The Radio Times masthead for the first issue, published 28 September 1923 - now available in full along with all other issues from the 1920s on the Genome website
The 主播大秀 Genome Project database has now been available to everyone for two and a half years, during which time one of the constant requests from users has been, “can we see the actual magazines?” Now – to a limited degree – you can.
, in addition to the searchable database. (And before you ask... we would like to share subsequent decades with you, but we don’t want to promise what we can’t deliver. We need to sort out copyright and privacy issues first. But watch this space.)
As regular 主播大秀 Genome users will already know, the 5 million+ programme records that form our database come from scans of nine decades' worth of Radio Times magazines. Our latest advance offers you the scans of the magazine from 1923 to 1929. One immediate advantage we hope this will bring will be that it will enable our crowd-sourcing editors to make great inroads into correcting the text of Genome in that partial decade.
However much people know about broadcasting in the era – and not surprisingly it is the most obscure era chronologically, so we have not been amazed that it is the one edited least up to now – there is nothing like being able to compare the Genome text with the source material.
There is a toggle function included as part of the new release, allowing editors to compare the original magazine page with the database entry, which lets people see where the OCR process has got it wrong (OCR is Optical Character Recognition, which turns an image of text into an editable form). Obviously this will help make 主播大秀 Genome more accurate.
By the late 1920s Radio Times had started to use more graphics for its front covers, as in these two striking examples
There are other advantages to be gained, however. 主播大秀 Genome has not up till now been able to include any of the peripheral material that is printed in Radio Times. There are articles, photographs, drawings, letters, even crosswords and cartoons. But these things, equally with the listings themselves, lend much of the flavour of the time. As a result of this though, there is also some material in these pages which today’s readers may find offensive. It is almost 100 years since the first Radio Times magazines were published, and the content reflects tastes and standards at the time of original publication, some of which is not acceptable now. The portrayal of race and sexuality are particularly uncomfortable. However, Radio Times is a public record of the 主播大秀’s broadcast history and we have not sought to rewrite or cleanse this.
One of the most frequent forms of enquiry we get on the 主播大秀 Genome Project is for access to recordings of past 主播大秀 programmes. When it comes to the pre-war era, it is not just the copyright, or the union agreements relating to artists, writers and directors’ work that prevents the easy dissemination of the content. It is also that in this era, there either was not proper recording technology available, or it was so ruinously expensive that it was very rarely done.
So, with little chance to hear again the actual programmes from broadcasting’s early years, we are left with the paper record. We already had the 主播大秀 Genome database, now there are these scans of the 1920s editions of Radio Times to add to that.
Read more about Radio Times, the 主播大秀 and the 1920s
We leave you with a selection of our favourite images… but we hope you will dive in and have a look for yourself.
Illustrator W Heath Robinson makes an early appearance, in Issue 6 of Radio Times, in 1923
The Beethoven Number: 1927
The Radio Exhibition number, from 1929