The run
- Network
- BBC
- Years active
- 1938–1947
- Surviving broadcasts
- 3
- Genre
- comedy
Band Waggon (1938–1940) was the BBC's first true comedy series built around continuing characters, with Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch sharing a fictional flat above Broadcasting House. Only a handful of transfers survive, including the 30 September 1939 edition broadcast weeks after the declaration of war, and the 1947 Jubilee revival. Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
2 dated broadcasts across 89 years on the air, with 88 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. The Long Silence · 21 Jul 2026
- 2. A Room Above the Street · 28 Jul 2026
- 3. Signal at Midnight · 4 Aug 2026
Signal at Midnight
4 Aug 2026 · 33 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
A Room Above the Street
28 Jul 2026 · 48 min
The one everybody argues about.
The Long Silence
21 Jul 2026 · 1h 3m
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
Also on BBC
BBC in 1938–1947
Other series the network carried while Band Waggon was on the air.
Same seasons
comedy on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
Friends in front of a microphone
Jack Benny and Fibber McGee sold intimacy: recurring characters, in-jokes, a house style. The modern hang-out show is the same trick without the script.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Band Waggon
Modern series carrying this form forward.
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