The Listener

This was a well-regarded weekly magazine that began life in 1929 in the reign of the BBC Chairman Lord Reith. It was designed as an accompaniment to the BBC’s educational output and covered a wide range of topics. It drew extensively from the BBC’s broadcasting output, often reprinting talk programmes or supplementing them with further illustrations and information. It was not well received by other magazine publishers who considered that it went beyond its area of activity. As a compromise to calm the opposition, it agreed to commission just 10 per cent of original content and could only feature a limited amount of advertisements.

The magazine soon built its reputation based on academic and artistic output focusing on broadcasting matters, the arts, intellectual life and politics. During World War II the magazine became a useful propaganda tool, reporting extensively on contributions from 'Commonwealth' countries to the war effort. By 1948 it attracted a readership of more than 150,000. It featured contributions from a wide range of artists and intellectuals. Contributors included E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Laurence Binyon, Herbert Read, William Rothenstein, Agatha Christie, Roger Fry, Eric Gill, Robert Graves, Laurence Housman, Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Bertrand Russell, Vita Sackville-West, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Sitwell, Sacheverell Sitwell, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West and Leonard Woolf. However, with the advent of commercial radio, the internet and rival publications, the magazine began to lose its popularity and sales plummeted. The BBC decided that the heavy losses were unsustainable and the publication ceased in January, 1991.