Bradford-born writer and broadcaster JB Priestley is the subject of BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives series tomorrow.

Broadcaster and comedy scriptwriter Barry Cryer and former Telegraph & Argus journalist Martin Wainwright remember the novelist, playwright and essayist, and assess his impact.

The programme, recorded before an audience in Bristol and presented by Matthew Parris, includes recordings of the writer and his son, Tom.

Barry Cryer knew JB Priestley for the last ten years of his life until his death in 1984. He fondly recalls visiting him with two members of Monty Python.

Mr Wainwright, who last year presented a radio documentary about Priestley’s wartime Sunday night broadcasts, Postscript, said Priestley brought the common touch to the nation at a critical time in its history.

He said: “He evoked Bradford better than anyone I’ve read and he brought the city’s friendliness, common sense and persistence against the odds into his wartime broadcasts.

“He was the man who used the pork pie shop to counter Naziism, a brilliant use of homely reality against fanaticism.”

Bradford-based writer and researcher Richard North, who is writing a book about the Battle of Britain, thinks Priestley’s political acumen about British society during the war has been vastly under-rated He said: “He was a man of the people who most challenged Winston Churchill’s top-down elitist world view.

“It was Priestley who wrote in his 1941 book, Out of the People: ‘…you cannot have a democratic government long, cannot make a democracy function properly, if you have an apathetic and passive people’.”

The only discordant note in the programme is sounded by Parris, who asks whether Priestley’s fiction was really that good.

Great Lives can be heard on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow at 4.30pm and again on Sunday, January 23, at 11pm.

e-mail: jim.greenhalf@telegraphandargus.co.uk