As we started working on the brand new BBC Genome blog, it seemed appropriate to do the equivalent of googling ourselves: what do you get if you search for "blog" on BBC Genome? When were blogs first mentioned in radio and TV listings?
What we found is that the first-ever mention of the word is in a 1947 radio comedy on the BBC Home Service called The Blog on the Escutcheon
No, it wasn’t a typo but a play on words of the expression "a blot on one's escutcheon" - which means "a stain on one's honour."
In the play, written by Russell Davies, an American asking for an aristocrat's daughter's hand in marriage, rattles the family skeletons by mentioning an ancestor called "Laetitia Blog", who is described as "a most respectable girl of good minor yeoman stock, who did her best to atone for her presumption."
The next mention of the term "blog" skips a decade to 1960 and appears in a talk on Woman’s Hour in which Cynthia Muir finds a solution to the recurring problem of losing things at home:
"Ours cannot be the only household in which things disappear mysteriously. That pair of scissors which we were using only yesterday and which was certainly put back in its proper place; the bedroom slipper which should be – but unaccountably is not – with its fellow; these are the sort of things which must occasionally go a’missing in most homes. The usual cry at such times is either: 'Someone has had…!' or 'Who’s taken…?' while the children accuse each other, which leads to indignant recrimination.
"Well, in our case at any rate, I can offer a solution to this problem. We have a Being – unseen, so far, by anyone – who is known as Blog and it is he who is responsible for any loss or disappearance."
Script from Woman's Hour, May 9, 1960: "Well, in our case at any rate, I can offer a solution to this problem. We have a Being – unseen, so far, by anyone – who is known as Blog and it is he who is responsible for any loss or disappearance."
The first mention of an actual weblog or blog, as we now know it, comes courtesy of BBC Radio 4's Analysis, which mentions the internet being a "key political battlefield" in the 2004 US Elections "with thousands of people debating the issues on their own web pages, or 'blogs'".
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that blogs or weblogs were mentioned by the BBC for the first time as late as 2005. Listings don’t describe everything that is ever said in programmes, but they do offer a clue to when some trends and new words start to be used.
And since we want this blog to be a space for sharing oddities, enthusiasms and searches do tell us if you have found any particular terms and when they were first used in listings...
