Radio 4’s plans for World War One programmes this summer

At the heart of our coverage on Radio 4 is Home Front, a hugely ambitious drama with more than 500 episodes, which will launch this summer. Distinctive factual programmes are also scheduled and we’ve designed our World War One programmes so that we’ll be telling compelling stories in real time across the four years that the war lasted.

I hope that with our programmes this summer we’ll be able to offer Radio 4 listeners something new and insightful about the period leading up to the war and how this felt from the perspective of the home front.

In Month of Madness, Professor Christopher Clark explains the reasons for the onset of hostilities from the perspective of the key centres of action and decision making - Sarajevo, St Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and London. The five 15-minute episodes will run Monday to Friday at 9.45am, starting on Monday 23 June.



From Friday 27 June, we’ll hear Professor Margaret MacMillan present a series of short programmes chronicling the road to war called 1914: Day by Day. The 42 episodes, each around four minutes long and broadcast daily just before 5pm, will take us from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand through to the first week of the conflict.

We’re working together with 14-18 NOW and The Cartoon Museum on a project in which twelve cartoonists and graphic artists will respond as if in real time to the events that brought the world to war. Each week, the reaction of two cartoonists to the deepening crisis will be published on the Radio 4 website and distributed via social media.



Specially commissioned original drama is planned as the spine of the Radio 4 offer over four years, with Home Front starting on Monday 4 August 2014. This is an exciting drama serial, unprecedented in scale with 500 episodes between now and 2018, each around 12 minutes long.



After careful consideration about the year ahead, we’ve decided to create a new slot in the schedule after the midday news on weekdays, hosting both Home Front and new factual content. This way we can offer something fresh to our listeners, adding to the already rich mix of programmes on Radio 4, and without limiting the range of dramas we broadcast and have already planned for the next year.



Home Front will be broadcast in clusters throughout the year, enabling us to create as realistic a picture as possible of day-to-day life away from the trenches. And for the weeks when Home Front isn’t on, we have plans for interesting new factual series that will be broadcast after the midday news, commissioned specifically for the new slot. This means that from August onwards, You & Yours will start at 12.15 and finish just before the weather bulletin ahead of 1pm.



In the coming days, we'll have an update from the Home Front production team which will be giving us a glimpse of their plans so far, blogging about characters that are being developed and some of the themes the drama serial will be exploring. Here's a piece that we published about Home Front from November of last year.





World War One on the BBC



World War One on TV and Radio

Find out more about some of the characters in Radio 4's landmark new drama series Home Front