About Budapest III.

A reconstruction of the aired radio program of Radio Budapest, Hungary in the 1930-40s

The Budapest III. project is the production of Első Pesti Egyetemi Rádió (the university radio of Eötvös Loránd University's Media Department) and Proscenion Drama Theatre.
There are only fragments recorded of the radio programs of the 1930-40s in Hungary. Most programs have not been recorded at all, others have been recorded to a media that was needed later for other recordings, so they were deleted and several have been lost during World War II and the 1956 Revolution. We don't know how radio had sounded in the 1930-40s but we can try to reconstruct this unique sound. We used transcrpts of the actual aired programs (transcrips were needed because censorship required them and because all programs have been read: there was no live improvisation) kept at the National Archives of Hungary as manuscripts. We also used the publicly available radio guides (radio magazines like Rádióélet) which also listed the playlists of musical programs. Then we have tried to find the very same gramophone disk that was played at that time at the studios of Radio Budapest I and II.

We have produced some programs that did not exist. Tarka Est (Colorful Night) is one example, which use the American talkshow genre as a sample.
From time to time we add new-old programs to the original set of about 24 hours of succesfully reconstructed programs

Henrik Hargitai (Bp3 project coordinator) hhargitai // gmail.com