Forster on the Air: TV and Radio Adaptations of the Works of E. M. Forster

The paper attempts to show how radio and TV adaptations kept E. M. Forster’s popularity as a writer alive in a period when he no longer wrote and published fiction. Half a century of the continuous presence of these audio visual adaptations on the air paved the way for the Academy Awards winning movies in the 1980s and 1990s, and the consequent rediscovery of Forster’s fiction, which also resulted, in turn, in further adaptations, such as the most recent Marcy Kahan’s two-part BBC radio dramatisation of A Room With A View in May 2023. The discussion covers the period from Forster’s first broadcasted short story in 1927 to the premiere of David Lean’s A Passage to India in 19841. It follows Forster’s collaboration with the most eminent radio producers and various media outlets. It charts as well the gradual change of the writer’s attitude from the initial mistrust in the new medium to the extensive collaboration with the adapters. One of the particular points made in the paper is the multimedial character of these adaptations as they were typically re-adapted to various formats – the same text could be used for stage performance, radio play, and TV film as was the case of Santa Rama Rau stage adaptation of A Passage to India (1960). The paper is based on the limited available materials (sadly, most of the early TV films and radio recordings are apparently either lost or hidden in the archives of the BBC), criticism, as well as Forster’s own comments on the cinema and adaptations.