I am always being told by people: “I miss The Listener.” Well, this BBC literary magazine, which ran weekly from 1929 to 1991, is not being restarted — but, coming from Gale and BBC Worldwide, the complete contents of its 62-year run can now be read online. It was an extraordinary magazine. Its basic purpose was to reprint the superb 20-minute talks that for years flowed out from the Third Programme and the Home Service (now Radios 3 and 4), and every topic seemed to be covered — the rise of existentialism, the great postwar legal debates, the startling discoveries of physics, the Angry Young Men. The list is almost endless. All the talks had been edited scrupulously by radio producers, so all that had to be done was to put them on the page. It was not such a hard job for the editor!
When television appeared, that in turn started making its contribution. In 1969, Kenneth Clark’s great BBC Two series, Civilisation, doubled the paper’s circulation.
But it was recognised that a lively weekly needed its book and art reviews, and here the paper was given an entirely free hand by the BBC. I was lucky enough to be literary editor from 1965 to 1986. I can remember Arianna Huffington, now
a powerful American media tycoon, coming in shyly with her first review, and the poet D.J. Enright invariably handing over his witty reviews to me in a pub in a plain brown envelope, as if they were dangerous porn.
For the whole of its lifetime the magazine gave its readers the fullest showing of new poetry that there was to be had, though my predecessor, J.R. Ackerley, was once made to turn down a poem about a urinal by James Kirkup because the two women sub-editors would not handle it. Once when I rang Philip Larkin to ask him if he had a poem, he said: “Poem? What’s that? Oh yes, I remember. No, no, no.” The very next day he sent me his beautiful poem Cut Grass. It is among the countless delights that can now be read again.
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