The hunt is on for the missing first edition of Radio Four’s Today programme, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October.
The hunt is on for the missing first edition of Radio Four’s Today programme, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October. Radio Four has been broadcasting invitations to the on-air party for months already in an endless series of mock ‘commercials’. But as Paddy O’Connell advised us on Broadcasting House on Sunday the party organisers have discovered a great lacuna in the archives.
It’s difficult to believe that any readers of The Spectator are old enough to have been around for those first 20 minutes of ‘topical talks’ introduced by Alan Skempton (from Tony Hancock’s comedy team) and Raymond Baxter (who went on to fame on TV’s Tomorrow’s World). Just in case you were…is there any chance you might have stashed away in your attic one of those Truvox reel-to-reel tape-recorders with a magnetically stored realisation of the programme? Probably not.
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