In May 2014, just over sixty years since its first appearance on British airwaves, Under Milk Wood was treated to a makeover. A good deal had happened in those intervening decades to alter production norms at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), to say nothing of listening figures or changing tastes. In January 1954, following its author's untimely death the previous November, Under Milk Wood had been positioned in the radio schedule in such a way as to pique the curiosity of the highbrow listener: nestled between a programme about the Spanish art song (or canción) and a musical setting of Eugene O’Neill's early monologue Before Breakfast, Dylan Thomas's last work had aired on the Third Programme at 7.25pm, with Richard Burton in the role of First Voice. On 5 May 2014, by contrast, the play appears to have courted a different sort of company in the listings – prefaced, on the one hand, by local news, weather and sports reports, and followed, on the other, by the latest bust-up in EastEnders. What Thomas would have made of either schedule is anyone's guess, though it's nice to imagine that he’d have approved in 2014 of the BBC's effort to set his ‘play for voices’ in some kind of dialogue with the ongoing theatrics of Albert Square. In the saltiness of its bartering, in its performance and perforation of social contracts, in the echoic disquiet of its players (‘Oh, what’ll the neighbours say’), Under Milk Wood is no less driven than latter-day soap operas tend to be by the rhythms of gossip and quasi-gospel truth, or by the semblance of returning storylines that are part and parcel of a fiction set in and around a busy thoroughfare. It has been noticed before – but is worth repeating – that Under Milk Wood not only helped in 1954 to stimulate some interest in an emerging brand of regional melodrama, but also seems to have paved the way for one of Britain's best-loved serials by staking out that well-known regal territory. ‘Listen’, we’re urged in Thomas's opening monologue, ‘it is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street …’