Gilliam transferred to the BBC drama department in 1933, where he worked on the development of special feature programmes which wove sound, words, and music together to create an aural picture. From 1933 until the end of his life he was responsible for the world-wide Christmas Day programmes that preceded the monarch's address. These programmes were the BBC's technically most complicated assignment, linking the Commonwealth outposts with Broadcasting House in London via elaborate world-wide link-ups. Another notable example of Gilliam's early technical ambition was ′Opping 'Oliday—a "sound picture" of hop picking in Kent—which he produced in 1934 using the newly established mobile recording van. Val Gielgud, head of drama, transferred responsibility for features to Gilliam in May 1936, though features really came into their own during the Second World War.[2]
In 1940 Gilliam married Marianne Helweg (1914–1976), a Dane whose father, Jacob Helweg, had immigrated to Britain in the 1920s to take up a lecturing position at the University of London. The couple met at the BBC, where Marianne had been a plays reader. She and Laurence had three sons and one daughter. They lived in Highgate, Middlesex, until the marriage was dissolved in 1952, when Marianne moved in with the Northern Irish poet Bertie (W. R.) Rodgers, who worked for Gilliam.
Gilliam saw the possibilities for the medium of radio to reflect the reality of war. In his major topical series The Shadow of the Swastika, which documented the rise of Nazism, Gilliam demonstrated the power of the factual documentary for propaganda purposes and offered the first challenging piece of work from the BBC since the outbreak of war. Gilliam had a natural sympathy for the journalistic approach to broadcasting, and his war work reflected these instincts. As one of the two editors (with Donald Boyd) of War Report, he helped to create a revolutionary technique on which all news reporting has since been based, taking the microphone to the fighting line to report back to the people at home nightly, in record time. In recognition of this outstanding war record, features became a separate department at the end of the war in 1945, with Laurence Gilliam as its head, and Gilliam himself was appointed OBE.[3]
Throughout the post-war period—the ‘golden age of radio’—Gilliam did more than anyone in the BBC to recruit and encourage poets and writers to contribute work for the BBC features department. He showed a gift for leadership which inspired devoted loyalty in a group of the most talented writers and producers in radio history, including Louis MacNeice, Douglas Cleverdon, Leonard Cottrell, Jennifer Wayne, Christopher Sykes, W. R. Rodgers, Francis Dillon, Nesta Pain, Wynford Vaughan Thomas, Alan Burgess, and D. G. Bridson.[4]
He maintained strongly that the feature was the one unique form that radio had achieved in its short history; and it was largely due to him that features came to stand for so much that was vital, contemporary, experimental, and above all ‘pure radio’. In his book BBC Features, edited by Gilliam, published by Evans Brothers in 1950, Gilliam described a Feature Programme as "in broadcasting, the term has come to signify a wide range of programme items, usually factual and documentary, presented by a variety of techniques, but mostly making use of edited actuality. The essential quality of the feature programme is that it should be the expression of one mind, whatever technique it uses".[5]
In the early 1960s Gilliam still maintained his faith in radio, but as the end of features department was being discussed, his health was deteriorating. Laurence Gilliam died of cancer of the kidneys on 15 November 1964 in St Andrew's Hospital, Dollis Hill, Middlesex, where he was convalescing after an operation.
