The extraordinary Jamaican poet, playwright, editor and producer became a radio sensation in the 1940s, but her name has been largely lost to history – an injustice this deft documentary is here to remedy
In her time, Una Marson was famous, and she was at the centre of everything. There she is not just in a photograph with her BBC colleagues George Orwell and TS Eliot, but right at the centre of it, commanding the room. There she is next to Haile Selassie when he visited England. She pioneered two hugely successful radio shows and broadcast Caribbean voices to Caribbean people on the BBC for the first time. Yet since her death in 1965, her name and memories of her extraordinary achievements have been largely lost. Una Marson: Our Lost Caribbean Voice (BBC Two) aims to right this unjust disappearance from history.
Marson’s life contained a series of spectacular firsts. She was the first Black producer and broadcaster at the BBC. She was the first Black writer to stage a play in the West End. This intuitive documentary pieces together the fragments of her life that remain, using scant archive material – much of her work has been lost – as well as her own writing, with occasional dramatisations, in which she is played by Seroca Davis.
