Mrs Dale's Diary

Mrs Dale's Diary was the first significant BBC radio serial drama. It was first broadcast on 5 January 1948 on the BBC Light Programme, which became Radio 2 in 1967; it ran until 25 April 1969. A new episode was broadcast each weekday afternoon, with a repeat the following morning.

The main scriptwriter for many years was Jonquil Antony, and her first collaborator (under a pseudonym) was Ted Willis, later to originate equally well-known characters for Dixon of Dock Green.

The lead character, Mrs Dale, was played by Ellis Powell until she was sacked in controversial circumstances in 1963 and replaced by Jessie Matthews. In 1975 Matthews' biographer, Michael Thornton, wrote:

On 19 February 1963, a plump and embittered fifty-six-year-old character actress called Ellis Powell walked out of Broadcasting House for the last time. She was not a star. In fact she had earned less than £30 a week. But her voice was as well known in Britain as that of Queen Elizabeth II, for it was heard twice a day by seven million devoted listeners. Miss Powell was Britain's most sacrosanct fictional paragon, Mrs. Dale, in the radio serial Mrs. Dale's Diary. And now, after fifteen years in the role she had created, the BBC had summarily fired her partly because of her drinking habits, and partly because it was felt that the role, and also the entire programme, was in need of a facelift. Three months later, at the age of fifty-seven, she died. Her friends believed she never recovered from the shock and distress of her summary dismissal by the BBC. In the last weeks of her life she worked as a demonstrator at the Ideal Home Exhibition and as a cleaner in an hotel."

An innovative characteristic of the programme was that a brief introductory narrative in each episode was spoken by Mrs Dale as if she were writing her diary.

The serial centred on Mrs Mary Dale, a doctor's wife, husband Jim, and the comings and goings of a middle-class society. The Dales lived at Virginia Lodge in the fictional London Metro-land-style suburb of Parkwood Hill. They had moved there from the real area of Kenton, which straddles the border between the London boroughs of Brent and Harrow. Later in the series, to modernise the programme and its setting, the producers relocated the family in the fictional new town of Exton New Town.

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