Nesta Pain, the entangled media producer.

The Entangled Media Histories approach to media historiography has produced new approaches to the practice of media history. The main emphasis in the entangled approach is on transnational and transmedial analysis but there is also an interest in the ‘cultural translator’, an individual who expresses cross-border or cross-boundary entanglement through their professional work. Such a person is the twentieth century BBC producer, Nesta Pain (1905 – 1995) whose career began during the Second World War when she contributed to the ‘Projection of Britain’ for the Overseas Service. Her reputation was made immediately after the end of the war at the time when the Features Department was separated from Drama and the innovative Third Programme was established. Nesta Pain utilised these new opportunities to create highly imaginative cross-genre radio features and especially those dealing with science. She made a major contribution to science education and the popularising of science but at the same time was also a budding radio drama producer. She produced John Mortimer’s Prix Italia winning ‘The Dock Brief’ and her adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ was ground-breaking. Nesta Pain showed it was possible to ignore the entrenched boundaries of the BBC; gender, departmental and genre as well as the gulf between radio and television and represents an important example of the ‘cultural translator’

'Countries in the Air': Travel and Geomodernism in Louis MacNeice's BBC Features

In the middle stretch of his twenty-two-year BBC career, the poet and producer Louis MacNeice earned a reputation as one of the ‘undisputed masters of creative sound broadcasting’, a reputation derived, in part, from a huge range of radio features that were founded upon his journeys abroad. Through close examination of some of his most significant overseas soundscapes – including Portrait of Rome (1947) and Portrait of Delhi (1948) – this article will consider the role and function of travel in shaping MacNeice’s engagement with the radio feature as a modernist form at a particular transcultural moment when Britain moved through the end of the Second World War and the eventual disintegration of its empire