The BBC marks scenes from our lives - aren't we lucky to have it?

Mondays are washdays. In the kitchen, steam rises from the sink and my mother squeezes sopping wet clothes through the mangle. On the radio a man sings Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' from the musical Oklahoma. Later in M my childhood other songs made their mark: Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better), (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?. But the opening number in Oklahoma is the first music I can remember and put a name to: a memory preserved, possibly, via the song's association with sunshine and sunshine's importance to washdays.

- Ian Jack

I had no idea of the song's origins or how songs came about; wouldn't know corn ("as high as an elephant's eye" or otherwise) if I met it dancing in the street. Nor did I know what was old and what was new. Children, when they first encounter the world, imagine what they hear and see has been there forever. That was how, for many years, I thought of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' when in fact it was only a couple of years older than me.

Likewise, the organisation that brought it into our home: the BBC had been founded only 20-odd years before, in 1922, and so was younger than my parents.

Other stations were marked on the dial but apart from a flirtation with Lord Haw-Haw during the second world war my parents had ears only for the BBC Home Service and BBC Light Programme.

The BBC had a good war. "To inform, educate, and entertain" was the mission statement of its Presbyterian founder, Lord Reith, but until 1939 none of these aims had been fulfilled in any great style. The days when it could see itself as the nation's voice were some way off.