According to Peter Lewis, in his chapter on Dylan Thomas in British Radio Drama (Drakakis, ed., 1981), "The Radio Road to Llareggub," the feature series Return Journey consisted of twenty-four episodes broadcast on the Home Service and Third Programme between 1945 and 1951 (p. 92). In The Growth of Milk Wood (1961), Douglas Cleverdon says the series was originally devised by the BBC Features Department
in order to lure writers of distinction into the radio field; they were commissioned to return to their native town, or to some other place that had powerful associations for them, and to write a programme about it, in the form of a semi-autobiographical talk interspersed by dramatized flashbacks, extracts from journals, actual recordings—anything, in fact, that might illuminate the theme.
[p. 15]
Scanning the broadcasting schedules in The Times for those years finds these episodes:
- Eric Linklater to the Orkneys (October 31, 1945)
- John and Rosamond Lehmann on the Isle of Wight (April 13, 1946)
- Palace Court, Bayswater, revisted by Sir Francis Meynell and Viola Meynell (September 2, 1946)
- V.S. Pritchett, Return to the Fells (October 13, 1946)
- Edward Sackville-West to Knole (April 9, 1947)
- Dylan Thomas to Swansea (June 15, 1947)
- Stevie Smith to Syler's Green (August 5, 1947)
- Rayner Heppenstall to Strasbourg (September 16, 1948)
- Sean O'Faoláin to Cork (November 20, 1948)
- Christopher Sykes to Berlin (February 19, 1949)
- Henry Reed, Return to Naples (August 17, 1950)
