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BBC archives The Listener magazine online

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

March 31, 2011 | 2 min read

An historic magazine which was published every week between 1929 and 1991 (all 3,197 of them) has been digitised by the BBC.

With editorial from Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin and TS Eliot the BBC produced title is seen as having a profound effect upon the British literary scene, prompting the broadcaster to preserve the title for posterity.

The mammoth project has taken the organisation 18 months to complete, as the laborious process of indexing and scanning each page in full colour was undertaken by archiving specialists Cengage Learning.

Founded in 1929 by Lord Reith, the first BBC director general, the Listener was designed as a high brow counterpart to the mass market Radio Times.

Its significance is enhanced thanks to the transcripts of live radio shows from the thirties, which were not recorded on tape.

Jean Seaton, the BBCs official historian, told the guardian: “It was edited with a real eye, a testament to the power of the editor, intelligent and constructive and with a style driven by the urgency and topicality of the BBC, but about as real an insight into what the serious minds of the time were thinking about.”

The Listener was finally dropped in 1991 due to declining sales and increased private sector competition from newspapers and supplements.

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