Writing is always besieged by other media. Sometimes it is strengthened by the attention, and sometimes it isn’t. Radio, film and television replaced the little magazines and journals publishing fiction that preceded them, but broadcasting also rewarded writers who were able to inform, educate and entertain their swelling and highly heterogenous audiences.

More recently the proliferation of crossplatform digital media has seen off newsprint and greatly reduced bookreading. The publishing landscape and the reading public have changed, fundamentally, and artificial intelligence will take both in new directions. The implications for writing, literary fiction and the short story are uncertain, not insignificant, and not all benign. Ask any member of the Writers Guild of America, which is troubled by streaming and ChatGPT and currently on strike.

Check back in half a century. The present may be clearer then.

J. B. Priestley, already a bestselling author, rose to the challenge of radio in the 1930s. A popular storyteller, he was an avuncular voice for democracy, and a champion of communities against a failing establishment. Let The People Sing and Out of the People, those two titles, that pair of texts, were Priestley at his best. Neither high culture nor low but both, the broadbrow, was his stance. During the war his Postscript talks on the wireless, immediately after the news, held the ears of the nation, and rivalled Churchill’s reach. For many writers, including Orwell, Priestley was the elder to emulate or topple, the star to follow or ignore, the success beyond their reach.

For Jolly Jack, as he was fondly known, postwar television was a tougher nut to crack. ‘Uncle Phil on TV’ is one of the earliest appearances of television in fiction. It comes from a moment long before every home had a set. The initial strangeness of the technology, of the flickering flow of entertainment, of unfamiliar programme formats, of what eventually became commonplace pervades the text: “the people were small and not always easy to see and their voices were loud enough for giants, which made it a bit confusing”.

In this spectre-on-the-screen revenge yarn, television becomes a demonic presence in the living room. A family inherits a sum of money after the death of a relative, Uncle Phil, who they didn’t much like. Contributory negligence hastened his end. The legacy is used to purchase a television set. And the set wouldn’t let them forget how they got it.

First published in Lilliput, April 1953, collected in The Other Place, William Heinemann, 1953