What the Listeners Want

In 1942, Val Gielgud and John Dickson Carr wrote and produced a pair of plays: Inspector Silence Takes the Air and Thirteen to the Gallows. Both are set in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) studios during wartime, and both dramatized dead air and dead bodies. Gielgud, as a high-level radio-producer, feared that the BBC was broadcasting into a void. The emergence of the Listener Research Department, a unit designed to assess listener sentiment about BBC programming, promised to usher in an institution with a more responsive relationship to its audience. But these plays, featuring BBC technicians as villains, criticize the BBC’s Reithian self-conception as an unliteral force to produce and manufacture public taste, a tendency in constant tension with the burgeoning science of listener research. This chapter traces the ambivalent responses to the wireless as both a method of controlling public opinion and a medium with the potential to facilitate psychographic congruity across populations. Those outside the BBC expressed equal parts concern and optimism about the ability of wireless technology to shape its audiences. Recognizing the BBC’s power to move listeners, Olaf Stapledon’s short story “A World of Sound” is the first of his works to theorize the sonic sphere as a means of transcending individual consciousness; radio-centric telepathy would later become a crux to his aesthetic project, with novels like Star Marker imagining radio waves as a means of decentralizing authority and enabling individuals to access the public consciousness directly and make collective decisions.