While we may still regularly see many of these iconic images of the campaign, the vagaries of both wartime and the early BBC means that only a tiny proportion of wartime broadcasts were recorded and remain for us to listen to today. Yet radio was the medium of the war – available to the vast majority of the population and the natural home to the biggest stars of the day. Unlike now, when the country might converge as one for the odd event such as a royal wedding or funeral, or a particularly significant sports match, the wireless listeners of the 1930s and 1940s had scant choice in what they could listen to. So everyone but everyone was familiar with voices such as those of the comedian Tommy Handley, Mr Middleton, the Radio Doctor and broadcaster Freddy Grisewood, as well as the comic antics of the fictional Buggins family. All these, and assorted others, played a crucial role in embedding Dig for Victory into the national psyche.
In 1939, there were some nine million homes with BBC licences, covering about three-quarters of the country. In the six years of the war the Corporation broadcast something approaching two thousand food-related programmes. A 1942 survey into the Dig for Victory campaign revealed that 72 per cent of respondents who had a wireless set listened to gardening talks, with 36 per cent of those acting upon the advice offered – figures that modern broadcasting executives would probably kill for. Of the horticultural programmes available, Mr Middleton’s In Your Garden dwarfed its competitors in popularity: 79 per cent of those who said they listened to gardening shows mentioned it by name; the next most popular show came up in only 13 per cent of responses.
The government made full use of the medium too. The annual relaunch of the campaign was marked by a ministerial address on the wireless, outlining the hopes and aims for the year ahead. Churchill also spoke on its behalf. In 1941, he made a speech primarily aimed at spurring on the nation’s farmers but which had a message for the amateur grower too:
The situation demands from each one of us still greater effort, still greater sacrifices, than we have yet made. Ships that would have brought food to our shores must now be used to meet the urgent needs of ourselves and our Russian allies for aeroplanes and tanks. You can release more ships by growing still more food in this country and so hasten the day of victory.
But above all others, Mr Middleton was the voice of Dig for Victory. On In Your Garden, his thoughtful, kindly delivery – rendered even more endearing by the odd dropped aitch – was the vehicle for many wise and memorable words, such as: ‘An allotment is like the army. The first month is the worst: after that you begin to enjoy it.’ Other pearls of wisdom included: ‘Sweep your lawn before the first mowing,’ ‘Keep your tools clean,’ and ‘There is no substitute for digging, or if there is I haven’t found it.’
Whether the BBC ever fully understood just what a diamond they had is not clear. A certain amount of damning with faint praise by his paymasters went on. When there was a slight falling off in his audience figures in the early months of 1940, the Corporation concluded it was because ‘gardening is no longer a hobby and therefore his soporific appeal has diminished’. The more likely truth was that with the country at war, listening habits were simply adapting. A good number of Middleton’s core audience were, in all likelihood, spending Sunday afternoons tending their vegetable patches as the government wanted them to, rather than staying at home with an ear glued to the wireless. According to an internal memo, there was, ultimately, an acknowledgement among the BBC management that ‘… Middleton’s scripts are maintaining their high standard, and that the heavy fall in his audience figures is probably due to war conditions affecting the normal gardening fans,’ as well as an admission that, ‘We all think there is nobody who could fill his place adequately …’.
Yet there were plenty of examples of his rather harsh treatment by the BBC. Paid twelve guineas per show, when Middleton came down with a nasty case of bronchitis and was unable to broadcast for several programmes running, his fee was dropped to nine guineas despite the fact that he prepared all the scripts as normal, with a staffer reading them out on air. On another occasion, he felt the wrath of both the BBC and the Ministry of Information for an unguarded but good-humoured comment he made during a discussion of the challenges of growing carnations while lime was in short supply: ‘But cheer up,’ he said, ‘the way things are going at the moment there will soon be plenty of mortar rubble about.’
Conduct towards him hit a new low after the Middleton family home fell victim to German bombing in the autumn of 1940, rendering the house uninhabitable until February of 1942. Mr Middleton went to stay with relations in Weston, Towcester, back in his native Northamptonshire. He applied to the BBC for extra petrol ration coupons to compensate for the additional travel he would need to undertake but it was rejected out of hand, with the BBC’s attached memo revealing that they considered him ‘grabbing’ for having even suggested the idea. Their condescending attitude was summed up when they refused to clear him for an appearance on The Brains Trust radio show, decreeing that, ‘Middleton’s whole charm is that he is an amateur expert’. His ability to connect with people possessing all levels of knowledge was to his credit but his talents extended rather further than the BBC was giving him credit for.
Not that Mr Middleton’s exploits were restricted to the radio. His abilities as a public speaker were in much demand for talks around the country and he was top of the list of any organisation seeking a judge for their Dig for Victory show. This was an area of his job he embraced warmly, trekking up and down the country uncomplainingly, his appearances drawing crowds as large as three thousand. His description of one local show as, ‘complete with flags, jangles and wangles, a band, a few speeches, darts competitions, bowling for a pig and other sideshows,’ illustrates not only a fine way with words but a genuine affection too. ‘There is something extremely satisfying about winning a prize at a show,’ he wrote. Nor did he attempt to hide his fundamental preference for flowers over vegetables: ‘… even a wartime Dig for Victory show is a poor affair without its flowers’. A colleague at the Daily Express wrote of him:’It was not that he hated vegetables but rather that he found them dull. He could not love an onion where a dahlia might grow.’
Middleton’s weekly gardening column for the Express had a circulation approaching seven million. He never shied from throwing himself into a pertinent debate or reprimanding a correspondent where he thought it was warranted. He began his column of 17 January 1942 by detailing a letter he had been sent: ‘You tell me to dig up my lawn and grow food, the government shouts “Dig for Victory”, but why should I, if it is only to put fat profits into the pockets of seed merchants? Do you think I am a perfect fool?’ Middleton’s considered response was, ‘Well no, I wouldn’t go as far as that but I do think it is rather foolish to write such piffle without a little knowledge.’
He published several guides both before the war and during, in support of the Dig for Victory Campaign. His last work was an encyclopaedia of gardening. He also worked for Boots as a horticultural consultant, the company’s adverts reassuring the public that ‘Mr Middleton approves all gardening products made by Boots the Chemists – The Gardener’s Chemists.’ However, Sunday afternoons presenting In Your Garden on the wireless was always his spiritual home.
After In Your Garden, the next greatest growers’ show was The Radio Allotment, which ran from February 1941 until the end of the war and was described by the Ministry of Agriculture as ‘an excellent feature’. It was a show of ten minutes (later lengthened to fifteen), offering practical advice from a genuine plot situated in Park Crescent, close to Broadcasting House in London.
Its original anchor was Roy Hay, a career horticulturist born in 1910 in Linlithgow. After a stint working for a seed merchant, he took over as Assistant Editor at the Gardener’s Chronicle in 1936. In 1939, he moved to the Royal Horticultural Society to head up their publishing division and also began working on the Dig for Victory campaign at the Ministry of Agriculture. A man keen to do his duty, he was in addition a War Reserve Police Constable attached to the police station in Hyde Park.
According to a BBC Listener Research Report, The Radio Allotment (along with In Your Garden) appealed ‘more to the novice than the experienced gardener’. Hay shared presenting responsibilities with several co-hosts including Michael Standing, Diana Hay, Raymond Glendenning, Sheilagh Millar, Stewart McPherson and Wynford Vaughan Thomas. In 1942, Hay left the show when he was transferred to Malta to oversee the food production programme there (and after the war he would serve as controller of the horticulture and seeds division of the British Zone in Germany). His role on the show was taken over by his father, Tom, a former Superintendent of the Royal Parks. This change was not altogether successful, though. A 1943 Listener Research Report revealed complaints that Tom Hay’s Scottish brogue sounded ‘old, indistinct, or disagreeable’ while one listener noted that he ‘just seems to walk around saying “Very good, yes, very good.”’ In 1944, Hay Snr received a rather strained letter from the Director of Outside Broadcasting, warning that the show was ‘covering much of the same ground for the third year running’. It had doubtless run out of legs by the time it finished, but had served an important function even so.
Other notable gardening-based programmes included Weekend Gardening, Back to the Land and Over the Border, which involved discussions between panels in Edinburgh and London. The BBC began its Forces Programme in January 1940 and by the end of the year Gardening for the Forces was broadcasting to the troops. More popular still was Ack Ack Beer Beer, a programme produced by Bill MacLurg for men on anti-aircraft and balloon barrage sites, which included regular gardening talks for servicemen working their own allotments. There was also The Practice and Science of Gardening, a series devised with children in mind.
Fred Streeter (a farm worker’s son from Sussex who had left school to become a farm labourer in the early 1890s when he was only twelve) had first appeared on the radio as a guest of Mr Middleton in 1935, by which time Streeter had risen to the role of head gardener at Petworth House. Blessed with a light touch and contagious enthusiasm, he was an immediate hit, and during the war became a regular on In Your Garden on the wireless and on the Dig for Victory circuit, discussing all subjects fruit-and-veg related. Indeed, after Middleton’s death he would become the Corporation’s main gardening man.
Another presenter particularly popular on the Dig for Victory show circuit was Donald McCullough, a high-profile writer and broadcaster of the day, particularly revered for his role as the question master on The Brains Trust, to which some 30 per cent of the population listened. In May 1942, he began presenting Country Magazine, a fortnightly programme aimed specifically at the rural population. In his ‘spare time’ he was a Public Relations Officer at the Ministry of Information.
Equally as important as the shows offering advice to those working in the garden or at the allotment were the programmes that focussed on the kitchen and offered ideas for the preparation and cooking of food. If Dig for Victory was to succeed, produce needed to be transported not only from soil to kitchen table, but carry on into the pot, to a plate and into tempted mouths. Health in Wartime and The Kitchen in Wartime both commanded steady audiences, but by far the most popular of this type of show was The Kitchen Front, which ran from 13 June 1940. That first episode included tips on planting vegetables, and was presented by S.P.B. Mais, a prolific author and journalist of the time who had broadcast the first Letter from America in 1933 but had no discernible background in food.
Broadcasting at quarter past eight in the morning, six days a week, the programme filled five minutes after the news bulletin and could bring in an audience of five million and more (some 15 per cent of the available audience). On offer, and delivered with great humour, were handy tips that the average housewife (the target audience) could pick up and use at once (ideally while out shopping that very day). A typical episode might begin with the presenter telling the audience: ‘I’m here to save you money, to save you time, to save you trouble, to tell you of food that there’s plenty of and of food that you’ve got to slow on.’
The show was an immediate hit, generating thousands of letters from captivated listeners in its first week. Within a fortnight it had received 30,000 requests for copies of the featured recipes. The Ministry of Food had a big hand in devising the content, with a team trying out all the recipes at a Ministry kitchen in Portman Square. Among the ministerial staff who worked on the scripts was Eileen Blair, the wife of George Orwell (whose real name was Eric Blair). While there were occasional skirmishes between staff from the BBC and those at the Ministry, relations were largely cordial during the life of the programme.
Information was presented by a variety of guests on The Kitchen Front but three of its great stalwarts were Freddy Grisewood, Ambrose Heath and Mabel Constanduros. Grisewood, known affectionately as ‘Ricepud’, was a smooth and appealing host. Born in 1888 the son of a rector in Worcestershire, he went to University at Oxford and served in the First World War, suffering injuries from which he took several years to recover. He succeeded in carving out a career as a singer before joining the BBC in 1929 and putting his voice to new use as an announcer. On The Kitchen Front he found the perfect home for his warm, debonair and witty delivery. Ambrose Heath, meanwhile, was born in 1891 in north London and, to his parents’ great disappointment, became a celebrated food journalist and cookery book author (his titles including The Good Cook in Wartime). He was also a talented cartoonist, responsible for the groundbreaking Patsy ‘cook strip’ (a comic strip with recipes presented by the eponymous young bride) and, armed with a sharp but quaint turn of phrase, fitted in well on The Kitchen Front.
Mabel Constanduros was a few years older than Grisewood and hailed from south London. Having made an unhappy marriage early in life, she had increasingly explored her love of writing and amateur dramatics. In 1925, she debuted an original comic creation on the BBC, The Buggins Family. Constanduros played all six members of the family – Grandma, Mrs, Aunt Maria, Emma, Alfie and Baby. The ‘family’ broadcast for twenty years from 1928, with Constanduros writing over 250 scripts. The Ministry of Food was eager to harness their popularity to pass on recipes, even though Constanduros once described Grandma as ‘one of the tiresomest and crudest creatures I could imagine’. Of all the family, it was inevitably Grandma whom the public loved the most.
Other particularly popular contributors were the female double act Gert and Daisy from Workers’ Playtime, two lovable cockney char ladies whose husbands, Bert and Wally, were in the services. They were the creations of Elsie and Doris Waters, two sisters long established on the British comedy circuit, and siblings of Horace John Waters (who, using his stage name Jack Warner, would later eclipse their fame in his lead role in Dixon of Dock Green).
Then there was the legendary Radio Doctor – ‘The doctor with the greatest number of patients in the world’ – whose inclusion in the programme could add millions to the audience. He was, in real life, Dr Charles Hill, the Secretary of the British Medical Association. In a tone not unreminiscent of Robert Robinson, he was able to broadcast the most disarming material in such a kindly, jovial way that he rarely offended even the most buttoned-up of listeners. He was particularly adept at dealing with issues of the gut, for instance telling his listeners: ‘Visit the throne at the same time each day, whether you feel like it or not.’
The wireless also allowed for the spread of popular songs in a way previously unthinkable, and the war years produced a number of ditties that took inspiration from the food situation. Take, for instance, such numbers as Louis Jordan’s ‘Ration Blues’, Harry Roy’s ‘When Can I Have a Banana Again’ (both 1943) and Elsie Carlisle’s ‘Please Leave my Butter Alone’ (1939), with its cheeky lyrics:
Everybody says I’m old-fashioned
To sit on the things that are rationed.
So pinch all my ham
And my plum and apple jam
But please leave my butter alone.
It was natural enough, then, that Dig for Victory should have its very own anthem:
Dig! Dig! Dig! And your muscles will grow big,
Keep on pushing the spade.
Don’t mind the worms,
Just ignore their squirms
And when your back aches, laugh with glee
And keep on diggin’
Till we give our foes a wiggin’.
Dig! Dig! Dig! To Victory.
While much less glamorous than the other media discussed here, the power of books, magazines and newspapers to reach vast numbers of people should not be overlooked. A 1943 social survey reported that 80 per cent of civilian adults read a newspaper daily, rising to 90 per cent on Sundays. The autumn 1942 Ministry of Agriculture review of the impact of the Dig for Victory campaign had also revealed that 77 per cent of respondents regularly read newspaper gardening notes. The report’s authors commented that ‘this appears to be the principle source of gardening knowledge’, with the Daily Express (home of Mr Middleton’s column) the most commonly cited title.
The Ministry of Agriculture’s own Advisory Publicity Committee would in due course report: ‘… despite newsprint difficulties … the press has supported the campaign most gallantly’. Many gardening columnists beside Mr Middleton became household names, such as Percy Izzard at the Daily Mail (said by son Ralph, incidentally, to have inspired the character William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop) and Albert Gurie at the News Chronicle. Izzard memorably championed the campaign in 1940 thus: ‘When once men experience the proud pleasure and the material and physical benefit of supplying their home tables with vegetables of their own cultivation they are not likely to abandon their venture into the world’s oldest craft.’ There were comic strips too, notably Cyril Cowell’s ‘Adam the Gardener’ in the Express and Ambrose Heath’s ‘Digwell’ in the Daily Mirror.
The press was also a vital outlet for officially sanctioned information, such as the Ministry of Food’s ‘Food Facts’, available as government pamphlets but most widely read because of their inclusion in all the major newspapers and in the Radio Times. A typical advert for the series, aimed predominantly at the nation’s housewives, ran: ‘If he’s fed up with his food, she gets the blame. But there are always new ideas about in Food Facts. It’s in all the papers every week.’
There were other joint ventures between government and Fleet Street. The Ministry of Agriculture provided weekly gardening insertions for the Sunday national newspapers and the larger regionals for all but the eight coldest weeks of the year. In 1941, the Ministry of Food and the Sunday Pictorial combined in a search for the twenty ‘best housewives in Britain’, all of whom, of course, were doing exactly the right things on the Kitchen Front. Woolton’s men devised a competition the following year to be played out in the press and judged by thirty leading chefs to find the nation’s best new potato-based recipes. Meanwhile, Hannah Hudson, wife of the Minister of Agriculture, was featured in Vogue in a Dig for Victory pinafore.
There was also an avalanche of new books to assist growers and cooks at every level. As Tom Williams, the Ministry of Agriculture’s Parliamentary Secretary, wrote in the foreword to the 1942 publication, Gardeners Are Asking … ‘There is a great thirst for knowledge on the purely practical points of the “Dig for Victory” Campaign, which aims at making more and more householders more dependent on the fruits of their own labours.’ For the average grower, the Royal Horticultural Society’s The Vegetable Garden Displayed was the indispensable bible. But there were plenty more to choose from, including collected volumes from the newspaper columnists, and T.W. Sanders’s Kitchen Garden and Allotment, which returned after having first appeared in the Great War. Other tomes included George Pollitt’s stirringly titled Britain Can Feed Herself, F.W.P. Carter’s Food Growing, Storing and Cooking and G.H. Copley’s How to Make and Manage an Allotment.
Other authors made it quite clear that it was every able person’s duty to get stuck into the campaign as an act of defiance against the Nazis. Raymond A. Cook’s Plots Against Hitler began: ‘It is becoming increasingly obvious that, amongst the plots calculated to bring Nazism to its knees, those measuring 300 square yards are destined to play an important part.’ Perhaps even more exquisitely named was Cloches versus Hitler, a title so ridiculous as to be magnificent. It was authored by Charles Wyse-Gardner. He could not have been called anything else …
Other authors were more interested in the produce once it had found its way into the kitchen. Constance Spry, previously better known for her flower arranging than her veg patch know-how, published Come into the Garden, Cook in 1942, with the following rebuke:
The fact is, vegetables in many kitchens are not taken seriously. A cook who would think it a shame to send up a flat soufflé or a lumpy sauce will with engaging cheerfulness ruin the crispest celery, the most succulent broccoli, boil green vegetables to a pulp, and tell you, when the garden is full to overflowing, that there is nothing, owing to the eccentricities of Lord Woolton, that she can think of for lunch.
Vegetable cookery of the highest order, as the French know it, for instance, has nothing to do with the complicated dishes to be found in some books under the heading of vegetarian cookery; nothing whatever to do with the lentil cutlet, vegetable turkey, or mock anything at all. It is not difficult but it does involve attention to detail. That perfection of simplicity which repays so very well is only achieved if time and trouble are taken. Technical skill is not essential.
Eleanour Sinclair Rohde was another of the great names. A renowned gardener and garden historian, her works included Hay Box Cookery (1939), The Wartime Vegetable Garden (1940) and Culinary and Salad Herbs (1940). She would eventually serve as the President of the Society of Women Journalists. A colleague at the Star was Hilda Neild who began Wartime Cookery (1941) with a rallying cry: ‘The women’s Kitchen Army is one of the most important sections of the women’s fighting forces, though the members of it have no official status, wear no distinctive uniform, armlets or Service badges …’.
Amongst the wonderful advice on offer, there were some distinctly peculiar contributions. Food without Fuss by Josephine Terry, for instance, included such dubious delights as carrot bread, herring and potato mustard, and pink potato soup. Elsewhere, the Vicomte de Mauduit’s pamphlet, They Can’t Ration These, presented recipes for preparing frogs, hedgehogs, sparrows and squirrels.
One of the most fun titles was A Kitchen Goes to War, published by John Miles Ltd in 1940 and including 150 ration-time recipes by famous people. Mr Middleton’s contribution was typically understated – stuffed potatoes with butter, milk and seasoning, ‘even an egg if you feel extravagant’. The stellar list of contributors included John Gielgud, Stella Gibbons, Joyce Grenfell, Jack Hobbs and Dr Marie Stopes. Sir Malcom Campbell, somewhat unimaginatively, proffered fried bacon, Mrs Neville Chamberlain fish and leek pudding, and Agatha Christie her trademark ‘mystery potatoes’. Arthur Askey offered his take on haggis, a recipe he claimed came from Mrs Bagwash, the fictional char lady from his popular radio show Band Wagon. ‘I thank you!’ indeed. With such a wealth of literature available, there could not have been a Digger for Victory anywhere able to claim they were starved of information.
The other great mass medium of the age was the cinema. In 1943, a social survey revealed that 70 per cent of adults went to the cinema ‘at least sometimes’, with a third making the trip every week. It was a captive audience that the government could not afford to ignore. To cater for this market, the GPO Film Unit came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Information’s Films Division in the early stages of the war and was renamed as the Crown Film Unit. The Ministry regularly commissioned work from external commercial production companies, ad agencies and newsreel companies too.
Although the Unit’s most famous film-maker was Humphrey Jennings, whose output included such notable pieces as 1941’s Words for Battle and 1942’s Listen to Britain, it was left to others to spread the message to Dig for Victory. The most prolific film-maker on behalf of the campaign was Margaret Thomson, one of a small group of women who had been able to break into the industry. Australian born, she studied zoology before coming to London in the mid-1930s, establishing herself as an early exponent of the cinéma vérité style. Her output for the growers, though never extravagantly titled, offered sound advice. It included Growing Vegetables Indoors, Storing Vegetables Outdoors, Making a Compost Heap, Clamping Potatoes, Garden Tools and Saving Your Own Seeds.
However, the most memorable of the campaign’s movies was, naturally enough, called Dig for Victory and was produced for the Ministry by Michael Hankinson at Spectator Films. Its commentary presented a bold call to arms: ‘Do you like standing in a queue for your vegetables – or do you think it’s tiring and a waste of valuable time? Do you ever find your long wait has been useless – that supplies of what you want have run out before your turn comes? It’s not the greengrocer’s fault. It’s up to you. Dig for Victory!’
There were a good many other titles directed at the garden army, among them: All About Carrots, Backyard Front, Bampton Shows the Way (a film about a Devonshire village preparing for a ‘Food Week’), Filling the Gap, Garden Friends and Foes, Growing Good Potatoes, How to Dig (the first of six films produced in conjunction with the Royal Horticultural Society, with commentary by Roy Hay), Roots of Victory and Simple Fruit Pruning.
In 1942, the Ministry of Agriculture persuaded the Greenford and Northolt Allotment Gardens Committee to contribute a film of their own. The Committee’s chairman, Councillor A.J. Johnson, made an address direct to camera. He cut a rather plump and jovial figure, with the slightest hint of pomposity. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, to make a successful appearance on a film there is some mystic quality known as SA,’ he began. ‘SA’ was the popularly used abbreviation for sex appeal, a characteristic not obviously bursting forth from Mr Johnson. ‘Well, this address is an SA in as much as it is a Spade Appeal, an appeal for more spadework in this district.’ He went on to celebrate ‘the health-giving properties there are in vegetables taken from the plot to the pot.’
Another film was made in support of the first Dig for Victory pamphlet and its call for all-year planting. Featuring a man being served by a waiter wielding a deathly scythe, it included the following admonitory couplets:
In Spring this gardener sowed away,
He meant to eat well every day …
Came the Winter, table bare,
He couldn’t eat what wasn’t there …
The dreadful fate of this poor man
Was due to lack of garden plan.
However, the films that had most impact on those concerned with food were the Food Flashes, of which some two hundred were made for the Ministry of Food between March 1942 and November 1946, each one with an average estimated audience of twenty million. Each was only fifteen seconds long, offering a useful tip on making the best of the available food in a punchy and humorous way, often using famous faces like ‘Cheerful’ Charlie Chester. A great many were made by Cecil Hepworth, one of the pioneers of pre-First World War cinematography who had effectively gone into retirement in the 1920s but returned to the business to contribute his talent to the propaganda drive. In 1950, he was one of the first six Fellows of the British Film Academy. One of the films, devoted to the cooking of greens, hints at the light tone of the series: ‘Thanks to the weather and – yes, old man – the growers, we have wonderful supplies of fresh vegetables just now. But don’t murder the vitamins now, will you. Boil quickly in very little water …’. They played an important role in fostering the climate in which people learned to love their home-grown produce.
For a nation that had to some extent fallen out of love with the soil over the preceding two centuries, reigniting that passion for the fat of their own land was the challenge that faced those in charge of the campaign. As Wise Eating in Wartime, a collection of advice from Kitchen Front broadcasts, had it: ‘Today we are interested in food as never before. It’s taken a war to make us interested, but that’s by the way.’
Government officials and members of the creative industries harnessed the potential of all the media available to them and won over popular opinion through a mixture of practical advice, good humour, poignancy and appeals to the public’s sense of duty. It was a job done with consummate brilliance by professionals prepared to mine their own pools of creativity to produce work that, technical advances apart, stands up impressively to the scrutiny of our own multi-media age.