Situating the Story: The Early Years of Evolution on the Wireless

Beginning with the first national radio broadcast on evolution in the UK in 1925, this chapter outlines how the biologist and science populariser, Julian Huxley, and early BBC science producers embedded early broadcasts with a progressive evolutionary narrative. Influenced by many external pressures—including nineteenth-century popular science, belief in radio’s power to educate and personal eugenicist ideology—the chapter shows how restrictions and censorship in other areas of broadcasting led Huxley to ally his progressive narrative of science with a distinctly secular humanist outlook. The chapter concludes as contestations over the autonomy and focus of science broadcasting increased in the late 1940s, arguing that Huxley’s approach and the progressive narratives it relied upon were able to bridge both didactic and science in society approaches to science broadcasting.