Front Line Family: ‘Women's culture’ comes to the BBC

Abstract

During the 1930s and 1940s, the BBC resolutely held out against the program form most notoriously associated with ‘vulgar’, commercial, feminized US radio culture: soap operas, or serial drama with a domestic setting directed primarily at an audience of women. Yet the first British soap opera, Front Line Family, made its debut in 1941 on the North American Service, as a propaganda vehicle aimed expressly at encouraging US entry into the Second World War. It became part of the Light Programme schedule after the war and led directly to Mrs Dale's Diary and The Archers. This article traces the controversial origins and contested life of the first British soap, within the context of the ‘women's culture’ largely missing from the BBC in its early years. The terms of the debate over its origins show clearly how notions of ‘quality’ and public service were both gendered and linked to notions of national identity, and how a popular yet ‘feminine’ and ‘American’ form like the domestic serial drama challenged those important cornerstones of the BBC ethos.

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