Hugh Chignell's compelling new book tells the tale of British radio drama's rise and fall, focusing on the post–World War II years, when drama, for a few shining moments, held central stage. British Radio Drama, 1945–63 is a welcome sign that, after more than a half-century of neglect, radio drama is finally getting the kind of attention it deserves as a uniquely expressive cultural medium. Long subsumed, in both popular and academic attention, by its far more prominent televisual relative, the recent upsurge of audio forms sparked by the digital era has not only prompted a welcome increase in the kind of contemporary critical reaction other media are accustomed to receiving—reviews, discussion, festivals, awards—but slowly, slowly has allowed radio's long-hidden history to emerge. Though Britain has played a leading role in the English-speaking radio world, dedicating more resources to experimental, boundary-pushing drama than most other countries and circulating it widely, much of it remains unfamiliar to non-British—and surely many British—audiences, despite its numerous awards and high critical reputation.

As Chignell's focused and succinct history shows, no medium's mere physical existence has suffered the way that radio's has—from an early “live” period when performances disappeared at birth into the air, leaving only scripts behind, to a kind of benign but deadly archival over-protectionism that has locked away many recordings, when they exist, behind closed doors, accessible to only a few. Add to that sound recording's uniquely awkward evolution through multiple noncompatible technologies—wax discs, shellac discs, steel tape, coated film, reel-to-reel magnetic tape, and more—and its intrinsic non-eye-readable (to use an archivist's term) nature, and it is a miracle we can study it at all. Imagine a film historian having to construct a history of the movies from scripts and reviews alone: this is too often the case for the radio historian. It is fortunate that the literary prominence of some of the BBC's dramatists have protected their work from radio's persistent ephemerality—as Chignell points out, Samuel Beckett's radio work is available on CD, for instance—but gaining access to others requires either a date with a listening booth in the British Library or a careful piecing together from scripts, published accounts, archival sources, and critical reviews of a radio play's contributions to dramatic form and its cultural impact.

The book opens with an illuminating discussion of the elements complicating our understanding of historic radio drama, situating its analysis within the structuring institutional framework of the British Broadcasting Corporation, from 1945 to 1963. Torn between two often warring departments—Drama and Features—loomed over by the imposing, caustic personality of long-time head of drama, Val Gielgud, and spread across three networks—Home, Light, and Third—a certain kind of drama flourished during this period that took the art of the radio play to new experimental heights, due in part to a close association with innovative figures in theater and literature—Samuel Becket, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, Marguerite Duras, Dylan Thomas—and some remarkable talents produced by radio itself, such as Louis MacNeice, Giles Cooper, and Rhys Adrian, aided by an equally remarkable in-house creative staff, including Douglas Cleverdon, Donald McWhinnie, Nesta Pain, Barbara Bray, Henry Reed, and several others, many of whom themselves wrote for radio as well as lending their unique talents to commissioning and producing most of the major works covered here.

Besides a very valuable chapter on the brilliant but overlooked Giles Cooper, based on deep archival research in both Britain and the United States (where Cooper's personal papers are held), British Radio Drama delves more deeply than any preceding work into key contributions to the evolution of what must be called a golden age of dramatic innovation for the ear. Chignell guides us through the experience of listening to a variety of key dramatic texts: some originating within the BBC, such as Louis MacNeice's The Dark Tower and Lance Sieveking's Silence in Heaven; others derived from stage originals, such as The Ascent of F6, a collaboration between W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood; and some, like Dylan Thomas's now-iconic Under Milkwood, that would never have come into being had not promising talents like Thomas been encouraged and assisted by the BBC production staff.

Another chapter, “Radio Drama and the Absurd,” illustrates the special affinity between radio's aurality and the absurdist sensibility through exploration of Samuel Beckett's extensive work on radio, in the teeth of ongoing hostility from Gielgud but with strong support from younger producers. Beckett wrote All That Fall specifically for radio; it was produced by Donald McWhinnie and debuted in 1957 on the Third Programme. Its success, Chignell argues, “opened the floodgates” (74) not only for more Beckett on the air but for a host of other avant-garde dramas, including works by Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Cooper, and Adrian. It was followed by further works by Beckett, both original to radio and adapted from the stage: Embers in 1959, Waiting for Godot in 1960, and Endgame in 1962. Much of this work pushed the boundaries of the acceptable on the radio, and Chignell has insightful things to say about the changing conditions of listening in the late 1950s and 1960s, as smaller, more portable radios came into existence, leading to a more privatized, individualized kind of listening that, it could be argued, forecasts the current digital situation.

The story of drama in the Features department is just as interesting, though less traditionally literary. Here the work of MacNeice dominates, ranging across numerous genres and styles from Greek and Roman classics through literary adaptation and fairy tales to experimental drama to documentary. The book's final chapters deal with the turn toward realism in the late 1950s, marked by Pinter's work, and the increasing competition from television, where many radio dramatists eventually moved. Despite this historical trajectory, repeated all around the world, of long-form radio's eclipse by its visual competitors, this book is evidence that, as Chignell concludes, “the great potential of radio drama . . . suggests that radio dramas are not a rather inadequate alternative to film and television, but have the power to tell stories that cannot be told in any other way” (162).