Observations: Careless talk costs time

Designated a C3, meaning he would be among the last people to be called up, Dylan Thomas whiled away the Second World War writing films for the Ministry of Information, on the recommendation of his friend and his wife Caitlin's former lover, Augustus John. His first, This is Colour, was a rather pedestrian history of the dye industry, while New Towns for Old, set in the fictional town of Smokedale, anticipated the post-war reconstruction effort, and These are the Men overlaid Leni Riefenstahl's iconography with his own poetry.

Earlier this year, Thomas's biographer Andrew Lycett found a previously unpublished wartime work in the poet's archives in Austin, Texas. Undiscovered for some 40 years, The Art of Conversation is a 30-minute drama loosely based on the wartime warning "careless talk costs lives". "A lecture with illustrations and a moral", it introduces a cross-section of conversationalists, "from Oscar Wilde, the poet, who could talk the hind legs off a horse, to Mr Humphrey Clack, the armchair-strategist who could probably talk the hind legs off a Wilde." As well as imagined exchanges between Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley – "Conversation, my dear Aubrey, is the art of putting the cart before the horse and then putting it in a nutshell" – Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale – "When I go out to dinner, Madam, I regard the tenderness of the feelings of the company as studiously as I do that of this most excellent meat" – it relays dialogue between ordinary citizens in which potentially red-hot information is signalled by the banging of a large gong. A witty, flippant and irreverent piece of propaganda, then, which unsurprisingly never saw the light of day.

The play will finally be broadcast on Radio 4 on 3 December, but keen Dylanophiles have the opportunity to hear it tomorrow as part of the Dylan Thomas Festival in Swansea. For free tickets call 01792 463 980, or visit www.dylanthomas.com.