Suitcase of Soundscapes: The London Transcription Service and the Packaging of Wartime Sounds for the BBC’s Global Radio Audience

The wartime work of the BBC is widely remembered, but the focus on the live broadcasting of news across Britain and occupied Europe which characterises most previous studies overlooks the extensive production of transcription recordings for both allied and neutral countries during the conflict. Transcription programmes, along with other neglected fields such as library music, have left more robust archival traces than the more celebrated and ‘ephemeral’ live programming, thereby challenging the continued centrality of ‘liveness’ to scholarly understandings of radio as a medium. This article looks at the programmes produced by the BBC’s London Transcription Service (LTS) through the case study of an unstudied collection of wartime discs which are preserved at the Czech Radio Archive in Prague. These programmes, produced by international teams for a truly global audience, offer further insights into the wartime ‘projection of Britain’ and show how the specificities of transcription were used to ensure audiences received an impression of Britain and the Allied cause that was carefully tailored to them.