J. B. Priestley was not listening when Neville Chamberlain declared war against Germany over the wireless on the morning of 3 September 1939. Driving into London from the Isle of Wight to broadcast the first instalment of his new ‘novel for radio’, Let the People Sing, Priestley could not tune in to hear the Prime Minister announce the arrival of war in a voice tinged with personal disappointment: ‘You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed,’ Chamberlain intoned. ‘Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different I could have done and that would have been more successful’ (Chamberlain 1939). If Chamberlain's transmission marked the exhaustion of appeasement as a viable strategy for the British government, Priestley's broadcast later that day signalled a symbolic transfer of power enacted over the air. The first commission of its kind by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Let the People Sing is a light-hearted comedy centred on a small English town; its simultaneous print and radio publication would, it was hoped, offer listeners and readers a multimedia form of respite from the growing tensions in Europe. For all its levity, however, the plot of the novel bears a message, common to much of Priestley's previous work but newly resonant, about the rights of citizens to take control of their political and cultural lives: the residents of the Midlands town of Dunbury struggle to keep their market hall, bequeathed to the town by a local aristocrat, out of the competing clutches of that aristocrat's jealous descendants and the town's American-owned plastics factory. The residents want nothing more, or less, than to use the hall for their town band.

The producers’ decision to allow Let the People Sing to go ahead, despite widespread disruptions to broadcasting that day, was intended as a gesture that the conflict would not induce a total upheaval of cultural programming (Nicholas 1996: 26).