Propaganda radio play: When Louis Met George (Orwell)

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

"When Louis Met George.",
author = "Farley, Paul
http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/254f90aec8f64a2c9565e4e8b60a4de5
http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/when-louis-met- george(2aed6c09-ba21-40de-bd32-9e487a1b9ff0)/export.html

When Louis Met George is a 45-minute radio drama that imagines two BBC employees of the 1940s, Louis MacNeice and George Orwell, meeting in a 1943 war-time Broadcasting House; through this imagined union, the play explores ideas of memory, popular culture and propaganda, surveillance and the uses of literature and art in a time of global conflict. It draws on extensive reading (including Orwell's journals, and MacNeice's letters and autobiography) as well as research into the Reithian era of the BBC. It was first broadcast as an Afternoon Play on 5th February 2003 (and selected for Radio 4's Pick of the Week on 10th February). It received favourable reviews; for example, writing in The Financial Times, Martin Hoyle said: ''When Louis Met George' was that hybrid, an imagined conversation between two real people' an intriguing historical arabesque in the margin of history that poses all sorts of tantalising questions'. The seeds of Big Brother seem to have been found in the unlikely figure of Lord Reith. Splendidly acted and produced (even the sound effect of the dripping plumbing spoke of the earnest righteousness of the BBC), this belonged to the higher echelon of radio drama