[2] It was first broadcast on 16 January 1950 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 (often sung by Eileen Browne and George Dixon) for "mothers and children at home", it had at its peak an audience of more than a million listeners.
The final week of programmes (widely reported in the press) featured Wriggly Worm stories, presented by Nerys Hughes and Tony Aitken and directed by David Bell.
It was recorded for the programme by Eileen Browne and Roger Fiske,[4] However 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 (noiselessly), rush across to the piano in the studio and play the Berceuse live.
[5] 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[1] It has been incorporated and sampled by many artists and musicians; for instance,