When Sir George Barnes, the first head of the Third Programme (now Radio 3) died in 1960, the BBC commissioned a memorial poem from Geoffrey Grigson for a broadcast celebrating Barnes’s achievements. Grigson cleverly satirized the philistines who were already, almost half a century ago, prowling the corridors and board rooms of Broadcasting House, devising quizzes, game shows and the prototypes of “reality TV”. Not so Barnes and his Third Programme, which stood for high culture on a sometimes extravagant scale:

Ear-counting colleagues jeered at Barnes’s
Folly
And your ridiculous elitist squandering of lolly
Better dispensed to purchase nastier names
And set up series of more babyish parlour
games.
“George will hire the Greek Ambassador to
read, in Greek,
All Aeschylus, in 99 instalments, week by
week.

For Grigson, Barnes only temporarily confounded the opposition (“For a while the bay-trees in the black tubs glistened, / And even the Muses sent for a radio, and listened”). But so far as BBC radio is concerned (television is another matter) he was too pessimistic. Under-funded though they are – none of the “extravagance” of the Barnes regime exists now – both Radio 3 and 4 continue to represent intellectual culture very effectively.

Grigson’s example of Aeschylus was well chosen. For, leaving aside culture in general, it is BBC radio that has done more than any other of the media to keep Classics and classical literature in the public ear over the past eighty-five years. While blockbuster movies have come and gone, in waves of fashion (from early disaster spectacle, through “sword and sandals”, to Gladiator and its clones), radio has an unbroken record of loyalty to the Greeks and Romans. As Amanda Wrigley emphasizes in a fascinating chapter (“Stages of Imagination: Greek plays on BBC Radio”) in Remaking the Classics, a new collection of essays edited by Christopher Stray (Duckworth, £45), Greek drama was a staple of BBC radio from almost the very beginning.

The first production she has identified is of Sophocles’ Antigone in 1924 – two years after the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then called, was founded. This was followed the very next year by a Tyrone Guthrie production of Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris and by a Gilbert Murray adaptation of the Medea, starring Sybil Thorndike. In fact, translations by Murray continued to find a home on the radio long after their old-fashioned, stilted English had ensured their demise in the theatre itself.

The most recent BBC investment in classical literature is a major Radio 3 series entitled Greek and Latin Voices, in which a single classical author is discussed each week, in four fifteen-minute talks, by four different speakers – academics, critics and creative writers. Homer and Horace were featured in December; Thucydides and Augustine (a nice addition to the usual classical canon) are having their turn this month; Euripides and Tacitus will follow in March; with Sappho, Juvenal, Cicero, Plato, Virgil and Herodotus to come later in the year. Between this and the very first radio Antigone, there is hardly a classical theme which BBC radio has not explored. To my knowledge, no producer has ever actually ventured a complete rendering of Aeschylus in Greek. But in 2006 Radio 3 came quite close, broadcasting sections of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History read in Latin, accompanied by appropriate animal noises recorded by BBC Bristol’s Natural History Unit. Barnes would, I imagine, have been delighted with the Latin (I’m not so sure about the animal noises).

A number of the creative projects sponsored by BBC radio in its earliest days, and in the period after its division in the 1940s into the Light Programme, Home Service and Third Programme (in ascending order of “highbrow-ness”), have gained a life of their own, outside the original medium. If the best-known example in drama is Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (first broadcast in 1954, a couple of months after Thomas’s death), the most distinguished classical project germinated by radio must be Christopher Logue’s adaptation of Homer, in War Music and its sequels. This was originally part of a new translation of the Iliad commissioned by the Third Programme producer Donald Carne-Ross, who divided the poem up and assigned chunks to different writers (the classicist, novelist and poet Peter Green was another member of the team). As is well known – and, indeed, this was part of the point – Logue knew no Greek, and he recounts in his memoirs how Carne-Ross responded to that apparent difficulty: “Read translations by those who did [know Greek]. Follow the story. A translator must know one language well. Preferably his own”. Logue’s section (from Book 21 of the Iliad) was broadcast in 1959, and he went on from there.

It is sad that the radio origins of the whole project have now largely been forgotten – so much forgotten, in fact, that a recent essay devoted to Logue’s Homer (in Homer in the Twentieth Century, edited by Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood) only barely mentions the original context for the work and even carries the title “Logue’s Tele-vision”. A pun on Logue’s “distant vision” of Homer it may be, but at the same time it sounds like an insult to the brave medium (and brave producer) that first sponsored the adaptation.

Such masterpieces were understandably few. But the first half-century of BBC radio launched many classical productions which were nonetheless very good indeed, by any standard, inside or outside broadcasting. Some of Louis MacNeice’s most engaging work was commissioned by the BBC: “The Enemy of Cant”, for example, produced for the Third Programme in 1946, is a wonderful tribute to Aristophanes (“a good hater and hard hitter, a live man, an Enemy of Cant”) – Dylan Thomas being appropriately cast as Aristophanes himself. Henry Reed’s “Streets of Pompeii”, first broadcast – also on the Third – in 1952, is a clever meditation not simply on the destruction of the ancient city but also on our own fascination with it. Reed here uses the same technique, of mixing modern tourists with the Roman population, that W. H. Auden had used in his radio play on Hadrian's Wall in the late 1930s, which explored the rights and wrongs of Roman conquest against the background of the rise of Nazism – or vice versa. This was a technique perfect for radio drama, merging ancient and modern voices, playing with the similarities and differences.

But it was not all poetry and drama. There were also radio “talks”, as the fireside euphemism had it. These were actually straight lectures on the ancient world given by a handful of distinguished professors – all male, until Iris Murdoch was hired in 1949, albeit to speak on modern, rather than ancient philosophy (“she has a lovely voice”, her sponsor assured the anxious departmental head). As Mick Morris has richly documented in “‘That Living Voice’: Gilbert Murray at the BBC” (in Gilbert Murray Reassessed, edited by Christopher Stray, reviewed in the TLS December 21, 2007), Murray was, for a long time, radio’s favourite classical don, whose debut in his own right – his translations had been heard a year earlier – came with an invitation from Lord Reith himself to address the nation after the collapse of the General Strike in 1926. It was Murray’s renowned internationalism and his commitment to the League of Nations, rather than his skills in Greek and his position as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, that lay behind Reith’s choice, and Murray congratulated those who had ended the strike for their generosity and patriotism – rather pointedly passing over the still striking miners.

For the next thirty years he was a regular performer, on classical history and literature, as well as modern politics. In the 1960s, the voice of the semi-resident classical don changed to New York Bronx. The American Moses Finley, who was in due course to become Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, took Murray’s place, with a long series of talks – not just on his own specialism, Greek history, but on all kinds of byways of the Roman world too, from Diocletian’s Price Edict (on the Third Programme in 1960) to Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (scheduled to coincide with the BBC television series in 1976). I still remember being slightly shocked by his down-to-earth suggestion that the Emperor Claudius more likely died from appendicitis than poisoned mushrooms.

Of course, there were some duds too. One has to admit that Grigson’s philistines may occasionally have had a point. Some of the stuff was a bit dry and arcane, its staple fare parodied by one correspondent in Time and Tide as “a disquisition on the Recusant Poets of North Germany by the Reader in Classical Studies at the University of Pen-y-Pass”. Sometimes even the regulars could turn in something rather below par. Murray’s “What Greece Stands For”, broadcast in 1940 (when “just now we are all thinking of Greece”), was a confection of romantic platitudes about Hellenic civilization, no doubt delivered with professorial authority – and made all the worse, when republished in the Listener, for being illustrated with grainy photographs of stoical, toothless Greek peasants. Sometimes the zany ideas simply didn’t come off or haven’t worn well. One “surprise item” in June 1929 – “Rome Calling” – obviously made a big hit with the radio audience, many of whom requested its inclusion in the Listener. It now reads as an embarrassingly feeble skit on the Roman News of 44 bc: “Missing from his father’s farm on the River Po, Publius Virgilius Maro, a young poet in love – I will just say the name again – Publius Virgilius Maro – last seen with a bag of lentils and wearing a borrowed toga. It is thought possible that he may have obtained a lift in a chariot, as he is understood to have expressed a desire to visit Rome in search of his Muse”; and so on, through Caesar’s death, a new club opening in Pompeii, and the Roman team’s trip to the Olympic Games. In general, however, the success rate was high.

So how did the BBC do it? Largely, as the story of Carne-Ross and Logue suggests, by letting producers follow their instincts, and their enthusiasms, and letting them take risks (Logue, after all, was a very big risk). Many of them had classical degrees, although not often very good ones – and this may, paradoxically, be part of the secret of their success (as well as an indictment of the university system which graded them). In fact, so far as I can see, the strongest diagnostic for a brilliant career in upmarket BBC radio before the 1970s was a Third Class degree from Oxford.

One such was Carne-Ross himself. Another was Douglas Cleverdon (Third in Greats), who masterminded the famous Brains Trust, on which Gilbert Murray was a regular guest, Under Milk Wood, and many projects with MacNeice. Another Third in Greats was Prue Smith, who first commissioned Iris Murdoch, and who persuaded Michael Ventris to make the first public announcement of his decipherment of Linear B on the Third Programme on July 1, 1952. The Envy of the World, Humphrey Carpenter’s history of Radio 3, includes Smith’s account of how she pulled off this classical scoop. Her husband was an architect working with Ventris at the Ministry of Education, and one night they were all having dinner at the Ventrises’ home in Hampstead. Ventris himself was nowhere to be seen, and everyone got hungrier and hungrier. “Finally he emerged, looking totally exhausted, saying: ‘I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting, but I’ve done it, I’ve done it . . . . I know’, he said, ‘that this language is Greek’.”

The next week Smith put forward a proposal for a talk by Ventris to “the Third Programme Talks meeting”. “They trusted me”, she said, “and it was put on.” This kind of personal enthusiasm and serendipity continues to be the rule in BBC Radio. The fact, for example, that Classics gets more than its fair share of attention on In Our Time is partly due to the commitment of Melvyn Bragg; the fact that it has cropped up so often recently on Woman’s Hour is probably to be connected to the presence of at least one producer on the programme (Victoria Brignell) who did a Classics degree, and to the fact that, of its recent presenters, Martha Kearney read Classics at Oxford and Jenni Murray has definite classical interests. Greek and Latin Voices is also the product of enthusiasm, on the part of its Radio 3 producers and its academic coordinators – Chris Pelling, who now holds (like Murray before him) the Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford, and Maria Wyke, Professor of Latin at University College London.

The series itself is a rather endearing mixed bag. Some of the talks give you the feeling that you are dropping in on an undergraduate lecture. Not necessarily a bad thing: I particularly enjoyed Chris Pelling’s understated introduction to the week on Homer, the Greek delivered in his discernibly Welsh tones; as well as his stories of reading the Odyssey, as a sixteen-year-old, during Continental caravan holidays, in the 1960s. There was, however, a bit too much in the Horace programmes about the “beauty of the Latin” to convince the ignorant sceptic – especially when the original was rendered in a variety of not always distinguished English versions.

Other contributors are more driven by personal engagement. Martha Kearney, for example, appearing here in the guise of lapsed classicist, was excellent on her youthful enthusiasm for Catullus, replaced in middle age with a fondness for Horace (though I wasn’t exactly sure what had caused this change of heart, except that Horace and middle-aged women tend to share a fondness for gardening). Maureen Almond spoke as a Northern poet, and ex-personnel manager with the Probation Service, who finds – a bit implausibly, to be honest – that she has an affinity with a Horatian view of the world.

There was, however, one distinct blot on the Reithian tradition here. When the Third Programme started, as Wrigley explains, its BBC controllers were much opposed to providing background information on any of the tough subjects, classical or otherwise, which they discussed. There were to be no crutches to assist the ignorant. That is not how it is today. Greek and Latin Voices is produced in collaboration with the Open University. On the dedicated website, punters are given a link to further authoritative information on the authors covered. In each case the link is to Wikipedia.

Mary Beard is the author of The Roman Triumph, published late last year. She is Classics editor of the TLS.

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