About The Listener

The Listener

The Listener was a weekly magazine established by the BBC in London, first published on 16 January 1929 and finally issued on 3 January 1991, under BBC Magazines. It was created to reproduce the texts of broadcast talks and to preview serious radio, and later television, programmes, and it grew into one of the most distinguished publications in British journalism, a weekly of culture, criticism and ideas that stood alongside The Spectator and the New Statesman without belonging to any political party. Its first editor was Richard S. Lambert, and its complete archive was digitised for institutional access in 2011.

Across sixty-two years and a total of 3,197 issues, The Listener published many leading writers and critics, virtually invented television reviewing as a critical craft under one of its editors, and maintained a crossword widely regarded as the most difficult in a national weekly, a puzzle that survived the magazine itself and continues in The Times. The Listener's history is the history of the BBC's cultural mission in print: conceived under Lord Reith as an instrument of intelligent listening, constrained at birth by the newspaper industry's suspicion of BBC publishing, and gradually overtaken after 1960 by a more plural Britain with other sources of information.

Origins under Reith in 1929

The BBC established The Listener in January 1929 under its director-general, Lord Reith, with Richard S. Lambert as first editor. Its origins lay in the BBC's adult education work and its aids to study: the magazine was developed as a medium of record for the reproduction of broadcast talks. In an age before recording and catch-up listening, a broadcast talk vanished at the moment of transmission unless it was printed. The Listener made the BBC's spoken word permanent, citable and available to readers far beyond the reach of any single transmission, including the overseas audience Lambert later recalled imagining: the country parson, the overseas cousin, the clerk or artisan keen on self-education, the teacher and the older schoolchild.

The magazine's published aim was to be a medium for intelligent reception of broadcast programmes, amplifying and explaining features that could not be dealt with in the editorial columns of the Radio Times. It previewed major literary and musical broadcasts, reviewed new books, and printed a selected list of the more intellectual broadcasts for the coming week. Its title reflected the simple fact that the BBC then broadcast by radio only: its audience were listeners, and the magazine addressed them under that name even after television arrived. Its price and positioning were debated internally before launch, with advocates of a stately, more expensive paper losing to the educators who secured a popular twopenny magazine pitched between the mass market and the serious weeklies.

The compromise with the newspaper industry

The Listener's launch was contested. The Newspaper Proprietors' Association considered it an illegitimate stretching of official activity: a publicly funded broadcaster entering magazine publishing in competition with commercial titles. After consultation between Reith and the prime minister, a set of compromises was agreed. The Listener would carry only an upper limit of ten per cent original contributed material not related to broadcasting, and the amount of advertising it could carry was also limited.

Those restrictions shaped the magazine's character for decades. Barred from becoming a general weekly on the commercial model, The Listener built its identity around the broadcast talk and the culture surrounding it, while its editors gradually stretched the definition of broadcasting-related material to accommodate essays, criticism and reviews of real distinction. Rival weeklies such as The Spectator and the New Statesman, with which The Listener came to be grouped as a trio, occasionally criticised what they saw as the privileged financial position of their subsidised competitor. The criticism itself confirms the standing the magazine achieved: it was being compared, resentfully, with the established organs of British opinion.

A medium of record for broadcast talks

The Listener's core function remained the printed talk. The BBC's broadcast talks of the interwar and post-war years were a central institution of British intellectual life, bringing academics, writers, scientists and public figures to a national audience, and The Listener is now one of the few means of accessing the content of many early broadcasts whose recordings do not survive. Historians of twentieth-century Britain use its pages as an archive of what the nation was invited to think about, week by week, for sixty years.

A surviving wartime issue illustrates the range. The edition of 7 June 1945, published shortly after Germany's surrender at threepence, as volume 33, number 856, opened its article sequence with a study of the Levant, its people and their problems, by the popular travel writer and regional authority H. V. Morton. A single issue thus carried the BBC's role in explaining a changing world to its listeners into print, at a cover price within reach of the audience Lambert had imagined in 1929. The Guardian later described The Listener as one of the most distinguished publications in British journalism, a judgement grounded in decades of such contents.

Editors and literary editorship

Richard S. Lambert edited The Listener from 1929 to 1939, establishing its form. The documented succession of later editors includes Maurice Percy Ashley from 1958 to 1967, Karl Miller from 1967 to 1973, Anthony Howard from 1979 to 1981, Russell Twisk from 1981 to 1987, Alan Coren from 1987 to 1989, and Peter Fiddick, who saw the magazine through its final phase from 1989 to 1991. Between and around those names stood a literary editorship of exceptional continuity: J. R. Ackerley served as literary editor from 1935 to 1959, and Anthony Thwaite later held the arts and literary side of the magazine, while Janet Adam Smith was an assistant editor in the early 1930s. Barry Fantoni provided cartoons and illustrations for twenty-one years.

Karl Miller's editorship is particularly noted. Miller, who had been literary editor of The Spectator and then of the New Statesman, publishing critics of the calibre of V. S. Pritchett, Frank Kermode and Christopher Ricks, moved to The Listener in 1967 and there, in the assessment of his obituarists, virtually invented the new craft of television reviewing, recruiting critics including John Carey, Raymond Williams, Ian Hamilton and Clive James. A magazine founded to print radio talks thus became, under Miller, the place where writing about television grew up, an evolution that captures The Listener's whole trajectory from Reithian instruction to modern cultural criticism.

The Listener crossword

The Listener crossword, introduced in 1930, is generally regarded as the most difficult cryptic crossword to appear in a national weekly. It became an institution within the institution: solvers sent in their solutions, three correct entries drawn at random won book prizes provided by the sponsor, Chambers, and annual statistics allowed regular solvers to compare their performances. In most years only a handful of solvers completed and submitted all fifty-two puzzles correctly. The leading solver each year received the Solver Silver Salver, and the all-correct solvers voted for the best puzzle of the year, whose setter received the Ascot Gold Cup.

Remarkably, the puzzle survived its magazine. When The Listener closed in 1991, the crossword transferred to The Times, where it continues to appear on Saturdays. A feature launched a year into a BBC weekly's life thus outlived the weekly by decades, carrying The Listener's name and standards into a second century. For many solvers, the crossword is the magazine's most tangible living legacy, and its survival testifies to the loyalty the BBC title inspired in the most demanding corner of its readership.

Decline after 1960 and the 1980s

The Listener represented above all the BBC's cultural mission as Reith had emphasised it: a single, authoritative institution raising the nation's intellectual level through guided listening and reading. Reference histories agree that the magazine gradually declined after 1960 as British society changed, the BBC itself became more plural, and other sources of information became available. The talk reproduced in print lost its scarcity value as recording, paperback publishing, television and eventually a multiplying media made talks, essays and criticism available elsewhere. A magazine designed for a world of one broadcaster faced a world of many channels.

The 1980s brought a revealing episode. In 1981 Richard Gott, features editor of The Guardian, was chosen as editor of The Listener, but his appointment was blocked after MI5 declared that he had ultra-leftist sympathies; the post went instead to Russell Twisk. The incident, recorded in the magazine's reference history, shows the political sensitivity that still attached to editing a BBC title at the height of the Cold War, and the security vetting that could reach into a literary appointment. Later in the decade, ownership and management of the magazine were taken out of the BBC's direct hands, a change in editorial circumstances that, together with increasing competition, preceded the end.

Closure in 1991

The Listener's final issue appeared on 3 January 1991, sixty-two years after its first, closing a run of 3,197 issues. Peter Fiddick was its last editor. Unlike many magazine closures, this one ended a title whose back run constituted a national archive: the printed record of BBC talks from 1929 to 1991, together with six decades of book reviews, broadcast previews, literary editorship and criticism. The magazine had ceased to fit the media economy around it, but nothing about its ending diminished the completeness of what it left behind.

The circumstances of the end matched the causes of the long decline. A plural BBC no longer needed a single printed voice for its serious output; a plural media market no longer lacked essays and reviews; and a magazine whose advertising and contents had been limited by the compromises of 1929 could not reinvent itself as a commercial weekly in 1990. The Listener closed, as it had begun, as an expression of a particular settlement between broadcasting and print, a settlement whose terms had expired.

The digitised archive

In 2011 the complete archive of The Listener was digitised and made available for purchase online to libraries, educational and research institutions, in the Listener Historical Archive covering 1929 to 1991, distributed through Gale. University libraries describe the archive as the intellectual counterpart to the Radio Times within BBC publishing and as one of the few means of accessing the content of many early broadcasts. Reviews of the archive in academic journals emphasised its value to cultural and intellectual historians, as a record of the conversations the BBC staged for its audience across the middle of the twentieth century.

Digitisation changed The Listener from a closed magazine into a working research instrument. A publication designed in 1929 as an aid to study became, twenty years after its final issue, an aid to study again, in a new form. That continuity of purpose, from twopenny weekly to institutional database, is perhaps the most Reithian outcome imaginable, and it ensures that the magazine's contents remain in active use rather than in storage.

Legacy

The Listener's legacy operates at three levels. As a BBC institution, it embodied the corporation's founding cultural mission in print for sixty-two years. As a magazine, it published leading writers and critics under editors from Lambert to Miller to Coren, invented serious television reviewing, and sustained British journalism's most demanding crossword, which still appears in The Times. As an archive, digitised in 2011, it preserves the text of broadcast talks that would otherwise be lost, making it an indispensable source for the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain.

For WorldNM, The Listener is one of the essential British magazines of the century: a London weekly with a first issue of 16 January 1929 and a final issue of 3 January 1991, an ISSN of 0024-4392, and a record that runs from Reith's compromises with the newspaper proprietors to an MI5-blocked editorship and a crossword that outlived it. Few magazines document their own era so completely, because few magazines were, as The Listener was, their era's record of itself.