As the Ashes series begins in Brisbane, we look at some of the people who have brought cricket to BBC TV and radio. 

From instructional radio programming and short match reports in the early years of the BBC, to live coverage throughout the day on both television and radio, the BBC listings show how much coverage of cricket has changed over the decades. 

A quintessentially British sport, cricket traces its origins back hundreds of years. The sport was once banned for interfering with archery practice, according to a 1933 Radio Times article. But cricket has won in the long term - there are only 204 references to archery in BBC Genome, while cricket listings number thousands. The schedules are more interested in boundaries than in bullseyes...

John Arlott was one of the original voices of cricket on BBC radio. He spent a number of years as a policeman in his native Hampshire before moving into broadcasting: a radio address to King George VI he made on behalf of the police on VE Day 1945 helped him make the transition.

Arlott's broadcasting career straddled his passions of poetry and cricket, which he often allowed to overlap. Cricket was the inspiration for this 1945 listing of poetry and prose, while his cricket commentaries were known for being articulate and rhythmical, but he wasn’t unnecessarily florid with his language. Writing in The Nightwatchman magazine, journalist Simon Barnes described “reticence and understatement as aspects of Arlott’s talents”.

Arlott was one of the commentators on Test Match Special when it launched in 1957 on the Third Programme, and remained on the team until the centenary Ashes Test match of 1980. His retirement led to a number of tribute programmes, and in a 2003 edition of Desert Island Discs, long-time colleague Henry Blofeld recalled his experiences working with Arlott.

Blofeld’s first listing on Test Match Special was in 1972, and apart from a couple of years spent at Sky, he was a crucial part of Test Match Special until the end of summer 2017. When "Blowers" started on TMS it was broadcast on Radio 3, but it has had a number of homes in its 60-year history. In the mid-90s the programme moved to Radio 4 long wave, and since 2002 it has been broadcast uninterrupted on digital station BBC 5 Live Sports Extra. Having reached "60 not out", it feels the responsible cricketing thing to do is to go for the century.

Cricketer Rachael Heyhoe Flint - a contemporary of Blofeld's - was a champion for greater coverage of women’s cricket in the second half of the 20th Century. She organised the first women’s World Cup in 1973 (two years before the first men's equivalent) which received some coverage on Radio 2. In 1983 Just After Four looked at her "one-woman campaign to put women's cricket on the map" and alongside Brian Johnston she discussed cricket on Woman’s Hour in 1993. 

Heyhoe Flint was preceded by Marjorie Pollard, a hockey player who was an advocate for women's cricket in the early years of the BBC. A consummate sportswoman, she is believed to be the first person to play two different sports at The Oval in one year. In 1937 Pollard provided commentary for the first women's Test Match ever to be played in this country, two years after a special edition of Sports Talk in which she made the case for women’s cricket. 

Coverage of Women’s cricket is now much more of a fixture on the BBC with Test Match Special covering every ball of the 2017 Women’s Ashes. A BBC Radio 5 live programme in October 2017 debated whether 2017 had been women's cricket's greatest year. On-air, Ebony Rainford-Brent and Alison Mitchell are regularly heard in the BBC commentary box.

It is nearly 80 years since Test match cricket was first broadcast on BBC television, although an early listing gave little fanfare with just these few lines in Radio Times. It was an important time for sport on television, as Wimbledon also made its TV debut in 1937. Coverage was far removed from what we are now used to, there could be no highlight packages or replays interwoven into the analysis. In the post-war years live cricket became a regular feature on television with future radio stalwart Brian Johnston presenting a look back at 200 years of cricket before a test against India in 1946. Johnston, known affectionately as Johnners, became the BBC’s first cricket correspondent in 1963. Test cricket was first shown in colour in 1968.

Cricket gave the BBC television lots of schedule-filling content and home Test matches remained exclusively on the BBC until 1999, when Channel 4 won the rights. Channel 4 continued to show live cricket until the end of the 2005 Ashes victory over Australia. But after cricket was removed from the list of "crown jewels" sporting events reserved for terrestrial TV, Sky acquired the rights in 2006, from which point live test cricket has not been available on terrestrial TV. In the intervening years, the BBC has shown highlights from some World Cups and an away Ashes series in 2006/07.

As I approach stumps at the end of this blog, the story of cricket on the BBC is far from over. In recent seasons the BBC Sport website has broadcast live commentary of every match in county cricket. Since 2016 the BBC have shown match clips and highlights online, and live cricket will also return to BBC TV from 2020.

It is 80 years since the death of Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of wireless telegraphy – in other words, radio.

Born in Bologna, Italy, in 1874, Marconi had a comparatively privileged upbringing, with expectations that he would go into the family business or another respectable profession. He did neither, but made the family name world famous.

Marconi was not conventionally academic, and never completed a formal programme of study, but he showed an early aptitude for science, especially physics. One new aspect of the science that was attracting attention in the late 19th Century was the phenomenon of Hertzian waves: what we now know as radio waves. This electromagnetic radiation had yet to be harnessed into any practical application, but it became Marconi's obsession to achieve this.

He was something of a prodigy, developing a basic system of wireless transmission while still in his early 20s. Thereafter he worked continually on it until he was able to convince institutions, such as the British Post Office, of its efficacy. With his lack of scientific education his work was practical rather than theoretical, but this was the key to his success. Conventional scientific wisdom, as espoused by the likes of Sir Oliver Lodge and other leading scientists of the time, had concluded that wireless communication was impossible.

It was not until the 1920s that it was established that radio waves were able to bounce off different layers of the atmosphere, making communication across the oceans possible – but this was many years after Marconi had achieved the feat, without actually understanding how it worked, only that it did. It was previously thought that radio signals needed line-of-sight between the transmitter and receiver, but it was then also thought that there was a substance called “the ether” through which electromagnetic waves had to travel, as it was thought that nothing could travel through a true vacuum.

As with many inventions, it was the interest of the armed forces, and in particular the use the technology was put to during the World War One, which gave the impetus to the full development of what we now think of as radio. Although the military authorities in many countries worried that private use of radio would interfere with their communications, it was soon inevitable that the demand for other uses, such as broadcasting, would have to be acknowledged.

Marconi, like that other maverick pioneer, John Logie Baird, took others’ inventions and made something new out of them, but did not devise every component himself.  Marconi is generally known as the inventor of radio, and shared the 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work (with Karl Ferdinand Braun, whose inventions included the cathode-ray tube, a tuning circuit for radio transmitters and the use of crystals for receiving sets), but many others, from James Clark Maxwell to Heinrich Hertz, Nikola Tesla and Reginald Fessenden, played a part in the development of broadcast radio. 

Marconi however discovered a means of realising the new technology of radio and got it to work. He also publicised it and made it into a commercial concern, paving the way for the radio industry. But curiously he was not particularly interested in broadcasting, and left it to others to develop means of transmitting sound, which led to modern radio. All his work was on technology to transmit messages using Morse code, and it was with this technique that his fame rested during his active research period. Wireless telegraphy became the wonder of the early 20th Century, with crucial roles in events like the capture of the murderer Dr Crippen, the sinking of the Titanic – but also with the Marconi shares scandal of 1911.

As with Baird, the company that bore Marconi’s name continued long after he was no longer its chief asset and driving force, and indeed after his death. In 1920, the Marconi Company broadcast the first UK radio programme, with the famous singer Dame Nellie Melba, from its Chelmsford premises. Within two years, Marconi and the other major firms, with representatives of smaller companies, came together in a consortium to provide content for a national radio broadcasting service. The British Broadcasting Company was born.

The Marconi Company was responsible for some of the most important technology used by the BBC and other broadcasters, from the original 2LO transmitter to the Marconi-Stille sound tape recorder of the 1930s; Marconi joined forces with EMI in the early 1930s to develop a system of electronic television, and it was their 405-line system which became the main television format in the UK from 1937 until the late 1960s.

Marconi himself was not a frequent presence on the BBC, but nonetheless, like many prominent figures of the time, he was persuaded to broadcast on occasion. On the BBC’s first anniversary in November 1923 he gave a talk in a sequence of programmes called The BBC Birthday, and in 1931 he spoke on The Beginnings of Wireless. Marconi was a fluent English speaker through his mother’s influence (she was born Anne Jameson, of the Irish whiskey dynasty), and reportedly spoke it without a strong accent, doubtless confounding some people’s expectations based on his nationality.

The last 15 years of Marconi’s life saw the rise of Fascism in his home country. He had been appointed a Senator in the Italian parliament in 1914, and he became a friend of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who appointed him to his ruling council, and accorded him a state funeral when he died.

The day after Marconi’s death, 21 July 1937, broadcasters everywhere joined in turning off all radio transmissions for two minutes (his homeland, Italy, observed five minutes’ silence). In Great Britain this radio silence was at 6pm, and included all BBC stations then broadcasting – except television, as it was not transmitting at that time of day anyway. It was still a fitting tribute to the man who first achieved this new method of communication, and changed the world.

Today's window is a real treat for those fans of the wireless.

Listeners on Christmas Day evening, 1931, were first treated to the traditional staple of a Christmas service from studio, panto and an appeal on behalf of the British Wireless for the Blind.

At 9:35pm, though, an "experiment with Time and Christmas" was announced and Half the World Away, a "one of those fascinating, highly technical programmes which someone devises every now and then to remind us that broadcasting and wireless telephony really are modern miracles' began.

The listeners would have started their journey "comfortably seated in one part or another of the British Isles having celebrated Christmas in as near the good old-fashioned way as finances have allowed." They would then be transported to Tower Hill, London, for a chat with Mr Smoker, the Yeoman Porter. From there they would "fly on telephonic wings to the wild coasts of the North" to listen to a light-keeper, next to Gibraltar, and on to Cape Town. The radiophonic waves would finally take them to Sydney (where there is now Boxing Day, the listing warned), Vancouver, Edmonton and the Niagara Falls:

"If luck is with us and the Falls are not frozen solid (fantastic thought), we shall hear, for the first time in this country, the voice of those titanic waters."

Finally, "In Montreal we shall find them finishing tea, and when, on our homeward flight across the Atlantic, we stop to talk to the liner Majestic, we shall interrupt someone at dinner. From the Majestic we pass to Dublin and, as Big Ben's hands are creeping towards 10.30, back to London."

Today's calendar window opens up to reveal a poem. It featured in the 1926 Christmas edition of the Radio Times magazine and then again in 1927 as part of a collection of poems about broadcasting. "It is not a strange thing", the introduction to the collection claimed, "that men have
made poems about broadcasting for this new magic, which pours the music of the concert room into the stillness of the cottage and brings the song of nightingales into the heart of Town, is of the very stuff of poetry."

BROADCASTING AT CHRISTMAS
by Katharine Tynan

What is it, fleeter than the bird,
That flies unfluttering far and near,
And is not seen, and is not heard,
Until it finds the listening ear?

It is the multitudinous voice,
That brings the good news far and wide,
And bids good people to rejoice
In town and in the countryside.

Of old, the angels bore the great
Tidings of joy from the high skies,
But here's a messenger of late
Bears Christmas tidings as he flies!

And through the speech and violin
There is a lovelier message swells,
And they have broadcast ChristmasE'en,
The voices of the Christmas bells.

Ever enamoured with the magic of the wireless, here at BBC Genome we feel it's still magical. Do you agree?

On today's Advent Calendar window, a poignant look at the 1930s Great Depression.

Today John Hilton is going to talk about the little gadgets and fitments an unemployed man can make out of cheap materials with simple tools (in the craft room at the Club if he has no tools of his own) to make the house more cosy and to make things easier for the wife. If he starts at once he can have something ready and the paint nicely dry for Christmas; and what's nicer, Hilton asks, than to give your wife a Christmas present made with your own hands?

This was the Christmas edition of This and That, a programme set up in October 1934 by John Hilton, a professor of Industrial Relations, to be broadcast to listeners in Unemployed Clubs. Listeners said they looked forward to the 20-minutes-long talk "because it distracts as well as instructs. Minds are occupied and interested, and when life is difficult it is good to be able to forget for a moment one's own concerns."

Her friend Simon Robinson wrote to tell us about her past, and she subsequently featured in a Radio Times article and was interviewed by the BBC. We were also able to play her some of her old recordings we found in the BBC archive.

She thinks efforts like BBC Genome are vital to the history of broadcasting.

"We didn't think of a programme's significance at the time of making it, or that people would ask about it years after. Now there is a permanent and accessible online resource to benefit not only historians but the public in general. In my time with the BBC from 1936-1960 the world changed a great deal and the BBC programmes were part of that change and history."

"Now it is possible to see not only what was popular in a specific year but what was actually broadcast on a particular day. I could look and find out for instance what I was broadcasting on this day in 1938, 1944 or 1954, it's unbelievable", she added.

One look at the BBC Genome listings shows you the scope of her career. She is first listed in the 1930s making frequent appearances on radio singing with Jack Jackson and his Band at the Dorchester Hotel. Helen Clare was also one of the pioneers of early television broadcasts appearing in Cabaret Cartoons in 1937. During the Second World War, she made it to the cover of the Radio Times in September 1940 as one of the "three heroines of salvage".

She was a well-known voice on radio shows broadcast to the forces abroad. She sang and compered It's All Yours, a programme featuring children sending messages and songs to their fathers, uncles and brothers serving with the British Forces in remote areas around the world; she sang soldiers' requests on Calling Gibraltar.

Helen Clare was shown the more than 900 BBC Genome listings that mentioned her and said it was a surprise to see just how many programmes she had been on.

"It really does bring back memories and recollections of all the people I have worked with in the past. So many wonderful performers and most of them are gone now, but they live on in this. I'm currently contributing to my biography due out in 2017 and it has been wonderful as an aid for checking details of key programmes I was involved in."

You can find out more information about Helen Clare on her website, helenclare.com

The greatest show on Earth has come to an end, with glory for Team GB and thousands of hours of BBC coverage in the bag.

But there weren't always wall-to-wall, multi-channel broadcasts of the Olympic Games. In the early days of radio, there were only scant references to the event. In 1928, there was no live coverage and a sense that Great Britain was only going to compete after "doubts and difficulties" in a talk from a former sportsman.

In 1936, the opening ceremony of the Berlin games was given star billing for a "description of the scene". But it wasn't until the first post-war Olympics in London that coverage of the games really came into its own.

The BBC was the host broadcaster and the event was televised for the first time. The Radio Times reflected this great occasion by creating its first Olympic front cover (above).

The home advantage was short-lived, however. For the Helsinki and Melbourne Olympics in the 1950s, television was in its infancy in the host nations, so it was back to quite limited radio coverage. An Australian games with its vast time difference and distance meant that UK listeners made do with recordings.

But the lull would not last long...

The Rome Olympics in 1960 saw coverage on BBC radio and TV reach a new level, with a striking cover for the Radio Times and a magazine packed with side panels and schedules to guide viewers. With another distant games from Tokyo four years later, recorded Olympic action was flown over the Pole by jet in an era when satellite technology wasn't yet the norm.

The 1968 Olympics from Mexico City was another watershed for the BBC. It coincided with the advent of colour (initially on BBC2) and the Radio Times cover mirrored this. The magazine even changed its regular title font for the occasion. This was a growing era of satellite broadcasts and schedules which dealt with a time difference similar to Rio 2016.

From the 1970s onwards, blanket coverage of the Olympic Games emerged. Radio Times covers switched from striking design to the sports personality, with the likes of Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim and homegrown superstars like Daley Thompson, Sir Steve Redgrave and Sally Gunnell (pictured).

A notable absence from the line-up of Olympics covers is Moscow in 1980, which was beset by a boycott led by the US. Great Britain attended but stayed away from the opening ceremony, while the Olympic flag was raised for gold medal winners.

So Tokyo 2020 beckons. How will the games be covered? More wall-to-wall coverage or a dedicated Olympics channel? Let us know your thoughts on games past and future.

Today marks the first anniversary since the public launch of BBC Genome, the site that brings you the BBC TV and radio listings printed from 1923-2009.

To date more than 107,000 corrections from our public community of editors have been accepted, while more than 9,000 links to playable programmes are now available. 

The site has been visited almost 725,000 times in the past year and has amassed more than 6m page views. Visitors tend to hang around, leafing through some 8-10 pages when they land on Genome.

To mark this occasion, we decided to go back to 1924, when The Radio Times was celebrating its own first birthday.

The BBC’s then Managing Director, John Reith, who went on to become the corporation’s first director-general in 1927, wrote a front page article for the magazine in which he spoke of the "problems, hopes and fears" that came with launching a publication.

But he continued: "The first issues were sold out.. today - on its first anniversary - it is phenomenal". Two years after the BBC first started broadcasting, he put circulation at 600,000 copies.

"This journal of ours is, we consider, of the very greatest importance to the success of British broadcasting," said Reith, “It should be the connecting link between the broadcaster and the great listening public.

"If the broadcast service is to attain the maximum efficiency and the listener to reap the greatest benefit, it can only be secured through a considerable degree of intimacy and understanding between the two parties concerned in the undertaking.”

You can download a PDF version of Reith's birthday article by clicking on this link.

These days we have other ways of trying to secure this two-way communication, we call it interactivity and we think it’s a very modern idea (!), Radio Times of course continues in rude health, though no longer owned by the BBC, but 91 years on from Reith’s words, the value of having a catalogue of the BBC’s planned output shows what a very good idea it was.

As for BBC Genome, it's still very a much a work in progress, with a lot of editing still needed to whip the listings into shape from the original scanning process. We also hope to include regional and national variations, as well as a record of when the actual broadcast varied from the schedule. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

As Reith observed, “the personalities of the owners of aerials and the broadcasters are transient, but the ideas and the achievements remain.”

Thank you for all your support in the first year - long may it continue!

As you probably know (I’m assuming you are all huge broadcasting buffs and know your stuff, and if you don’t there is a brief guide in the About this Project section at the front of the Genome website) the BBC began broadcasting regularly on 14th November 1922, but as Radio Times did not begin publication until September the following year, the Genome website does not feature more than 10 months of BBC broadcasts.

Before you get excited, no, I am not announcing that the listings for those months are about to be added to Genome, that is just one of a number of major tweaks that are on our to do list. It’s more that I have a sneaking suspicion that I feature TV more often than radio in these columns, so I thought I would take a look at the very first schedules published in Radio Times (or ‘The Radio Times’ as it was known, until January 8th 1937 – coincidentally that issue previewed the programme Scrapbook for 1922, which featured reminiscences of the start of the BBC.)

By 1923, the main stations of the BBC (then the British Broadcasting Company) were established, with broadcasts coming from London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Newcastle and Glasgow. A few things are particularly noticeable about the first published day of listings, for 30th September 1923: one, the programmes are mainly composed of music, the only exceptions being religious talks (it being a Sunday) and the news.

The news itself is a single short bulletin at 10pm, and it is the only networked programme that day – the rest of the content is produced locally. Another thing is the hours of broadcasting: only London and Newcastle provide afternoon programmes, from 3pm to 5pm (London in fact does not list the closedown time but it is a reasonable assumption). Most of the other stations start their transmissions at 8.30, when London and Newcastle also resume; Cardiff though begins at 8.15.

The nature of the content is noticeably sober too, the music is all serious and ‘improving’, in line with the views of the then General Manager of the BBC, John Reith (later Managing Director, and then the first Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation), whose strict Presbyterian upbringing left him determined to protect the Christian religion, which he felt would be compromised by the inclusion of jazz or variety (in the showbusiness sense, though other senses apply) on the Sabbath. One of the most light-hearted offerings anywhere that day were numbers performed on the Newcastle service by the South Shields Corporation Tramways Band.

The rest of the week, 1st – 6th October, saw things lightening up a little, with a greater range of programmes, and more hours of broadcasting – London begins with a Morning Concert from 11.30 am to 12.30, though the other regions start around 3.30 pm – London itself does not restart until 5pm with Women’s Hour (Manchester follows this pattern as well on Thursday 4th). Most of the programmes still originate locally, but on the Monday at 7.30pm there is a Symphony Concert from 2LO London which is taken by all the regions except Cardiff – Manchester is listed as providing a Special Operatic Night performance of Carmen, starting at 8.15, but elsewhere in the magazine there is an erratum note to the effect that this would not take place.

Apart from the national news, the only other networked programmes appear to be a simultaneous broadcast of speeches at the Royal Colonial Institute Dinner from the Hotel Victoria in London on Tuesday 2nd , and a play, Rob Roy, produced in Glasgow on Saturday 6th October, although Birmingham transmitted their own programmes in the latter slot – mostly a concert by the Band of the Royal Air Force, with talks and a comedian in the intervals.

On a technical note, it’s interesting to see that the mode of transmission is mentioned occasionally – the Rob Roy production is specified as being ‘transmitted by wireless’, while several broadcasts by Mr Paul Rimmer’s Orchestra from Lozells’s Picture House in Birmingham, and the Oxford Picture House Orchestra in Manchester, are billed as being by landline (they were not being heard outside their own regions, this is presumably a reference to the programmes being outside broadcasts rather than coming from the studio).

It’s unfortunate that we are not yet able to share all the articles from Radio Times on the Genome site, perhaps this will one day be possible – but the earliest pieces in the magazine are fascinating for the historical information they give. The first edition includes an article by the BBC’s Chief Engineer, Captain P.P. (Peter) Eckersley, about the problems of these ‘simultaneous transmissions’, alongside an alarming picture of him alongside the current equipment to achieve this in the “experimental room” at the BBC headquarters, an arrangement that would make Heath Robinson throw in the towel…

The first edition of Radio Times is more than just a publishing landmark, it gives so many insights into the state of broadcasting then, both in the articles (sorry about that, again) and the listings. Various Children’s Hours under various names were well established, concerts were being given by in-house musicians such as the 2LO and 2ZY Orchestras, and Glasgow’s ‘Wireless Trio’. There was even a talk Seen on the Screen with Mr. G.A. Atkinson reviewing the latest films (silent of course – the films, that is, not the talk).

Every now and again, you can come across something that makes you realise people were not entirely straight-laced – for example, Manchester’s programme Keyboard Kitty and Klavier-Klash on 5th October wouldn’t sound too out of place at Glastonbury…