Listen with Mother

Listen with Mother was a BBC radio programme for children which ran between 1950 and 1982. It was originally produced by Freda Lingstrom and was presented over the years by Daphne Oxenford, Julia Lang, Eileen Browne, Dorothy Smith and others.

It was first broadcast on the Light Programme in a fifteen-minute slot every weekday afternoon at 1:45, just before Woman's Hour. Consisting of stories, songs and nursery rhymes (often sung by Eileen Browne and George Dixon) for children under five (and their mothers), at its peak it had an audience of over a million listeners. Like Woman's Hour, it was subsequently transferred to the BBC Home Service (later renamed BBC Radio 4).

Listen with Mother's final week's programmes (widely reported in the press) featured Wriggly Worm stories, presented by Nerys Hughes and Tony Aitken and directed by David Bell. These stories were broadcast on the Listen with Mother programmes throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.

Listening Corner, which replaced Listen with Mother, began with repeats of the Wriggly Worm stories. Collections of Listen with Mother stories have been published by Hutchinsons/Random House. Two collections of Wriggly Worm stories ('Wonderful Wriggly Worm' and 'Wonderful Wriggly Worm Rides Again'), by Eugenie Summerfield, have been published by Book Guild.

The Berceuse from Faurés Dolly Suite

The theme music, which became synonymous with the programme, was the Berceuse from Gabriel Fauré's Dolly Suite for piano duet, Op. 56. It was recorded for the programme by Eileen Browne and Roger Fiske, though Julia Lang in an Anglia Television interview in the 1990s said that during her tenure, when she finished reading the story she had to get up (noiselessly), rush across to the piano in the studio and play the Berceuse live.

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