When Was Lilliput Gulliver First Adapted For Radio Broadcast?

If you love poking around old radio listings like I do, this question is oddly fun — but also a little slippery. There isn’t a single universally agreed “first” broadcast of the Lilliput episode from 'Gulliver's Travels' because early radio was full of live readings and one-off dramatizations that weren’t always archived. What I’ve found researching similar topics is that dramatizations of 'Gulliver’s Travels' began appearing in the 1920s and 1930s on stations like the BBC’s early services and various American networks’ children’s slots. So the safest answer is that the earliest radio adaptations date back to the late 1920s or early 1930s, with more regular serialized versions and recycled adaptations becoming common in the 1930s and 1940s.
If you want the exact first broadcast date, the place to hunt is the BBC Genome project (digitized Radio Times), old newspaper radio listings, or archives like the Library of Congress and vintage radio fan sites. I got pulled down this rabbit hole once late into the night—there’s nothing like finding a tiny radio listing for a show that’s otherwise vanished. Happy sleuthing; if you want I can outline a search plan using those archives.

I’ve chased questions like this as a weekend historian of pop culture, and this one is classic: the first to broadcast Lilliput’s slice of 'Gulliver’s Travels' is hard to certify because radio’s early years were ephemeral. The BBC began experimental broadcasts in the early 1920s and rapidly moved into dramatic readings; by the late 1920s and early 1930s there are multiple listings for 'Gulliver' dramatizations. Across the Atlantic, American networks picked up similar children’s adaptations during the 1930s, and the popularity of the Fleischer Studios' 'Gulliver’s Travels' film in 1939 even spawned tie-ins and renewed interest on radio.
To be rigorous, I’d look for the earliest extant listing in primary sources: the BBC Genome (scans of the Radio Times), newspaper radio listings (local papers often printed daily schedules), and archives like the Library of Congress or the British Library’s sound archive. Fan-run old-time-radio catalogs and university special collections sometimes hold scripts or recordings. So while I can’t hand you a single date without digging those sources, the most likely window is the late 1920s to early 1930s, with more durable, archived productions appearing from the mid-1930s onward.

I get why you want a specific date, and I wish I could give a neat one. From what I’ve dug up before, the first radio takes on the Lilliput sections of 'Gulliver’s Travels' crop up in the late 1920s and become more common in the 1930s. Early BBC children’s broadcasts and U.S. network children’s shows experimented with these stories, but many early broadcasts weren’t preserved.
If you want to pin the absolute first, try searching the BBC Genome (Radio Times), historical newspaper listings, or old-time-radio archives — that’s where definitive first-dates usually show up. I always enjoy the hunt for these little historical breadcrumbs.

I like the way you phrased this — short, specific, the kind of thing I’d ask on a forum. Straight up: there’s no single neat date I can pin down from memory. The earliest radio dramatizations of 'Gulliver’s Travels', including Lilliput scenes, show up in scattered listings from the late 1920s and through the 1930s. Early BBC transmissions and American children’s programs experimented with classics, and many were one-off readings that weren’t archived well.
If you need a concrete first recorded broadcast, I’d check the BBC Genome (Radio Times archives) and American newspaper radio listings from the 1920s–1930s. Libraries or old-time radio collectors sometimes have surviving scripts or transcriptions, especially for later, better-documented productions in the 1930s and 1940s.