The Lost BBC: Mrs Dale’s Diary

March 13, 2026

THIS programme is celebrated as the first significant radio serial drama. However, the BBC keeps as much information as possible under wraps, and I can’t find any details about its origins. Apparently it arrived fully formed on January 5, 1948, on the Light Programme.

It was broadcast at 4.15 each weekday afternoon, with a repeat at 11am next day. Each 15-minute episode began with Mrs Mary Dale, a GP’s wife, reading aloud an extract from her diary, segueing into scenes with dialogue. The storylines revolved around Mrs Dale and her husband Jim who lived in the fictional upmarket London suburb of Parkwood Hill. Mrs Dale was perpetually anxious about her husband, often saying ‘I’m rather worried about Jim’ or in extremis ‘I’m awfully worried about Jim’. Other characters included Mary Dale’s mother Mrs Rosemary Freeman (always addressed by Jim as ‘Mother-in-law’), the Dales’ adult offspring, Gwen and Bob, and Mary Dale’s sophisticated sister Sally (pronounced ‘Selly’) who lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

The original scriptwriter was Jonquil Antony (1911-1980). For someone credited with creating a national institution, there is a remarkable dearth of biographical detail. All I can find out is that she was married to actor John Wyse, that her real first names were Alice Marjorie, and that she later co-created Sixpenny Corner, the first daily TV soap opera, broadcast by ITV from September 1955 until June 1956. Her collaborators on Mrs Dale’s Diary included Ted Willis (under a pseudonym) who later created Dixon of Dock Green, and Hazel Adair who went on to co-create Crossroads.

The theme music was composed and played by harpist Marie Goossens, who came from a renowned musical family. Her father was the French-born conductor and violinist Eugène Goossens, and her younger sister Sidonie Goossens was also a harpist. Her brothers were Eugene (a composer), Adolphe, a horn player who was killed in the First World War at the age of 20, and Léon (an oboist).

Here it is with the announcer’s introduction.

Needless to say the BBC’s sample programme, from January 1958, is ‘not currently available’ (though a cast picture is shown) but it is on YouTube.

Every internet site I have looked at reports that the Queen Mother said the serial was her ‘only way of knowing what goes on in a middle-class family’, so I thought I had better mention it, but I doubt if the old girl said any such thing.

With its cut-glass accents and relentless middle-classery, Mrs Dale’s Diary soon became a target of parody. The BBC’s Round the Horne referred to ‘Mrs Dire’s Dreary’, Mrs Dire being played by Kenneth Williams. The programme was mentioned several times in The Goon Show, notably in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Five’, broadcast in January 1955:

[Bluebottle is reading a book]

Seagoon: I want to read it. What’s it called?

Bluebottle: It’s called Mrs Dale’s Real Diary.

Seagoon: Mrs Dale’s . . ? Heavens – would the BBC stop at nothing? So this was how they kept the masses from thinking.

Mrs Dale’s Diary was the inspiration for the 1960s Private Eye spoof Mrs Wilson’s Diary, which mocked Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s provincial background (he came from Huddersfield) by suggesting he enjoyed Spam with brown sauce and Wincarnis tonic wine.

The greatest Mrs Dale’s Diary drama took place outside the studio. From the first episode Mrs Dale was played by Ellis Powell, one of the drama team who were sent out of London during the war. She was based in Evesham, Worcestershire, where she took part in in many radio plays. She was married to fellow BBC actor Ralph Truman, who had as many as 5,000 broadcasts to his name, and they had one son.

In 1962 the BBC, no doubt embarrassed at the beginning of the Swinging Sixties by the unfashionably middle-class aura of Mrs Dale’s Diary, decided to update it. Dr Dale got a job at a group practice in a new town called Exton and the family moved there. The programme was renamed The Dales and the diary-reading preface to each episode was dropped; there was a new theme tune composed by Ron Grainer.

Evidently the changes were not sweeping enough for the BBC. Michael Thornton (biographer of actress Jessie Matthews, who we will come to shortly) wrote: ‘On 19th February, 1963, a plump and embittered fifty-six-year-old character actress called Ellis Powell walked out of Broadcasting House for the last time. She was not a star. In fact she had earned less than £30 a week. But her voice was as well-known in Britain as that of Queen Elizabeth II, for it was heard twice a day by seven million devoted listeners.

‘Miss Powell was Britain’s most sacrosanct fictional paragon, Mrs Dale, in the radio serial The Dales. And now, after fifteen years in the role she had created, the BBC had summarily fired her – partly because of her drinking habits, and partly because it was felt that the role, and also the entire programme, was in need of a facelift.

‘Three months later, at the age of fifty-seven, she died in the National Temperance Hospital. The official cause of death was a cerebral haemorrhage, but her friends believed that she never recovered from the shock and distress of her summary dismissal by the BBC.

‘In the last weeks of her life she worked as a demonstrator at the Ideal Home Exhibition and as a cleaner in an hotel. She left only £15 6s, having carried around in her handbag for weeks a cheque for £600 [£11,000 now] – her pay-off from the BBC. She had never put it into her bank because she feared the money would be swallowed up by her overdraft.’

(The comment about Ellis Powell’s drinking is disputed in two interesting blogs which give a lot more detail about the actress and her background, which you can see here and here.)

At the same time the actor who had played Dr Dale from day one, Douglas Burbidge, was dispensed with and replaced by Charles Simon.

There are suggestions that the BBC’s heartless treatment of Ellis Powell inspired Frank Marcus’s 1964 play The Killing of Sister George, later adapted into a film.

Powell was replaced by Jessie Matthews, at 56 well past her days as a 30s film star and in many ways the very antithesis of the staid Mrs Dale.

She was born in Soho in 1907, the seventh of 16 children of whom 11 survived. Her father was a costermonger, selling fruit and veg from a handcart in the street. How they afforded it I don’t know but Jessie had dancing and elocution lessons and by the age of 12 she was appearing on stage and soon after in silent films.

At 16 she went to New York to be an understudy for Gertrude Lawrence on Broadway. During the transatlantic voyage she was raped by an Argentinian friend of the Prince of Wales called Jorge Ferrara and became pregnant. On her return to London she had an illegal abortion.

On 17 February 1926, aged 18, Matthews married the first of her three husbands, the 19-year-old actor Henry Lytton Junior. It crumbled almost at once. Lytton was sleeping with chorus girls and was envious of Matthews’s growing success.

In 1927, starring in the West End revue One Dam Thing After Another, she introduced Rodgers and Hart’s My Heart Stood Still.

(The pianist on this recording is Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, the Grenada-born singer and musician who was one of the biggest cabaret stars in the world during the 1920s and 1930s. Despite his popularity he was frequently obliged to enter premises where he was performing via the servants’ entrance.)

The same year Matthews was booked to perform in a revue called This Year of Grace, written by the 29-year-old Noel Coward (it resurrected his career). Her co-star was the bespectacled and short comic actor Sonnie Hale, who despite his lack of conventional good looks was married to the glamorous actress Evelyn Laye. This is their wedding day.

Early in 1928 Laye travelled to Manchester where This Year of Grace was previewing. When she arrived at the theatre she caught her husband and Matthews holding hands. Laye, pretending to joke, asked whether they were in love with each other. They nervously laughed and assured her that the idea was absurd.

A few weeks later Laye found passionate love letters in an ill-educated scrawl from Jessie to Sonnie. Confronted, Hale admitted the truth and Laye moved out of their home.

In 1930 Jessie Matthews and Lytton were divorced. Five weeks later in the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, Evelyn Laye’s divorce petition, naming Matthews as ‘the other woman’, came before Sir Maurice Hill, noted for his hatred of divorce.

Against all advice Matthews attended the hearing. She soon realised her mistake when her letters to Sonnie were read out:

‘My Darling, I want you and need you badly, all of you, and for a very long time. I am lying here, waiting for you to possess me. The dear little boobs, which you love so much, are waiting for you also.’

During the reading of one particularly embarrassing letter Matthews fainted.

Her humiliation was complete when the judge pronounced: ‘It is quite clear that the husband admits himself to be a cad, and nobody will quarrel with that, and the woman Matthews writes letters which show her to be a person of an odious mind.’

Matthews and Hale married in January 1931 and a son was born in December; he lived only a few hours. The marriage was punctuated by Matthews’s affairs, including with Salvador Dali, Tyrone Power and Danny Kaye, and allegedly with Prince George, Duke of Kent. She also had several nervous breakdowns.

Here she is in the 1934 film Evergreen (is it just me or are the chorus girls’ costumes faintly obscene?)

She developed a following in the US, where she was dubbed ‘The Dancing Divinity’, and her success continued until the outbreak of war. The British Film Institute says this scene with Jack Whiting from Sailing Along (directed by Sonnie Hale, 1938), ‘indelibly incarnates 1930s style’.

During the war Matthews appeared on Broadway and entertained troops as a member of ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association, also called Every Night Something Awful). She and Hale were divorced in 1944, and in 1945 she married Lieutenant Brian Lewis, who was 13 years her junior. In December that year, she miscarried a child. Matthews and Lewis separated in 1956, and were subsequently divorced. She died in 1981 aged 74.

Matthews’s career had stalled after the war so it was a major boost when she was cast as Mrs Dale in 1963. However the BBC’s attempt at a revamp didn’t do the trick. The audience was down to 3.7million by 1969. Even though that still seems a good number, quite obviously the serial was not at all in keeping with the progressive attitudes infecting the Corporation, and the BBC killed it off on April 25, 1969, after 21 years and about 5,431 episodes (accounts vary), blaming Jessie Matthews’s ill-health.

Mrs Dale’s last words were: ‘There’s one thing that won’t change – I shall always worry about Jim . . .’ This is a recording of the final scene.

In 2012 Penelope Keith narrated a Radio 4 programme about Mrs Dale’s Diary called ‘I’m Rather Worried about Jim’. Of course it is not available on the BBC website but you can hear it on YouTube.

The BBC produced a profile of Jessie Matthews, Catch a Fallen Star, after her death in 1981. It is not even listed as unavailable to view on the corporation website, but here it is on YouTube.