Waggoners' Walk - First Edition

I remember arriving home from school to find Mum perched on her favourite stool reading My Weekly, eating a Kit Kat and shusshing me as she caught up on the latest happenings on Waggoners' Walk. I can hum the theme tune still. Hum hum, hmm hum hum, hum hummmm, twidly plonk. Look.

A black and white Val Singleton in the front room was of more interest to a spotty me.

The Radio 2 daily serial began in April 1969. It followed a Saturday Night Theatre play called 'The Ropewalk' and went  on to replace 'The Dales'. The drama was set in a Victorian lodging house on a North London cul-de-sac, located between Hampstead Village and Belsize Park. The flexible location afforded ample scope for plots on all the familiar social topics from homosexuality to illegitimacy. 

It attracted audiences of around 4m.

As ever, when it was threatened with 'the axe' owing, no doubt, to some 'Delivering Drama Last' strategy, the Nation (or, at least, the press) were in uproar. It ended in 1980.