He was a novelist known for his quick and cruel wit, his wide-eyed opinions and his indifference about saying the shocking. So a BBC Home Service programme called Frankly Speaking in which Evelyn Waugh is quizzed by three abrasive questioners was never going to be a walk in the country. Today what was later described as the most ill-natured interview ever broadcast can be heard for the first time since 1953.

Waugh was being questioned by Charles Wilmot, Jack Davies and Stephen Black and the exchanges are, to say the least, "sparky", according to British Library sound archive curator Stephen Cleary. "It's three interviewers pitched against one subject and they don't get on terribly well."