Pure Radio – Featuring Nesta Pain

This post was originally going to be called Flies and Greenflies but I thought that might lead you to think I was writing about an edition of Gardeners’ Question Time rather than a radio feature from a series that looked at the world of insects and other creepy-crawlies. You’ll find out why later. The creator of the programme was the writer and producer Nesta Pain.

Nesta Pain was on the staff of the BBC from 1942 until 1963 but continued to work for the Corporation on a freelance basis until the 1980s. She is principally remembered for her work on ‘Features’ and her radio adaptations of novels and plays. Despite having no formal scientific training she would become a leading writer and producer of science-based programmes, so much so that the BBC Handbook for 1950 picks her out for her ‘continued indefatigably to interpret the mysteries of science to the lay listener’.

The Features Department has started life in 1928 as a small Programme Research Section attached to the Drama Department. It was especially concerned with new dramatic techniques and the new possibilities offered by the mixing and controlling unit, later known as the Dramatic Control Panel.

The eventual head of Features, Laurence Gilliam, attempted a definition and described it as ‘a group of writers and producers...exploring the possibilities of the radio medium itself. Because what they produced fitted no known formula, and for that reason stood out from the run of programmes stemming from existing forms, they were grouped under the generic title of features programmes.’

A feature programme, Gilliam explained, ‘should be an expression of one mind, whatever technique it uses’ and that it is ‘pure radio, a new instrument for the creative writer and producer.’ The features programmes were researched and scripted, though they might include unscripted interviews and reality recorded on location. They usually involved actors, music and sound effects. It was into this environment that Nesta Pain started to flourish following her appointment to the team as a producer and writer in June 1943. In particular she was championed by the Assistant Controller of Programmes, Lindsay Wellington, who was keen to see more scientific programmes being commissioned. 

The 1950 book on BBC Features offered this glowing introduction to her work so far: 

Nesta Pain ... has steadily won an increasing public for her programmes on scientific subject, among them So This is Man, The Silent Areas, the series War Against Disease, and the Light Programme science magazine Searchlight. Educated at Liverpool University, where she read classics, and at Oxford, Nesta Pain claims no scientific training. This is probably one secret of her success with leading scientists in many fields, who have been generous with their co-operation with one so expert in her own field of exposition. 

Nesta Pain was born Florence Nesta Kathleen Taylor in Liverpool in 1905, the daughter of a ship-owner. From the age of ten she attended a boarding school, West Heath at Ham Common in Richmond upon Thames, and in the Sixth Form she discovered she had a passion for classics but was discouraged from attempting a scholarship at Oxford because she had started to learn Latin and Greek too late. Instead she went to Liverpool University to read classics. “In my first year I got engaged and married. In my second I produced my daughter Angela, and in my third I got a First.” A few years later she did eventually get to Oxford to read comparative philology. She began to write magazine articles, made a start at writing a novel and did a correspondence course in journalism. An involvement with the Liverpool Playhouse gave her the impetus to write a play, The Jews of York, which was performed at London’s Duchess Theatre in 1939. Her next effort was a farce that was produced by a repertory company in 1941. It was her plays that brought her to the attention of the BBC by way of the husband of an old school friend, Scottish Regional Programme Director Andrew Stewart (at the time seconded to the Ministry of Information). By 1942 she had separated from her architect and surveyor husband, Coard Henry Pain, was living down in London with her 15-year old daughter and in April that year she joined the BBC, initially on a temporary contract working for the Overseas Service at Bush House.    

A picture of domesticity whisking up another production.
Reynolds Newspaper 2 August 1959  

One of her first notable early features was on sleeping sickness for the series War Against Disease (Home Service, 26 February 1944). Nesta was doing some research at the Colonial Office which led her to interview a leading authority at the School of Tropical medicine. ‘I got it all up in three days and began to talk to him hopefully. He said:”Would you like to see a trypanosome – that’s the organism which causes sleeping sickness?” He pricked the tail of an infected mouse, slipped a drop of blood on to a slide. There was this astonishing sight, the corpuscles being pushed by hundreds of dragon-like monsters. That, for the first time, made me really interested in science.’   

Tenacious and thorough in her research, on at least one occasion a broadcast irked officialdom, as was the case with Focus on Milk (Light Programme, 25 February 1947). Stephen Potter, another writer/producer in Features, made this diary entry:

Laurence very excited about what really is an extraordinary affair about today’s Milk feature. Nesta Pain was absolutely third degreed by the Milk Marketing  Board and Sir Donald van de Peer, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, tried to get Haley [the Director-General Sir William Haley] to stop the broadcast. In other words, vested interests (farmers), represented in both Board and Ministry, attempt to stop this broadcast, approved by doctors and by Ministry of Health. 2000 children die yearly from non-pasteurisation of milk.     

Nesta fostered working relationships with a number of scientists to help inform her programmes. This included Professor Alexander Fleming who helped with War Against Microbes (Home Service 1944) - he also wrote an introductory piece for the Radio Times – and Louis Pasteur (Home Service 1945). She favoured dramatic reconstructions with a cast of actors rather than interviews and location recordings. One of her staff reviews by Laurence Gilliam observed that ‘Mrs. Pain is devoted to the dramatized style of documentary and allergic to actuality.’ For instance in The Atom Explodes (Home Service 1945 and retained by Sound Archives) included some familiar names in the cast: Laidman Browne, Valentine Dyall, Norman Shelley and Carleton Hobbs.

Her first feature on the world of insects was in 1951 (Home Service 23 October 1951) on the subject of ants - ‘their agricultural and pastoral pursuits, their mating flights, their slave raids, and their life in the nest together.’  From the off she engaged Antony Hopkins to compose the music. Hopkins would later became well-known for his long-running series (1954-1992) Talking About Music.  She had become interested in insects after reading Social Life of the Insect World by French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. Of Fabre she said: “No naturalist has ever carried out such detailed and imaginative experiments as Fabre did, or observed the lives and habits of insects with such devoted care, or recorded them with such charm.“

Further insect-related programmes followed at intervals between 1952 and 1958 covering Beetles, Spiders, Scorpions, Honey Bees, White Ants, Grasshoppers and so on. She authored a couple of related books on the subject: Lesser Worlds in 1953 and Grassblade Jungle in 1957.

In 1962, and again in 1963, the insect series was revived on the Home Service with either new programmes, new productions of the originals or repeats from the 1950s broadcasts. Introducing them for the Radio Times (23 August 1962) Nesta Pain attempted to explain what they were all about, though when she says the first one was on the subject of spiders this seems to contradict the listings which show it was ants (see above):

The insect series began with a single programme on spiders (which are not, of course, insects). It was not intended to have a successor, but Antony Hopkins, who composed the music, and I became so attached to the type of programme that we kept on doing ‘just one more’ until in the end we had broadcast a dozen. It is difficult to say what these programmes are. They are certainly not straight natural history, and they are not intended to inform. They are not really allegorical and they are not, strictly speaking, satire. Nor are they altogether comedy. Perhaps they are ’Horror Comics’. Certainly they were once described in the Press as ‘suavely shocking,’ and an eminent critic, who was to discuss one of them on air, exclaimed to his wife, ‘I will not listen to this – no, not for money!’ But he did.

Five of them are to be broadcast in this present series – Grasshoppers, Beetles, The Praying Mantis, White Ants and Spiders. Michael Hordern will once again be the narrator. David King-Wood is flying back from America especially to play his old parts. Lionel Harris will once more be heard as Dr Muffet, Heron Cavic as the more sinister entomologist who snips off wings in the interests of science, and Duncan Carse as the more kindly observer who sees poetry in insect life.

Antony Hopkins’s music was incomparable – witty, gay, heartrending, or macabre as the occasion required. I am looking forward to hearing it again.

The BBC Transcription Service issued ten programmes on five discs for overseas sale under the title Grass Blade Jungle. The editions were: White Ants, The Praying Mantis, Beetles, Grasshoppers, Spiders, Flies and Greenflies, The Solitary Wasp, Scorpions, Cicadas and Ants and Wasps. It was one of these Transcription Service versions, on Flies and Greenflies, that you can now hear.  

The recording was made in about 1980 from a Radio New Zealand broadcast by Duncan Lockhart who kindly sent me a copy earlier this year. The programme was retained in the BBC Sound Archives but to my knowledge it hasn’t been repeated on BBC radio since its first broadcast on the Home Service on Friday 27 September 1963.  

The opening announcement tells to what we can hear about: ‘The courtship of gnats and their need for blood. The anthrax fly and the sinister requirements of its young. The mild-mannered greenfly and its numerous persecutors’. 

The other significant part of Nesta’s output was producing, and in some cases adapting novels, for radio, some of which went on to be filmed. These included: Richard Gordon’s Doctor at Sea (Home Service 1953) with David King-Wood as the Doctor (filmed in 1955 with Dirk Bogarde in the main role), the tales of a newly qualified barrister in Henry Cecil’s Brothers in Law (Home Service 1955) with Donald Sinden as Roger Thursby (filmed by the Boulting Brothers in 1957 with Ian Carmichael as Thursby) and Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (Third Programme 1961) with Barry Foster (a Tony Richardson directed film with Tom Courtenay in 1962).

Doctor at Sea first broadcast on the Home Service 27 August 1953.
Cast included David Kossoff, Norman Shelley and John Laurie 

But her most significant partnership, lasting for a decade, was with John Mortimer. It was in about 1955 that Nesta first approached him to write a play for her though he ‘put it off for a considerable time’, but eventually a lunch and persistent phone calls spurred him on to write The Dock Brief (Third Programme 1957), a two-hander with Michael Hordern as the inept defence barrister and David Kossoff  as the wily criminal. The production won the Drama Prix Italia that year, was adapted for BBC television with the same cast later that year, was staged in London the following year (with Maurice Denham replacing Kossoff) and was made into a 1962 MGM film in 1962 starring Peter Sellers and Richard Attenborough. The Dock Brief also partly provided the inspiration for Rumpole of the Bailey, indeed Mortimer was initially keen for Hordern to be cast as Rumpole, the role eventually going to Leo McKern. Hordern would get the starring role in Paradise Postponed (ITV 1986).

John Mortimer described Nesta Pain as "a remarkable woman who talked precisely but with a slight stammer and seemed like an enlightened headmistress, a marked contrast to the expansive grey-haired men in knitted ties and the hard-drinking poets who stood around her in the bar of the George.” [Pub on Great Portland Street frequented by BBC staff]

Further collaborations with Mortimer were I Spy (Third Programme 1957), A Voyage Around My Father (Third Programme 1963 plus the tv adaptation for BBC2 1969), Education of an Englishman (Third Programme 1964), Personality Split (Third Programme 1964), The Rare Device (Home Service 1965), What Shall We Tell Caroline? (Third Programme 1966) and Hampton Court (Home Service 1967).   

In 1964 the Features Department was closed, squeezed out by the growing importance of current affairs, at the time attached to Talks. By November that year the producers had been reallocated with Nesta Pain transferred to Drama. Her productions included portraits of various royal and historical figures (William I, Mary Tudor, Cromwell, Nelson, Wellington, Palmerston etc.), the serials Stay of Execution (Light Programme 1965) with another one of her favoured actors, Barry Foster,  Host Planet Earth (Light Programme 1967) and Games Without Rules (Radio 2 1968). Another actor often employed by Pain was Joan Miller, BBC tv’s switchboard operator on the pre-war programme Picture Page. Amongst Miller’s credits were Richard’s Gordon’s Women in Medicine (Home Service 1954), Philip Levine’s story of a store detective Light Fingers (Home Service 1956), an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains (Third Programme 1962) and Angus Wilson’s Crazy Crowd (Radio 3 1967).

In 1970 Nesta directed the mammoth 20-part dramatisation of War and Peace. In 1973 she was the producer of the story of Queen Victoria starring Peggy Ashcroft in the 13-part Dear and Honoured Lady. 

Her final radio credits included Letters from a Governess (Radio 4 1980) and Smallbone Deceased based on Michael Gilbert’s novel. This was originally broadcast on Radio 4 in 1971 with Nesta producing and then reworked in 1987 from her adaptation with Glyn Dearman directing.

In her later years Nesta had problems with her sight but surgery did help restore it. She continued writing for the press, wrote tapes for the Science Museum and completed her (unpublished) autobiography On First Sighting. She died in London in 1995.

Further reading:

The book BBC Features (1950, Evans Bothers Ltd) edited by Laurence Gilliam is available to borrow on the Internet Archive. You’ll also find Nesta Pain’s books Grassblade Jungle, The King and Becket, Science and Slimming and Louis Pasteur.

I’ve concentrated on Nesta Pain’s radio work but she was also involved in television production. For more on this search for Translating Radio Productions into Television Programmes: The Post-War Career of BBC Writer/Producer Nesta Pain by Kate Terkanian in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (October 2024)  

Further listening:

I reckon that under 10% of Nesta Pain’s work has been retained in the BBC Sound Archives; many of the early programmes would’ve been broadcast live. Sadly few have been repeated but the major exceptions are, of course, The Dock Brief, most recently repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra in 2017, Host Planet Earth, last heard in 2022 (a copy is on YouTube), and There Will Come Soft Rains, last repeated in 2025 (a copy is on Internet Archive). The drama Smallbone Deceased is on YouTube and Internet Archive, as is the Transcription Service issue of A Tune on the Old Tax Fiddle (Home Service 1960) with Michael Hordern and John Slater. Also on Internet Archive is another Michael Gilbert collaboration, The Last Chapter (Radio 4 1970) and the 1977 revised repeat of Beetles.