During the current Covid-19 pandemic, many people’s lives are focussed on getting food on the table whilst living in isolation. Nutrition has been on the mind of the nation in past emergencies, and just like now, the BBC has been there to offer some solid advice. Dr. Sian Nicholas, Reader in Modern British History at Aberystwyth University, has been looking through the archives.
Not simply figuratively, in the way it has managed to embed itself in British popular culture and the public consciousness. But also literally – because it belongs to the BBC. It wasn’t brought to the Corporation by an outside writer or a production company. It was created within the BBC by BBC employees working on BBC time. A symbol itself of the creative possibilities of the organisation and its staff.
There is a very long list of people without whom Doctor Who would never have made it to the screen in the form that we know it on November 23 1963; the likes of Verity Lambert, CE Webber, David Whitaker, Delia Derbyshire, Anthony Coburn and many more. But without any and all of those, there would still have been a Doctor Who of some sort.
Some of the most charming fragments of history in those Doctor Who files at Caversham, though, come not from the production documentation but from the occasional evidence of just what a hold the programme took upon its viewers at an early stage. Such as the letter from Miss Linda Chappell of Gloucestershire in March 1964, which survives in one of the files concerning the first Dalek serial.
Gert and Daisy returned, as did abrasive working class matriarch Grandma Buggins (Mabel Constanduros). The popular BBC announcer Freddie Grisewood became the BBC’s ‘Man in the Kitchen’, an amiable middle-class incompetent cooking for himself for the first time (though his wife apparently disapproved of her husband undertaking such a ‘feminine task’ as cookery presenter).
Wednesdays were always the Radio Doctor (Dr Charles Hill), advising on family health and healthy eating. Saturdays featured regional recipes, international recipes – even vegetarian recipes. Listeners were advised what foods were currently available, how to make leftovers go further, how to make ‘mock’ substitutes for unobtainable foods such as cream (or in one infamous recipe, goose), even how long to cook vegetables (‘no more than half an hour for any vegetable and no more than twenty minutes for cabbage’).
On Boxing Day 1944, a special edition of the programme was hosted by one of the iconic figures of the war, the ITMA character Mrs Mopp (‘Can I do you now, sir’).
In over a thousand five-minute episodes broadcast on the wartime Home Service at 08.10 (or 08.15) six days a week from 1940 to 1944 the programme managed not only to introduce the British housewife to foods and recipes never before encountered (American baked beans, Icelandic salt cod, the ubiquitous dried egg powder) but also to establish a new kind of informational broadcasting of the most straightforward and practical kind, that aimed to be helpful, authoritative and entertaining.
The programme had a loyal audience of some 5 million listeners, and a particularly strong following among working-class housewives, an audience the BBC had often previously struggled to reach. Its success can perhaps be measured by results: during the period of rationing, the British people were healthier than they had ever been before or since.
One thing The Kitchen Front appears not to have done is to permanently change the cooking and eating habits of the British people. Food rationing did not finally end in Britain until 1954. But when it did, old cooking habits resumed. It would take another generation, and other kinds of cookery programmes, before the food habits of the British were challenged so radically again.
Written by Dr Sian Nicholas, Reader in Modern British History at Aberystwyth University.
What has Doctor Who meant to you over the years? Has the programme been exciting and entertaining, or maybe a constant friend? Which episodes or Doctors do you remember most? What would you like to see more or less of in the coming series?
I remember being 12 and listening to the radio with my dad. Women’s Hour were discussing sex toys, particularly ones that vibrate. My father was visibly struggling with the decision to turn it off out of embarrassment, or to keep it on, so as to support his little feminist daughter.
Please talk about issues facing our trans sisters, without the unnecessary input of “concerned” cis feminists. Some cis feminists like myself are completely and unflinchingly pro trans rights.
Please get Shon Faye on the show to speak about her new book, The Transgender Issue.
Anna Lambert, Farnborough Hampshire.
Have women done so well? I wrote a letter (hard copy with an envelope) to Woman’s Hour in 1983 following an iterm on the new design of the disposable nappy. As a user of the same 12 towelling nappies on my 2nd child after my first in 1977 I was shocked, standing in my local (Boots) store to realise that there was a whole aisle devoted to those “modern” disposable items. My lightbulb moment was that this was just one aisle in one town, in one country. My letter highlighted the awfulness of the monstrous “malodourous piles of plastic and paper” that the disposable nappy trend was causing and that we are leaving this problem to be dealt with by these very dear babies we are using them on. So my comment is that I am depressed that we women have “demanded” an item to make our lives easier and thus created horrendous landfill hills for our indulgence because we couldn’t be bothered to rinse and sluice and hang on the line an utterly recyclable terry nappy. So Woman’s Hour heard my comment and broadcasted it 38 yrs ago but it had no impact at all. Women today – need to get our heads around acknowledging and fixing this awful blind-spot we have with regards the landfill issue we cause. (I had 3 children and worked part and full time throughout. I am proud that I would taker 4 nappies on holidays and these were brought home … to be used as dusters and mops for 20 years after my 3rd became potty trained)
Theresa Hughes, Perthshire, Scotland.
To answer Theresa Hughes’ comment above – by ‘women’ did you mean ‘parents’? Or in your view is the malodorous issues of nappies (recyclable or not) purely a woman’s problem?…. 🙂
Catherine Blain, Baildon, West Yorkshire
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