Whatever Happened to JB Priestley?

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Archive on 4: Whatever Happened to JB Priestley?

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, Whatever Happened to JB Priestley?

Stuart Maconie asks why JB Priestley has all but disappeared from our cultural life.

Polymath JB Priestley was once among the most famous and important people in Britain. Stuart Maconie sets out to discover why so few of us know anything about him now.

Thanks to his famous 'Postscript' broadcasts in 1940, heard by nearly half the adult population of Britain, JB Priestley was our second most important leader after Churchill, according to Graham Greene. The spirit expressed in those broadcasts was later embodied in the post-war establishment of the Welfare State, and later on Priestley's radical spirit saw him become one of the main figures in the creation of CND. 
He was a hugely popular writer - his publisher had to dedicate a whole fleet of vans to the distribution of his first best-seller, 'The Good Companions' - and was the author of countless plays, essays, screenplays, articles and much more besides. 
So why, Stuart Maconie would like to know, do so few of us know anything about him now - even though other figures like Orwell, perhaps less significant at the time, remain discussed and revered to this day. 
In answering that question Stuart conducts fresh interviews with Professor Selina Todd, critic DJ Taylor and Doctor Kitt Price, and also draws on the plentiful archive of JBP himself. He hears about the prejudice that Priestley encountered because of his background and popularity from the literary aristocracy of the 1920s and 30s (Virginia Woolf called him the tradesman of English Literature) and also the Oxbridge satirists of the 1960s. 
Stuart talks to some of the last remaining group to pay attention to JBP - the GCSE students studying 'An Inspector Calls' to discover they think his concerns remain pressing today - and also finds out how this author, so often condemned for being 'middlebrow', introduced a large part of the British public to radical ideas concerning time and psychology.

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