Saturday Night Theatre

Saturday Night Theatre was noted as the major drama of the week on BBC Radio 4 from 1943 until September 1990 when the ninety minute regular slot was taken over by The Forsyte Chronicles, a serial of twenty-three hour-long episodes. When this was completed in March 1991, further serials were produced.^[2] The ninety minute regular slot for plays was finally scrapped in June 1996. Audiences had reached a peak of 6.75 million in 1955, but by the end the average audience levels had fallen to between 50,000 and 100,000, although with another 500,000 listening to the Monday afternoon repeat.^[3] 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.^[4]

Since 1998, the main weekly play on the station has been The Saturday Play, a daytime programme that runs for sixty to ninety minutes. There have since been campaigns to bring back Saturday Night Theatre,^[5] 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),^[6] any return looks unlikely.

Many plays, mainly from the 1940s (when they were usually broadcast live) all the way through to the early 1970s, are considered to be lost or destroyed. The earliest surviving audio is The Corn Is Green, by Emlyn Williams, adapted for radio by T. Rowland Hughes, which was broadcast on 27 January 1945, though re-discovered archive copies are still being found.^[7]