Radio: Lively Britons

“That was a bomb. The sky is absolutely patterned with bursts of antiaircraft fire and the sea is covered with smoke. Parachuters? No, I think they’re sea gulls. Oh, we’ve just hit a Messerschmitt! Oh, that was beautiful! He’s coming right down. You hear those crowds?”

Rattling along in this fashion last week, BBC’s Newscaster Charles (“Filthy”) Gardner brought to British listeners radio’s first eyewitness blow-by-blow account of a full-dress air battle. Nervous, wiry, a pilot himself, Gardner patrolled the English Coast with a recording van for a solid week before he happened upon an air fight off the chalk cliffs of Dover. For nine frantic minutes, Gardner talked into his recording machine, then whirled off to London to persuade the Ministry of Information to issue a bulletin on the raid an hour earlier than usual. Dramatic enough to galvanize even the most stolid Britisher, the Gardner broadcast wound up in fine sporting style with the home-team winning nine planes to one.

BBC recently set another precedent by aiming at the U. S. a program exclusively designed for American listeners. Known as Britain Speaks, the new show, now a fortnight old, is a vast improvement over the stodgy stuff that BBC used to short wave to North America to be shared by Canada and the U. S. With swing bands and torch singers, brisk news and political comments, Britain Speaks (on every evening at 7:30 E.D.S.T.) is at its best when Novelist-Playwright John Boynton Priestley holds forth. Compact as a beer mug, with a voice as mellow as ancient ale, Priestley has a pronounced Yorkshire accent which falls more pleasantly on American ears than the nasal whinnys of Oxford.

Sincere, hearty, full of gallant buck-you-uppo, most of Priestley’s remarks have been right down the U. S. alley. On food: “You can eat yourself sick if you want to, but of course it is very nice to have a parcel of America’s noblest produce including perhaps a bottle of rye or bourbon.” On parashots: “There we were—ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk, turning out at night as our forefathers had often done before us, to keep watch and ward over the sleeping hills and fields and homesteads.” On war: “A lot of us may be maimed or dead very soon, but that can’t be helped. We’ll go on and on until we break their black hearts.”