Name: Father & Son - BBC Saturday Night Theatre - Alexander Baron
Uploaded: 2020-09-19T03:09:37+00:00
Duration: 1 h 24 min 37 s
Description: Alexander Baron was a British author and screenwriter. He is best known for his highly acclaimed novel about D-Day, From the City, from The Plough (1948), and his London novel The Lowlife (1963). Baro

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3 years ago

Alexander Baron was a British author and screenwriter. He is best known for his highly acclaimed novel about D-Day, From the City, from The Plough (1948), and his London novel The Lowlife (1963).

Baron's father was Barnet Bernstein, a Polish-Jewish immigrant to Britain who settled in the East End of London in 1908 and later worked as a master furrier. Baron was born in Maidenhead, where his mother Fanny (née Levinson) had been evacuated during Zeppelin raids. The family soon returned to London, and Baron was raised in the Hackney district of London. He attended Hackney Downs School.

Originally Broadcast 11/11/1967

Saturday Night Theatre was a long-running radio drama strand on BBC Radio 4. The strand showcased feature-length, middle-brow single plays on Saturday evenings for more than 50 years, having been launched in April 1943. The plays featured in the strand included stage plays, book adaptations and original dramatisations. For most of its history, programmes ran for 90 minutes and were largely entertainment-centred, such as thrillers, comedies and mysteries.

Saturday Night Theatre was noted as the major drama of the week on BBC Radio 4, until it was scrapped as a programme strand in 1996. Shorter plays continued to be broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday evenings from 1996 until the relaunch of the channel's schedule in April 1998 by James Boyle, when single dramas were removed from the Saturday evening schedule. Since 1998, the main weekly play on the station has been The Saturday Play, a daytime programme that runs for 60–90 minutes.

There have since been campaigns to bring back Saturday Night Theatre, but in the context of BBC budget cuts, that have included the 2010 axing of Radio 4's Friday Play (established in 1998, when Saturday Night Theatre was abolished), any return looks unlikely.

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