I wrote about Reith and the General Strike in This New Noise, my book about the BBC, and I still can’t decide what I really think about the episode. On the one hand, Reith did not hand over the BBC to Churchill, and he did broadcast communiques from the TUC as well as the government. On the other, he made some serious compromises – for example, bowing to pressure from prime minister Stanley Baldwin not to allow Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, access to the airwaves.

A fascinating segment of history... the play creates a shimmering sense of the past... Thorne triumphantly uses real history to create a compelling drama that is both amusing, touching and revealing' WhatsOnStage It's not all Stephen Campbell Moore: Haydn Gwynne, calm, collected, and knowing, plays an extremely wily PM, Stanley Baldwin, and having performed Winston before in a TV movie, Adrian Scarborough's staccato bulldozing ambitious Churchill is pitch perfect! And Kitty Archer (her enunciation as evocative of an era as her name would suggest lol), Laura Rogers, Shubham Saraf and Mariam Haque are all terrific in smaller roles, in a cast that is spoiled for rich talent in small parts.AUDIO-DESCRIBED PERFORMANCE – Saturday 8 July 2.30pm, touch tour at 1pm (audio described by VocalEyes) Sound is married to visuals in arresting ways too on Laura Hopkins’ clever set and flashes of light (design by Howard Hudson with video projection by Andrzej Goulding) reveal the strike itself. It is this delight in and celebration of sound, so apt for a play about the power of radio, that makes the play worth seeing.

Campbell Moore's intimate and revealing performance is very special, like Gatiss's performance in "The Motive and the Cue," but Campbell Moore has more to work with, and the story is more relevant and more important to our lives today. Campbell Moore is at once buttoned up, cupping his words in a deliberate throat, while suggesting a stammering agitation at the forces restraining his grandiose ambitions: at one point, in private, he practically screams out his desire for greatness.Adrian Scarborough will play Winston Churchill, with Stephen Campbell Moore as John Reith. Further casting will be announced at a later date. With the printing presses shut down, the only sources of news are the government's British Gazette, edited by Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, and the independent, fledgling British Broadcasting Company, led by John Reith. The stage is set for a fierce battle over control of the news and who gets to define the truth.

Meanwhile, boozy, eccentric, baggage-laden Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill (Adrian Scarborough) has an alternative plan - the British Gazette , a state newspaper edited by… Winston Churchill. The General Strike affected transport, travel and supplies over 12 days. The BBC was the only source of news, independent from both the government and the TUC. The picture of Churchill is not that of the heroic war time leader but someone bullying, determined that the Bolshevik revolution should not encompass Britain. What with Churchill’s anti-emancipation shown in Sylvia, pre-war Churchill is being reassessed. On stage her other recent credits include appearing in Anything Goes at the Barbican Theatre in London, and in Copenhagen at the Theatre Royal Bath.The play takes a somewhat unconventional approach to the way its characters are portrayed; Haydn Gwynne plays both a studio singer and the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and indeed most of the cast successfully multi-roll, with impressive performances from Laura Rogers and Ravin J Ganatra. Writing for Time Out, Andrzej Lukowski also awarded the play three stars of five, claiming that it "never quite manages to live up to its intriguing concept" and calling it "an entertaining but flawed exercise in cakeism." [4] There could scarcely be a better moment to put the BBC on stage. So under threat – from the influence of placemen and from precarious funding. So needed, not only for non-fake news but as a conduit of imagination and intellect, when the arts are under threat.

The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Jun 13, 2023 7:27:03 GMT justinj said:It was ok. After seeing patriots last week, during which I was engrossed throughout, I was hoping for more of the same. Unfortunately I found my mind wandering during a lot of this. When Winston Went to War with the Wireless opens with a sharp, spectral tableaux of coal miners toiling. Soon, those miners are downing tools and the Trades Union Congress has called a general strike, paralysing Britain. The fledgling BBC, founded only three years before by John Reith, finds itself on the horns of a dilemma – should it report the objective truth of the strike, police brutality and all? Or should it dance with the devil (well, Stanley Baldwin’s Tories) and be used as a government mouthpiece to help quell a putative Bolshevik revolution?It’s a fascinating segment of history, when – as Thorne said in an interview – “everything could have happened in a different way” and his play creates a shimmering sense of the past as John Reith struggled to preserve the independence of his nascent British Broadcasting Company, then just four years old, by preventing it from being commandeered as a direct arm of government. Yet something feels under-powered about this central conflict. There’s a lot of shouting – and Adrian Scarborough’s Churchill doesn’t help things. He gets a few nice laughs, but Churchill here is a caricature. There’s also an awful lot of history to crunch through: characters lob gobbets about Gallipoli and the Gold Standard at each other like hand grenades. It should be noted that half way through the interval, a quartet of actors, led by a mischievous Kevin McMonagle, rousingly perform such a variety skit, for those not queuing for the bathroom, in it's entirety.