Already a successful novelist, essayist and playwright by 1939, Joseph Boynton (J. B.) Priestley found himself transformed, with the help of what he termed ‘some fortunate accidents of voice and manner’, into the greatest radio celebrity of the war (1940c: vii). Aspects of his radio career are now firmly established elements of the ‘People's War’ mythology: over the course of twenty-eight broadcasts in the ‘Postscripts’ series, aired between June 1940 and March 1941, Priestley captured, on average, a third of the adult listening public in Britain, with his audience peaking at 40.4 per cent in spring 1941 (Baxendale 2007: 14; LR/231). These short, familiar radio talks – part of his larger wartime output of over 200 Home Service and Overseas transmissions – were designed to offer a commentary on the events of the war and the responses of British citizens. Priestley used the forum to extol the courage of average Britons in his decidedly non-metropolitan Yorkshire accent, all the while insisting that the conflict must yield a more equitable society after the war, a position which led to clashes with BBC officials and Conservative members of government. His place in the public imagination of the war, then as now, depends on his relation to other prominent broadcasters inside and outside Britain: if Winston Churchill presented himself as ‘the Voice of the Nation’, radio historian Siân Nicholas argues, then Priestley was ‘the Voice of the People’, at once wise, familiar, and sceptical of officialdom (1996: 60). This scepticism allowed Priestley to draw listeners away from illicit broadcasts emanating from the Continent; he offered listeners a hint of the more scandalous counter-narratives offered by pro-Nazi radio propagandists like Lord Haw-Haw, with none of the treason. Priestley excelled, in large part, because his winking at authority was still thoroughly patriotic. He could fill the gaps between stodgy government pronouncements and public opinion with wry optimism rather than defeatism or rancour.

It does Priestley a disservice, however, to posit him as nothing more than a folksy propagandist whose improbable stardom testifies to the eccentricities of wartime cultural appetites. He was at once more clearly in command of his position in the public eye than such narratives suggest, and the beneficiary of a larger cultural florescence whose roots and branches extend far beyond the narrow bracket of 1939–45.