Both Sides of the Microphone

The year is 1952. While television is quickly gaining in popularity, radio is still the main broadcast medium – reflected in the title of the Radio Times’ weekly roundup of entertainment news, ‘Both Sides of the Microphone’.

While today the Radio Times is an independent magazine (it was sold by the Beeb in 2011), in the 1950s it was effectively the “journal of the BBC” and the only guide to what was on radio and TV that week.

This week’s edition carries the following preview of the second series of the Goon Show, prior to the broadcast of the first episode on this day 70 years ago:

The Goons, radio’s newest and youngest comedy team of actors and scriptwriters, begin another weekly series on Tuesday. Goons Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Michael Bentine – recently returned from his television success in New York – will again make up the team. Harry Secombe, possessor of a fine tenor voice, will sing a song each week. In between writing Bumblethorpe and the Goon pantomime, scriptwriters Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens, with the connivance of Jimmy Grafton, have been compiling for the new series a Goon Thesis on the History of England.

(from the Radio Times, issue 1471, page 9, published 18 January 1952)

Image and caption from the Radio Times