The BBC

PREFACE

Is a history of the BBC even possible?

At a hundred years old, the British Broadcasting Corporation has already transmitted somewhere between ten and twenty million programmes. The precise total is unknown simply because any attempt at an accurate count would be too vast and complex a task for anyone to undertake. Back in 1957, Asa Briggs started to write an ‘official’ history of the Corporation. He took thirty-five years, five volumes, and nearly 4,000 pages to complete his mission. Even this Herculean effort, he said, offered ‘a history and not the history’.1 In the years since the last volume of his magisterial study was published, broadcasting has become a round-the-clock, multi-channel phenomenon. The most dedicated listener or viewer in the world would stand no chance of catching more than a tiny slice of the BBC’s daily output. What hope for the historian wanting to make sense of a century’s worth of activity? The problem of selection is almost unbearable. Merely listing its programmes would occupy a shelf, doing justice to the story of their creation a whole library.

Still, the BBC demands our attention. We can’t hope to understand modern Britain – its politics, its culture, its sense of itself – without understanding the role of the BBC in the life of the nation. In large parts of the world, public service broadcasters survive in the margins of national life, while state-run or commercial companies dominate the scene. Yet here is an institution that almost every Briton uses in one way or another; the tiny minority who don’t will know about it – have views about it. Around the globe, it’s long been seen as the embodiment of public service broadcasting, a template to emulate. To use the advertisers’ favoured language, it is a powerful ‘brand’, conveying something about quality, reliability, accuracy. For listeners and viewers at home, the BBC is not just one broadcaster among many: it is the national broadcaster, possessing a quasi-mystical place in the national psyche. Public devotion can sometimes reach unnerving levels of intensity. The novelist Sebastian Faulks said of Radio 4 that its ‘humane upper-middlebrow seriousness has done more both to define British society and to hold it together than any political or artistic movement of the last 100 years’. Another writer suggested that it is the BBC’s historic position at the heart of our media ecology that has given Britain ‘possibly the greatest single system of diverse, quality communication the world has ever seen’. A poll of men and women listed in Who’s Who once found that the Corporation was regarded as more influential than Parliament or the Church of England. Although not actually a government-run broadcaster, it is a body so clearly aligned with the ‘Nation’ that it often feels to us like an organ of state, as if it were a creative arm of the civil service. It exists by Royal Charter, and the licence fee that funds it is set by ministers in Parliament. If nuclear war begins, the last voice of authority we will hear before Armageddon arrives is a Radio 4 announcer.2

All of which makes the BBC part of what we have come to call ‘the establishment’. But in all sorts of meaningful ways it also belongs to us. This is not just about ‘owning’ the BBC because we pay for it directly through the licence fee. Public service broadcasting is always, in the most fundamental way, for us: its output has no value unless it’s heard or seen, and broadcasters always have some kind of listener or viewer in mind as they go about their work. Broadcasters and their audience, it has been said, are like twin stars: they revolve around and substantially determine each other. For decades, our domestic routines – getting up, preparing meals, sitting together as a family, going to bed – have been marked and measured by the passage of our favourite radio and television programmes. The television playwright Dennis Potter recalled the BBC of his childhood days as ‘paternalistic and often stuffily pompous’, presenting itself in an almost priestly role. Yet at a crucial moment in his life it also ‘threw open the “magical casement” on great sources of mindscape at a time when books were hard to come by, and when I had never stepped into a theatre or even a concert hall’. The images and sounds the BBC has brought into our homes have been the portal to other worlds, other ideas, other times, ‘the tissue of our dreams, the warp and weft of our memories, the staging posts of our lives’.3 Its status as a lofty national body in close embrace with the world of high politics has always co-existed with a cradle-to-grave role in our own domestic lives and emotional landscapes.

This dual identity is why the Corporation’s former Director-General, Tony Hall, claimed that ‘all the eddies and currents that make up Britain flow right through the BBC’, and why Asa Briggs said that ‘To write the history of broadcasting in the 20th century is in a sense to write the history of everything else’. It is also why the BBC has aroused not just intense devotion but fierce criticism. We expect so much of it that it always disappoints. The Corporation acts as a lightning rod, a place where some of our most fundamental anxieties about politics or taste or morality are displayed and fought over. Sebastian Faulks might revere Radio 4, but others have accused it of being no more than a mouthpiece for the middle-aged and the middle class, for ‘Middle England’ and everything that goes with such rhetorical terrain. Complaints over a particular programme or a particular channel are rarely parochial affairs. With a national press ever-ready to amplify the mildest of grumbles, they easily spin out of control. As the Guardian writer Charlotte Higgins puts it, ‘The BBC is a battlefield that can be grim and dark and strewn with human wreckage. It is where the British gather to fight their most vicious culture wars.’ The Corporation, she suggests, has always ricocheted from trouble to trouble – ‘it has crisis in its bones’.4

These headline-grabbing flare-ups are an inevitable feature of the pages that follow. But one reason why this is a ‘people’s history’ is that it attempts to trace the wider story of the BBC’s tangled relationship with the public. The Corporation has always had to be utterly alive to the feelings of its audience as well as to the prevailing political climate. Its programme makers see their job as measuring the mood of the times, restlessly turning over social issues, spotting trends, nurturing new talent. The television and radio that emerges from this labour tells us what these programme makers thought about their viewers and listeners – that is, what they thought about us.

This is also a ‘people’s history’ because it aims to bring into focus the men and woman who made the BBC what it is. It’s too easy to dismiss all modern media as formulaic and machine-tooled. Some of it certainly is. But for the past hundred years, most programmes have been handcrafted – made by thinking, feeling, and often fallible human beings. Behind every programme lies a world of thought and debate. Only by reaching deep inside the BBC, and by trying to discover the backgrounds, the tastes, the prejudices, the ideals of those who have worked there over the decades, can we understand why the radio we listen to and the television we watch has become what it is today.

Seeing the broadcasters of the past as flesh and blood rather than as faceless functionaries, we can begin to see the BBC as one of the most extraordinary creative communities of the past century. David Attenborough remembers his induction as a young producer in the 1950s, and a colleague showing him a diagram of the Corporation’s structure. ‘It came as no surprise to me later to discover that he was also the author of an authoritative book on witchcraft in medieval England.’ It’s been said that one needs to understand medieval power politics to appreciate the Byzantine structure of the BBC and its proud tradition of territorial disputes. Over the years, the Corporation has attracted the attention of generations of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians and journalists. Few have been brave enough to summarise the BBC in a short sentence. After immersing herself in its life for many months, Charlotte Higgins decided that it was ‘ungraspable in its entirety: it was like a city whose streets I had only partially explored, a place whose streetscape was so circuitous and complex that a lifetime would be too short to map it’. Asa Briggs, who really did spend a large part of his lifetime trying to map the Corporation, certainly possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of its inner workings by the time he retired. But according to his fellow historian, Raphael Samuel, policy-making, rather than broadcasting, was the true subject of his work: his five-volume history, Samuel suggested, was perhaps too ‘top-down’ to do justice to ‘radio’s penny-a-liners, the freelance playwrights and scriptwriters, scraping a living in the republic of letters, the foreign correspondents, the old soaks at Bush House, gathered from the four corners of the world, doing their all-night stints, and comforting themselves with the bottle’. These men and women are part of the BBC’s story as much as the high politics of government interference, official enquiries, administrative reorganisations, or the Olympian pronouncements of Governors and Director-Generals. This ‘people’s history’ is a belated attempt to give them their due.5

Fortunately, the testimonies of those who ‘made’ the BBC reach down to us from the past. As an organisation obsessed with monitoring its own performance, the Corporation minuted almost every stage in its decision-making processes. Its written archives therefore contain hundreds of thousands of documents in which the thinking of staff has been captured in print at a level of detail the most punctilious civil servant would celebrate. But there’s another, equally valuable resource – one of the Corporation’s most underused treasures: the collection of several hundred oral history interviews with former staff that it has been quietly accumulating over the past half-century. These feature people – Directors-General, yes, but also editors, producers, presenters, engineers, secretaries, even telephonists and lift attendants – who were asked to talk candidly about their life and times. Their accounts don’t just blow the dust off the written archives and bring them to life; they offer first-hand accounts that sometimes transform our understanding of key episodes in the BBC’s past. Even if dates or names or the precise sequence of events are occasionally misremembered, almost every testimony provides priceless evidence of what it felt like to be in the BBC at a given moment of time: the look and smell and sound of a place, the small but telling details of working life, the atmosphere in the studio, the arguments that got in the way of normal business, the friendships and alliances that made good things happen, how grand policy was really interpreted on the factory floor. As a ‘people’s history’, this book puts these accounts centre stage.

Everyone who has ever worked for the BBC will have a strong view as to its ‘true’ history. But what they thought of the BBC will have depended not only on their character, experience or outlook, as well as the precise date on which they entered the Corporation, but on the place that they occupied within the system. Their perspective would perhaps have changed as they moved upwards, across, or occasionally downwards. Which is why historians try to look at the scene from more than one angle. Getting to grips with ‘the BBC’ is like piecing together a vast jigsaw puzzle, and even then the final picture defies easy description. The distinguished critic Clive James once said that British television was ‘too various to be fully absorbed by one mind . . . The more you watched, the less likely you were to make wide-ranging statements’. Broadcasting, he suggested, could ‘be reduced to a socio-political formula only at the price of distortion’.6

Even so, some things can be said with reasonable certainty. The media historian Jean Seaton has suggested that the BBC’s story is one of men and women ‘trying to make programmes that people like and that also – not in a preachy way (well only occasionally in a preachy way) – do them good’.7 This deceptively simple description provides one helpful starting point for the tale that unfolds over the following pages. A history of broadcasting is always partly about that long and continuing effort behind the scenes to discover formats and styles that somehow ‘work’ for the vast and unseen audience. But in the case of the BBC, it has always been much more than a matter of delivering programmes to people’s homes as if they were electricity or gas or water: it has been about culture, morality, values, politics. Behind the Corporation’s famous mission statement to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ lies a complex tangle of ideas, though one united around a vision of humanity’s potential to change. That vision has been ferociously debated and continuously adapted. The struggle to hold on to some kind of guiding ethos while constantly bending under the strain of wider social forces lies at the heart of the BBC’s story. The struggle matters because it’s not just about the nature of the BBC itself; the Corporation’s fate can be seen as emblematic of the kind of society we wish to preserve or create.

That’s why it’s no coincidence the story of the BBC begins in the early 1920s – many years after wireless had been discovered but in the lingering aftermath of a traumatic world war. And it’s why, before we even begin to talk about the very first programmes that were broadcast, it’s good to stand for a little while alongside those who had fought in the conflict and who were looking to build from the rubble a new and better world for the generations to come. It is through trying to understand their fears, their hopes, their passions and their values that we might just get a clearer picture, not just of how the BBC emerged in 1922 but why.