners have, however, shown us that their interests are as wide as the world itself: accordingly, the programme has travelled abroad and acquired its own correspondents in five different countries."

Fast-forward to 1967, when Woman's Hour decided to celebrate its 21st anniversary with a series of "birthday fortnight" special editions. "Although those of us who produce the programme had not planned any special celebration, listeners have been writing to us throughout the year to remind us of our birthday, sending greetings and suggesting items they would like to hear", wrote Monica Sims, editor of the programme at the time.

Items that week included a talk from Dr Benjamin Spock about parenting, a couple undecided about marriage, and being a grandmother.

She announced some favourite guests and broadcasters would be "looking ahead to life in 1988" and hoped that for the next 21 years listeners would "enjoy many happy returns of Woman's Hour."

Woman's Hour did indeed continue on air in 1986 and made it to the cover of Radio Times for its 40th anniversary. The main article described the programme as "the first to break the BBC taboos surrounding such things as the Pill, homosexuality, impotence and frigidity". Programme editor Sandra Chalmers added that "we would never do something purely for the sake of shocking people, "but if it's in the interests of our listeners, there's nothing that can't be discussed."

The 50th anniversary was celebrated in 1996 with a cover featuring a semi-nude photograph of actor Helen Mirren, at "50 & Fabulous". Presenter Jenni Murray told how in 1992 "the programme came under threat. It was suggested that in a 'post-feminist' era its time, title and focus should change, you the listeners gave the reasons why it should continue - in an unprecedented furore directed at the then controller Michael Green (who now openly admits to travelling in permanent terror of being handbagged wherever he went)".

"You told him the programme celebrated, informed, entertained and educated women, filling in the gaps that other programmes ignored. Some of you wrote to say how Woman's Hour had changed your life - giving you the courage to apply for a job, cope with a difficult teenager or take out the pension fund you'd been putting off. Some of you spoke of smears or mammograms you'd had because you heard it on Woman's Hour. The programme had saved your life. Men, too, wrote in to save 'their' programme - explaining how they loved to hear a female perspective, or how they now understood their wife's illness considerably better after hearing it described.

Woman's Hour will be celebrating its 70th birthday with a live audience show from the BBC Radio Theatre on October 10th. The panel will discuss the results of a poll specially commissioned to find out how life has changed for women at home and at work from 1946 to the present day. In the meantime, our suggestion is to search for different topics + the term "Woman's Hour" and organise it by Oldest First - this gives you a fascinating glimpse at how the programme has tackled different subjects through the decades. We've tried "job" and "sexual." What have you found?

When a blog is not a blog

2015-07-24T10:00:00+00:00

As we started working on the brand new BBC Genome blog, it seemed appropriate to do the equivalent of googling ourselves: what do you get if you search for "blog" on BBC Genome? When were blogs first mentioned in radio and TV listings?

What we found is that the first-ever mention of the word is in a 1947 radio comedy on the BBC Home Service called The Blog on the Escutcheon

No, it wasn’t a typo but a play on words of the expression "a blot on one's escutcheon" - which means "a stain on one's honour."

In the play, written by Russell Davies, an American asking for an aristocrat's daughter's hand in marriage, rattles the family skeletons by mentioning an ancestor called "Laetitia Blog", who is described as "a most respectable girl of good minor yeoman stock, who did her best to atone for her presumption."

The next mention of the term "blog" skips a decade to 1960 and appears in a talk on Woman’s Hour in which Cynthia Muir finds a solution to the recurring problem of losing things at home:

"Ours cannot be the only household in which things disappear mysteriously. That pair of scissors which we were using only yesterday and which was certainly put back in its proper place; the bedroom slipper which should be – but unaccountably is not – with its fellow; these are the sort of things which must occasionally go a’missing in most homes. The usual cry at such times is either: 'Someone has had…!' or 'Who’s taken…?' while the children accuse each other, which leads to indignant recrimination.

"Well, in our case at any rate, I can offer a solution to this problem. We have a Being – unseen, so far, by anyone – who is known as Blog and it is he who is responsible for any loss or disappearance."

Script from Woman's Hour, May 9, 1960: "Well, in our case at any rate, I can offer a solution to this problem. We have a Being – unseen, so far, by anyone – who is known as Blog and it is he who is responsible for any loss or disappearance."

The first mention of an actual weblog or blog, as we now know it, comes courtesy of BBC Radio 4's Analysis, which mentions the internet being a "key political battlefield" in the 2004 US Elections "with thousands of people debating the issues on their own web pages, or 'blogs'".

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that blogs or weblogs were mentioned by the BBC for the first time as late as 2005. Listings don’t describe everything that is ever said in programmes, but they do offer a clue to when some trends and new words start to be used.

And since we want this blog to be a space for sharing oddities, enthusiasms and searches do tell us if you have found any particular terms and when they were first used in listings...