When Winston Went to War with the Wireless (NHB Modern Plays)

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It’s a fascinating window into now little-remembered events, and Katy Rudd’s zippy production feels the most at ease while depicting the dawn of the BBC: a ragtag group of eccentrics who genuinely had no idea how to run a broadcaster - because literally nobody anywhere had ever done it before - balancing ethical dilemmas about news coverage with hokey light entertainment shows. Stirring things further, chancellor Winston Churchill sees the chaos as his chance to unseat Baldwin from the “big chair”. Meanwhile, Baldwin wants to outflank his rival, making him the fall guy if Reith’s newly formed voice of the people fails to toe the line. Yet something feels under-powered about this central conflict. There’s a lot of shouting – and Adrian Scarborough’s Churchill doesn’t help things. He gets a few nice laughs, but Churchill here is a caricature. There’s also an awful lot of history to crunch through: characters lob gobbets about Gallipoli and the Gold Standard at each other like hand grenades.

Jun 13, 2023 7:27:03 GMT justinj said:It was ok. After seeing patriots last week, during which I was engrossed throughout, I was hoping for more of the same. Unfortunately I found my mind wandering during a lot of this. What he means by that last comment is that the BBC was in its infancy. It was a tiny startup, staffed by a group of young war veterans, misfits, impresarios, intellectuals and engineers. But Reith, a visionary with immense ambition – matched by Churchill’s immense personal ambition – understood that broadcasting could be a great democratic power. “Most of the good things of this world are badly distributed and most people have to go without them,” he wrote. “Wireless … may be shared by all alike … the wealthy and the poor listen simultaneously … there is no first and third class.”Akbar, Arifa (2023-06-14). "When Winston Went to War With the Wireless review – radio is the star of BBC crisis drama". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-07-15.

There are laughs too, mostly provided by the variety acts that populated the Beeb in between news segments: Haydn Gwynne's singer's assertion that you shouldn't be "cruel to a vegetab(uel)" made me laugh, though the biggest laugh belonged to the versatile Luke Newberry, whose skit, about the lies he would tell his Mum to prevent her discovering he was an actor, was laugh-out-loud hilarious! When Winston Went to War with the Wireless opens with a sharp, spectral tableaux of coal miners toiling. Soon, those miners are downing tools and the Trades Union Congress has called a general strike, paralysing Britain. The fledgling BBC, founded only three years before by John Reith, finds itself on the horns of a dilemma – should it report the objective truth of the strike, police brutality and all? Or should it dance with the devil (well, Stanley Baldwin’s Tories) and be used as a government mouthpiece to help quell a putative Bolshevik revolution? The General Strike itself is a juicy subject, but here it’s essentially reduced to a few tantalising vignettes. It should be noted that half way through the interval, a quartet of actors, led by a mischievous Kevin McMonagle, rousingly perform such a variety skit, for those not queuing for the bathroom, in it's entirety.There could scarcely be a better moment to put the BBC on stage. So under threat – from the influence of placemen and from precarious funding. So needed, not only for non-fake news but as a conduit of imagination and intellect, when the arts are under threat. Adrian Scarborough will play Winston Churchill, with Stephen Campbell Moore as John Reith. Further casting will be announced at a later date.