Life on air : a history of Radio Four

Abstract

The published work was commissioned by Oxford University Press in 2001 and published on 27 September 2007. It is 518 pages long, including 418 pages ofmain text plus 100 pages of footnotes, bibliography and indexing. Overall, the book is approximately 250,000 words in length. It provides a history ofRadio Fourprimarily focused on the period 1967 to 1997, though also containing a brief assessment ofthe wartime and post-war Home Service as well as a limited assessment ofdevelopments since 1997. Though the book is supported by the usual structures ofacademic work - original research, footnotes, systematic referencing, etc - it was also, at the publisher's request, deliberately designed to be accessible to a broader lay readership. Thus, in the interests ofmaintaining narrative focus it deliberately excluded a discussion ofthe wider reading that informed it or ofthe underlying intellectual questions I was pursuing - even the methodologies deployed in researching it. It also sought to provide only implicit conclusions in the fmal epilogue. This critical essay therefore attempts to compensate for these absences by making such 'embedded' elements more explicit. It offers an account, in tum, ofthe background literature, research questions, methodology, and fmdings. Though these are organised under four separate headings, they are, inevitably, interconnected elements in the research and writing ofa book. I therefore conclude, very briefly, by drawing out what I suggest might be the book's overall contribution to the academic field ofmedia history.

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