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The figure of Christopher Columbus was a key trope in the programming for the BBC's Latin American Service (LAS) and West Indian Service during the Second World War. This paper analyzes four dramas and one feature program from the 1940s that not only dramatize events from Columbus's life but also reflect the contemporary broadcast context by promoting British war interests and showcasing Latin American and Caribbean histories and geographies. These commemorative programs are broadly hagiographic, but they also reveal the BBC's awareness of how Latin American and West Indian audiences might variously respond to portrayals of Columbus and European colonization. Using radiogenic strategies including immersive aurality, the interplay of different historical narratives, and multivocality, these programs reveal the relationships between the BBC's institutional aims in overseas broadcasting and Latin American and West Indian program creators' literary and political goals. The portrayals of Columbus in the 1940s served an allegorical and ultimately propagandistic purpose, demonstrating the role of faith and perseverance amid turbulence and conflict, and inducing, by analogy, sympathy for Britain's war effort. The authors commissioned to write, produce, and deliver these dramas were not simply responding to propaganda guidelines; they were responding to the demands of the corporation and the war effort while also pursuing their own commitments and literary ambition. Ultimately, the scripts produced by the BBC for broadcast to the Americas reveal Columbus and his voyages as polysemic symbols of the regions' relationship to their past and their relationships to Europe in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the unpublished private papers and fictional writing of the pioneering BBC producer Lance Sieveking (1896–1972), this article argues that a sustained focus on the biographical background of media professionals can broaden the scope of broadcasting history while offering a necessary narrative coherence. In the case of Sieveking, the article provides new detail on his family background, his wartime experience, and the part he played in the broader cultural networks of interwar Britain, in order to argue that many of the programmes he and his contemporaries made in the 1920s and 1930s should be understood as highly personal responses to the artistic and political world trends of the period. Further, in arguing for the merits of biography, the article draws on recent scholarship in ‘the history of emotions’ to suggest that a focus on the private life histories of media professionals can also advance our understanding of bodies such as the BBC as complex ‘emotional communities’ rather than as ‘total’ institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]