BBC Archives | Richard M. Langworth

Assault on Winston Churchill, 2018: A Reader’s Guide

22 March 2018 Comments 2 Comments

Assault count: Since I am losing track, I thought it would be convenient to create an index to smears of Winston Churchill following the film Darkest Hour. Note the similarity of topics. Many writers feed off each other, repeating the same disproven arguments. Never do they check Churchill quotes or The Churchill Documents —which prove them irretrievably wrong. The order is most recent first. . Update for 2019 Assault of 29 March: The Ezine Scroll-in reported that Churchill’s policies caused the drought that caused the Bengal Famine. (Not enough to be Prime Minister, he must also be a farmer, since he needed to know Irrigation.) This was a huge red herring.…

Churchill on the Broadcast

17 November 2016 Comments 2 Comments

The question arises, has anything been written on Churchill’s radio technique? Did he treat radio differently from other kinds of public speaking? How quickly did he take to the broadcast?

“The Art of the Microphone”

An excellent piece on this subject was by Richard Dimbleby (1913-1965), the BBC’s first war correspondent and later its leading TV news commentator. His “Churchill the Broadcaster” is in Charles Eade, ed., Churchill by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1953). Old as it is, the book remains a comprehensive set of essays of the many specialized attributes of WSC.

Dimbleby offers four areas of discussion: the technical background, the drama of World War II, the factual material, and Churchill’s methods of delivery.…

The Problem with Speech Recordings

1 February 2010 Comments 2 Comments

I’m currently analysing a few of Churchill’s speeces for an academic paper. After listening to the audio files and reading along I found a lot of paragraphs which were left out in the radio speeches. It’s especially evident in “Their Finest Hour” from June 18th, 1940 where only a fifth of the text made it to the radio. At one point it sounds like the audio file has been edited. Were the audio files full radio speeches or just excerpts? —N.K., Copenhagen

What you are listening to is likely a postwar recording of speeches Churchill made for HMV/Decca, which were edited and truncated in later versions.…