With this goal in mind the Ministry came upon the idea of Education-Entertainment. They crafted a soap opera called “All about the Alburys,” however the program was deemed too American in sound to appeal to the Bahamian people. The Ministry of Tourism then tried to reuse the scripts using Bahamian vocal talents. The recruited actors deemed the scripts bland and unsatisfactory. Local playwright and lawyer Jeanne Thompson was then contacted to write an all-Bahamian production. After consultation with her childhood friend Sonia Mills, who had done similar work on radio serials in Jamaica, Ms. Thompson agreed to write the programme.²³ This was the birth of The Fergusons of Farm Road. It remains to this day a singular instance of Bahamian creative collaboration.

Ms. Thompson was a prominent member of the theatre scene at the time and was able to recruit other members of the Nassau acting community, among them several family members, to provide the vocal talent for the show.²⁴ Success soon followed the inaugural broadcast of Wednesday the 6th of May, 1970. The show attracting the attention of Bahamians who had never before heard a fictionalized version of their daily lives, every week they would congregate around their radios to hear the latest fifteen minute installment.

Anthropologist Nicolette Bethel contends that the Bahamas is primarily an oral society and that because of this “radio, and not the press, is the bearer of information, the provider of any kind of central, organised unity in the nation.”²⁵ Therefore the use of radio, an oral medium, was the ideal conduit for the creation and transmission of national symbols and ideology. And with monopoly control over the country’s air waves the PLP were determined to use that power to their advantage.²⁶

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