Voice, BBC, 11 AUGUST 1942
One of Orwell’s innovations – the kind that would be the inspiration for the BBC’s Third Programme (see ‘The Cost of Radio Programmes’, 1 February, 1946, n. 2) – was a ‘spoken poetry magazine’ complete with spoken editorial by Orwell. In all, six were produced. The later ‘issues’ were devoted to ‘War Poetry’, ‘Childhood’, ‘American Literature’, ‘Oriental Influences on English Literature’, and ‘Christmas’. One script is missing (that for Oriental Influences), and though they were intended as recitals and free discussions in order to satisfy censorship requirements the entire broadcasts were carefully scripted. Orwell managed to encourage distinguished writers to participate including Herbert Read, William Empson, Mulk Raj Anand, Edmund Blunden, Stephen Spender, Una Marson, Venu Chitale, Narayana Menon, and T.S. Eliot (reading ‘What the Thunder Said’ from The Waste Land).
This is the worst possible moment to be starting a magazine. While we sit here talking in a more or less highbrow manner—talking about art and literature and whatnot—tens of thousands of tanks are racing across the steppes of the Don and battleships upside down are searching for one another in the wastes of the Pacific. I suppose during every second that we sit here at least one human being will be dying a violent death. It may seem a little dilettante to be starting a magazine concerned primarily with poetry at a moment when, quite literally, the fate of the world is being decided by bombs and bullets. However our magazine—‘Voice’ we are calling it—isn’t quite an ordinary magazine. To begin with it doesn’t use up any paper or the labour of any printers or booksellers. All it needs is a little electrical power and half a dozen voices. It doesn’t have to be delivered at your door, and you don’t have to pay for it. It can’t be described as a wasteful form of entertainment. Moreover there are some of us who feel that it is exactly at times like the present that literature ought not to be forgotten. As a matter of fact this business of pumping words into the ether, its potentialities and the actual uses it is put to, has its solemn side. According to some authorities wireless waves, or some wireless waves, don’t merely circle our planet, but travel on endlessly through space at the speed of light, in which case what we are saying this afternoon should be audible in the great nebula in Orion nearly a million years hence. If there are intelligent beings there, as there well may be, though Sir James Jeans1 doesn’t think it likely, it won’t hurt them to pick up a few specimens of twentieth century verse along with the swing music and the latest wad of lies from Berlin. But I’m not apologising for our magazine, merely introducing it. I ask you to note therefore that it will appear once monthly on a Tuesday, that it will contain prose but will make a speciality of contemporary poetry, and that it will make particular efforts to publish the work of the younger poets who have been handicapped by the paper shortage and whose work isn’t so well known as it ought to be.
‘Voice’ has now been in existence nearly three minutes. I hope it already has a few readers, or I should say listeners. I hope as you sit there you are imagining the magazine in front of you. It’s only a small volume, about twenty pages. One advantage of a magazine of this kind is that you can choose your own cover design. I should favour something in light blue or a nice light grey, but you can take your choice. Now turn to the first page. It’s good quality paper, you notice, pre-war paper—you don’t see paper like that in other magazines nowadays—and nice wide margins. Fortunately we have no advertisements, so on page one is the Table of Contents .….