December 1941. London. The worst of the blitz just ended. A nation at war faced Christmas. The BBC’s charge? Uplift the spirits and strengthen the spines of Britain with a radio drama about Jesus. The whole nation will tune in. Needed: One writer who can tell history’s most powerful story to a people facing unprecedented evil.
Who did the BBC choose to write the play The Man Born to Be King?
A genius.
Was it C.S. Lewis? Nope. It was Dorothy Sayers. And you know how Sayers got her start as a wordsmith? If you guessed “advertising copywriter,” you nailed it in one. Give yourself a chocolate.
Sayers spent the years 1922-1931 writing ad copy. Her clients included a mustard company and the producers of Guinness beer. She is credited with coining the phrase, “It pays to advertise.”
Dorothy Sayers wasn’t just any old copy hack, and I don’t mean to give the impression that she was. She was one of the first women to attend Oxford University. Her scholarship of Dante is legendary. She was an acclaimed novelist and poet. Her works on theology, feminism, and creativity are cited regularly by writers today. But with all that talent, she spent nine years writing about such riveting topics as mustard and beer. In fact, her first novel was entitled Murder Must Advertise and is about the death of a copywriter in his office at an ad agency.
Some folks might argue that it was Sayers’ theological scholarship or skill as a novelist that earned her the privilege of writing The Man Born to Be King. She was a heavyweight theologian and novelist, for sure, but I believe Sayers alone could write the BBC’s most important religious and political work because she was an ad copywriter at heart. That means everything she wrote, she wrote with her audience in mind. She wrote with a creative eye on those people who would turn on their radios, shush their children and enter into a story world that lit their homes with hope in a time of deep darkness.
The radio drama, The Man Born to Be King, proved to be among the BBC’s most controversial productions ever. One religious group even claimed the fall of Singapore was proof of God’s disapproval of the program.
Why such a fuss?