It was first broadcast on the BBC Light Programme in a fifteen-minute slot every weekday afternoon at 1.45, just before Woman's Hour. Consisting of stories, songs and nursery rhymes for “mothers and children at home”, at its peak it had an audience of more than a million listeners. From 7 September 1964 the programme moved to the BBC Home Service. Listen with Mothers final week's programmes featured Wriggly Worm stories, presented by Nerys Hughes and Tony Aitken and directed by David Bell. These stories were broadcast on the Listen with Mother programmes throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Listening Corner, which replaced Listen with Mother on 10 September 1982, began with repeats of the Wriggly Worm stories. Collections of Listen with Mother stories have been published by Hutchinsons/Random House. Two collections of Wriggly Worm stories, by Eugenie Summerfield, have been published by Book Guild. Listening Corner continued until 24 August 1990, ending three days before the launch of BBC Radio 5.
Theme music
At the start of each programme a short introduction on piano was played. The tune went to the rhythm of the words quarter to two, which of course was the time of the broadcast, and many children were helped in learning to tell the time by this ingenious device. A piece for piano duet, the Berceuse from Gabriel Fauré's Dolly Suite, Op. 56, was played at the conclusion of each broadcast and became synonymous with the programme. It was recorded for the programme by Eileen Browne and Roger Fiske, though Julia Lang in an Anglia Television interview in the 1990s said that during her tenure when she finished reading the story she had to get up, rush across to the piano in the studio and play the Berceuse live.
"Are you sitting comfortably?"
Each story on Listen with Mother opened with the phrase "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin". The question, originally an ad lib by Julia Lang on 16 January 1950, became so well known that it appears in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations It has been incorporated and sampled by many artists and musicians; for instance,
in the episode "The Idiot's Lantern", in the revived series of Doctor Who, it was used by the alien presence known as "The Wire" appearing on a television screen and addressing its first victim, the hapless Mr Magpie.
in a later episode of Doctor Who, "The Timeless Children", the line was reformulated by The Master as "Are you suffering comfortably? Then I'll begin" on addressing The Doctor in the Matrix.
