At 7.25pm on 25 January 1954, the Third Programme aired 90 minutes of radio that would go down in history as one of broadcasting’s creative pinnacles, its opening words destined to be among the most famous lines in British poetry:
To begin at the beginning: it is spring,moonless night in the small town,starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisibledown to the sloeblack, slow, black,crow-black, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
Under Milk Wood went on to treat listeners to a bawdy journey through the night-time dreams and working days of Organ Morgan, Polly Garter, Captain Cat and a multitudinous cast of other characters in the small fictional Welsh village of Llareggub.
Its author was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who was also due to have been the drama’s…