Mrs Blog’s Diary by Chris Green
Internet blogging began in the late 1990s and a host of blog platforms sprang up to facilitate its growth. Within a few years, it was huge. Not many people realise it, but the expression blog has its origins in an old radio show called Mrs Blog’s Diary which went out on the BBC Light Programme twice a day back in the nineteen-fifties. Mrs Blog’s Diary was the first serial drama to be broadcast in the UK and ran from 1949 to 1961.
Those of you who are old enough to remember it will recall that it was set in Uppington, a small middle-class suburban town in the home counties where Mrs Blog and her family, friends and neighbours found themselves in a never-ending series of sticky situations. She narrated her recollections as if she were reading from her diary, hence the title. Her reports were interspersed with short dramatisations of the relevant events, featuring seasoned theatre actors along with appropriate ambient sounds. These sketches typically lasted for around three minutes, although the more complex ones could be longer. The special ones might take up the whole fifteen minutes of the episode, with Mrs Blog just coming in now and then.
On the face of it, Mrs Blog’s characters led orderly lives in keeping with their tranquil surroundings. They were respectable people going about their daily business. But secrets were plentiful in the Blog universe. Something sinister always seemed to be lurking just beneath the surface. Stories like Councillor Bradshaw’s son George going AWOL from his army detail on manoeuvres in Germany, Audrey Perfect becoming pregnant by Sooty Ramadan, or Colin Prior the landlord of The King’s Head leaving his wife and family to join the French Foreign Legion kept the audience entertained. While it was relatively easy to shock people in those days, when audience numbers started to drop, the producers decided storylines needed to be edgier, and a tense cliffhanger was needed at the end of each episode to keep the listener wondering how it would pan out and tune in the following day to see. Each programme was to end with a shocking revelation about one of the coterie.
The brutal murder of Brigadier Heath Hawkins and the corrupt police operation led by Inspector Gaffer that followed held the audience in thrall for days. Crime show tropes from television were creeping in. Push the boundaries, the scriptwriters were being told. Although he got off on a technicality, Reverend Goodman of St Decuman’s being arrested for kerb-crawling caused quite a stir. What was happening in polite society, listeners wondered? Were the middle-classes coming apart? Were they living in a web of secrets and lies? And low-life crime? Mrs Blog’s neighbour, Clive Barrington, arrested for a ram raid on the Co-op was a bolt out of the blue. Earlier, Mrs Blog had suggested that Clive should be put forward for an award for his selfless services to charity. Nothing was what it seemed in Uppington.
The alarming thing for the audience, perhaps, was that Mrs Blog, who appeared to be a respectable middle-class lady, was acquainted with all these dodgy people, and had close relationships with most of them. Related even to a growing number of them. This also appeared to be one of the things that made the show so popular with the radio audience in those repressed post-war days. Many listeners did not realise that Mrs Blog’s Diary was a fictional account and believed that the events she related were actually happening.
The episode featuring Mrs Blog’s son Keith’s arrest under the Obscene Publications Act for marketing lewd material came to the attention of the influential clean-up campaigner, Kirsty Grimdyke. She expressed her unreserved disgust for the diary in her Daily Mail column. Perhaps it would have been time for the producers to tone it down, but unwisely, they persisted with stories they knew would cause outrage.
With the clean-up campaign gaining in strength in the early nineteen-sixties, the diary’s days were numbered. It was finally taken off the air after Mrs Blog’s’ brother-in-law, Doctor Hugh Blog was caught in St Decuman’s churchyard, buggering the jockey, Josh Littler, and charged with Gross Indecency. Although the revelation appeared to be in keeping with the policy of a steamy story to keep the faithful tuning in, it received a record number of complaints from puritanical listeners, who in 1961 were simply not ready for such deviancy. Perhaps it hadn’t helped that the producers had come up with a graphic re-enactment of the event with actors voicing the parties. Kirsty Grimdyke no longer cared whether Mrs Blog’s Dairy was fictional or not, she demanded the programme’s immediate withdrawal. You could not have this kind of filth on the airwaves. This was splashed across the front page of The Daily Mail, which was still reeling from the Lady Chatterley court case verdict the previous year. They had campaigned vigorously to keep the book’s ban in place. The BBC, anxious not to lose their funding, complied and took Mrs Blog’s Diary off the air.
Shortly before she died in 1984, aged 80, Maria Farthingdale, who voiced Mrs Blog, appeared on Desert Island Discs. She revealed that at the time she had been against some of the more lewd storylines, but had been overruled. She was told that it was necessary to stop the audience switching their loyalty to TV. But despite all this, she believed in free speech and she felt Mrs Blog’s Diary had made important breakthroughs here.
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