C.S. Lewis at the BBC
By Justin Phillips
HarperCollins. 321 pages. £20.00
ISBN 0 00 710437 5
Justin Phillips's career in broadcast journalism spanned over 20 years at the BBC, including being a producer for Radio 4's flagship 'Today', the morning news programme. Sadly he died of a severe asthma attack on Boxing Day morning 2000, three weeks after the completion of this book and just short of his 50th birthday.
His interest in C.S. Lewis stemmed from his Christian commitment, and he had access to the BBC's Written Archives Centre in Caversham. There he found numerous files of correspondence concerning the radio talks given by C.S. Lewis during the years of World War II. These 15-minute monologues proved immensely popular with listeners and, after some rewriting, were published as Mere Christianity, probably the most influential evangelistic book of the 20th century.
Phillips's book is fascinating. He begins with a wonderfully atmospheric and anecdotal description of the BBC and religious broadcasting during the 1930s in the run up to hostilities. We are introduced to the men behind the scenes like the Rev. Prebendary J. W. Welch and Eric Fenn, who came up with idea of inviting Lewis to broadcast.
Conditions during the bombing in London meant that many radio departments were evacuated to various locations. We are given insight into the arrangements at the Lewis residence, the Kilns, outside Oxford, where his brother Warnie did such a great work in dealing with the huge number of letters that Lewis's talks generated. Then we get into detailed accounts, from the archive correspondence, which show how the talks came to be written, the suggestions and improvements made by the editors, and the pressure Lewis was under during their creation. Other Oxford dons were not best pleased with Lewis for embarking on something so 'popular'.
There are a couple of superb cameos along the way. One is of work of J.B. Priestley who, in a way, invented the war-time morale-boosting radio talk. The other is of Dorothy L. Sayers, whose series of plays, 'The Man Born to be King', broke new ground in religious broadcasting during the war years.
This is a worthwhile read. I suppose I was encouraged most by the fact that the book refutes the common idyllic picture of Lewis as the unruffled genius, generating masterpieces with ease. No, he was a man like the rest of us, working under pressure, and humble enough to accept advice. A previously untapped and rich vein of Lewis material has been opened up here and Lewis fans will love it.
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