This expansion of the parochial horizons of British culture was also aided by a steady stream into the country, before the Second World War, of Jewish and anti-Nazi exiles, a number of whom joined the BBC. Among them was Martin Esslin (born Pereszlényi Gyula Márton in Budapest) who worked for the External Services and ran radio drama in the 1960s and 1970s, and Stephen Hearst (born Stephen Hirshtritt in Vienna) who was head of BBC TV arts features in the 1960s and ran Radio 3 in the 1970s. Another was the Frankfurt-born Ludwig Koch. As a child violinist he had been part of Clara Schumann’s circle; his earliest memory was of being kissed by Liszt; and he had been advised to take singing lessons by Giuseppe Verdi. In adulthood Koch became an important sound recordist of the natural world, in his time as familiar a name to BBC audiences as David Attenborough is today.
In Penelope Fitzgerald’s wartime BBC novel Human Voices Koch is given fictional life as Dr Vogel, an émigré who, in pursuit of a programme called Lest We Forget Our Englishry, travels round the country recording people’s wheezy breathing and endless creaking church doors. The name Vogel is a pun on the title of Koch’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Birdman, Vogel being the German for ‘bird’. At the start of that book, Koch describes being given an Edison phonograph and a box of wax cylinders by his father in 1889, when he was eight. ‘I had the original idea of using my phonograph to record human voices,’ he remembered, in a pre-echo of the title of Fitzgerald’s novel.
As a child he collected ‘audio autographs’ – Kaiser Wilhelm’s curiously high-pitched voice among them – as well as ‘the voices of all the Bayreuth Wagner singers of the late-90s’ and birdsong, including ‘the raucous call of the great bustard’. All these early recordings were lost during the war. ‘All gone with the Nazis. Well, it can’t be helped,’ he once told an interviewer. When coaching singers at Bayreuth he discussed The Ride of the Valkyries with Cosima Wagner: her husband had been inspired by the throbbing, panting sound of the mute swan’s wingbeat, she told him. With his wife Nellie in Frankfurt, Koch kept a bewildering menagerie at home of 68 creatures. Nellie remembered the surprising morning when ‘there were suddenly two alligators on the breakfast table in cardboard boxes!’
Koch pioneered an early version of the multimedia text: what he called the ‘soundbook’, which combined recorded sounds with a written commentary, an especially useful tool in the field of ornithology. But working in Germany became increasingly dicey in the 1930s, and during a trip to Switzerland, where he had been seen talking to a Nazi official who was shortly afterwards assassinated, he was warned not to return. ‘I landed at Dover on 17 February 1936, and arrived in London alone and almost penniless, at 5 p.m., welcomed by mist and drizzling rain,’ he recalled in his autobiography. (Cold and damp was to be a recurring theme: ‘As I write this I have been here 18 years and yet I still cannot understand the average British person’s love of draughts and cold rooms.’)
Only a week after arriving in London Koch received a letter from Mary Adams, of the BBC’s talks department, and gradually began to be offered work. After a period of internment on the Isle of Man (where ‘I was able to make a special study of the hooded crow and the herring gull’), he joined the staff of the BBC, his task to build up the sound-effects library. ‘I visited a number of factories to explore unusual noises, but amid the din of machinery I longed for the sounds of nature, and I persuaded my superiors that this was the right moment to show the enemy, by recording all kinds of farm animals, that even bombing could not entirely shatter the natural peace of this island,’ he remembered. He composed a ‘Victory Symphony’ from found sounds mimicking the opening of Beethoven Five – ‘even nature helped me, for one of the call-notes of the curlew has this victory rhythm’. Internal BBC documents detail his recordings: one memo concerning ‘Dr Ludwig Koch, 19 October 1942’, is headed, delightfully, ‘An exhaustive series of recordings of footsteps, probably out of doors’. Another note, written on the same day, contains a list of his recordings that reads like a taxonomy out of a Borges story: bugle calls, aircraft factory, farm animals, winnowing, St Paul’s Cathedral in wartime, pigs and sow, donkey braying, concolor gibbons, black-necked crackle, yellowhammer, demolition and reconstruction, tank factory, steam and hand winch, derrick and rope running out, conversation on quay re cargo, footsteps on pavement.
By January 1943 the head of the BBC’s sound library, Marie Slocombe, was despairing of Koch, whose high professional standards often prompted him to spend a great deal more time and money on projects than his employer deemed necessary. Though his work was ‘excellent beyond dispute’ he was ‘constantly straining at the leash and going beyond his terms of reference, and quite frankly wastes a lot of my time in attempts to discuss the most far-reaching schemes which are quite irrelevant and quite impracticable’. He certainly inspired BBC employees to unaccustomed heights of burnished prose. ‘To explain to him that Effects records could be continued without him is rather like trying to explain to Kreisler that it is possible for other people to play Caprice Viennoise. This does not mean Dr Koch is conceited. He just cannot understand how anyone can regard perfection as a luxury,’ noted the recorded programmes director in January 1943.
Fitzgerald cruelly killed off her Dr Vogel in Human Voices – she downed him with a piece of flying drainpipe in the Blitz, as he courteously attempted to explain a point of English law to an ARP warden. The real Koch returned to freelance life, constantly attempting to persuade the BBC of the immense care and time required to maintain his desired standards. This was particularly true of his recordings of birds: even to get sufficiently close to his often rare or shy targets, with the bulky equipment of the 1940s, could be an extraordinary feat, requiring a naturalist’s knowledge, the cunning of a thief and the patience of a saint. A typical letter, from 24 August 1946, written somehow in a strong German accent, runs:
Last spring I have been concentrating under horrid conditions watching by day and night the breeding behaviour of the Green-shank and made an attempt to record as many breeding notes as possible, especially the cracking of the eggshells and the first peeping of the youngsters and the mother talking to the young birds is very fascinating. But with these recordings the bird is not covered yet and I intend to spend at least one or even two more months somewhere in the Highlands, early next spring, trying to get the courtship notes of the bird, including the wonderful song.
Koch also contributed a series of programmes to the BBC after the war called ‘sound pictures’. One especially delicious example was a compilation, without voiceover or interruption, of noises harvested from a beach. He introduced it thus:
Throughout the ages, the eye of mankind has always been kept in training … but sound has never been preserved for us. I notice that very few people really listen, either to the radio or natural sounds, or even to beautiful mechanical sounds out of doors such as church bells or carillons. Most people still use their radio as a daily background to work or conversation. I want you to concentrate only for quarter of an hour. Close your eyes. Do not fall to sleep. Simply listen …
There follows the susurration of waves lapping at the sand; the cry of melancholy seabirds, the buzz of a motor-launch engine and the voices of distant, happy children. ‘War or no war, bird life is going on and even the armed power of the three dictators cannot prevent it,’ he had written a few years earlier in a letter to The Times. ‘I would like to advise everybody in a position to do so, to relax his nerves, in listening to the songs, now so beautiful, of the British birds.’ In his voice, the injunction becomes almost an act of resistance. To stop, to open your ears, to delight in birdsong: to grip humanity close though war raged.
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Huw Wheldon – D-day war hero and founder, in 1958, of the first TV arts programme Monitor, nursery of Ken Russell, John Schlesinger, Humphrey Burton and Melvyn Bragg – invented a ringing phrase to describe the BBC’s cultural mission. It was about making ‘the good popular and the popular good’. But doing so has never been as simple or as unconte
sted as his neatly balanced chiasmus implies. Within the BBC, the politics of ‘inform, educate and entertain’ have been fought over, the Reithian inheritance ferociously debated and subjected to widely differing interpretations. In the BBC that Wheldon worked in, music programmer William Glock was taking forward Clark’s inheritance and introducing listeners of the Third Programme to a new generation of the European avant-garde. Now audiences could hear music by composers such as Pierre Boulez, who would become the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor from 1971 to 1975. Glock took the view, he remembered in his memoir Notes in Advance (1991), that ‘to try to give the public “what it wants” inevitably means falling below its potential standards and appetites’.
Over in television, Bill Cotton, the man who would become the head of light entertainment at the BBC in 1970, and later managing director of television in the 1980s, had a different view on the relative importance of the tricolon ‘inform, educate and entertain’. He and Wheldon, he remembered in his autobiography, ‘both believed that the BBC’s core duty was to entertain the public, for the simple reason that unless listeners and viewers found a programme agreeable they wouldn’t stay with it long enough to be educated or informed’.
Cotton, the son of the wildly popular band leader Billy Cotton, himself a fixture on post-war BBC television, described himself in his memoir Double Bill (2000) as representing the ‘vulgar end of the market’. In an age of ratings battles with ITV, he invented Top of the Pops, and had the idea of a show for Jimmy Savile called Jim’ll Fix It. (‘Jim’, he recalled, in what now seems ominous phrasing, ‘could get kids to do anything.’) He brought Morecambe and Wise into the BBC, had the idea of asking Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker to form a double act, and, borrowing the format from a Dutch show he encountered at a European awards ceremony, devised the hugely popular Generation Game, which ran from 1971 to 1982 and was revived in the 1990s.
Cotton, steeped in show business, came from a different world from that of most of the decorously educated, solidly middle-class executives at the BBC. So did his protégé, Michael Grade, now Lord Grade. He was also the scion of an entertainment dynasty. His father, Leslie, and uncles, Bernie and Lew, were impresarios, agents and theatre owners. Michael Grade ran BBC1 in the 1980s and eventually became the BBC’s chairman (2004–6). Lew, Leslie and Bernie were born the Winogradskys, sons of a family that had emigrated from Ukraine in 1905 to two rooms over a shoe shop in the East End of London. Lew started out dancing the charleston in East Ham, becoming an agent for music-hall and variety acts when his knees started to give out when he was twenty-seven; he rose to become a mogul of commercial television. The Grade family story – a remarkable ascent from Brick Lane to presiding over the BBC within two generations – is in itself a metaphor of the manner in which popular British entertainment shifted from the stage to the small screen, and a reminder of how powerful the impresarios of popular entertainment were within the BBC, especially one that was competing with ITV for eyes on screen.
When the writer Dennis Potter was asked about television for The New Priesthood (1970), a volume on television co-edited by Joan Bakewell, he told her, ‘The main criticism with television is that it just seems an endlessly grinding thing – a burning monk, an advertisement, and Harold Wilson, and a pop show, and Jimmy Savile, all seem the same sort of experience.’ But, on the other hand, compared with the ‘middle-class privilege of the theatre, only television is classless, multiple, and, of course, people will switch on and people will choose. It’s the biggest platform in the world’s history, and writers who don’t want to kick and elbow their way onto it must be disowning something in themselves.’ The BBC, he said, ‘does genuinely give one the chance to create … I think it’s a federation, really, of various pressure groups. The Wednesday Play as a unit became, as it were, its own little force within this huge stadium called the BBC.’
In the 1960s, the Wednesday Play put out Ken Loach films such as Cathy Come Home and Potter’s own Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton. It was a purple patch in the BBC’s cultural history: a time when the right people and conditions for making great art collided. Stephen Frears, now best known for feature films, directed in the BBC in the 1970s, often working on Alan Bennett’s TV plays, starting with A Day Out (1972). He was operating in Loach’s slipstream. Loach had, he said, ‘just invented television films. I mean he literally invented them.’
Absorbing the influence of the Italian neo-realists and Czech cinema, ‘he had stumbled on a whole new story of Britain which had never really been told’, added Frears. ‘The BBC had a great subject: working-class, post-war Britain was being revealed.’ Frears, a bearlike, crumpled man whom I met at his regular cafe in Notting Hill, said, ‘I tell you what: it’s really the growth of management you should be writing about. One man ran the drama department. You fitted into a process that was a perfectly intelligent process, and you were working with the best writers, it seemed to me, in the country. I could see if you weren’t one of the writers they were interested in you wouldn’t agree with me but – Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, Adrian Mitchell. What are you supposed to do? Complain?’ Bright people were lurking down every corridor ‘and it sort of rubbed off on you. It was a very creative time.’
It is dangerous to look back to the BBC’s past and identify golden ages (and a flick through back issues of the Radio Times puts paid to such notions: there has always been plenty of forgettable or mediocre programming among the wonderful stuff). In truth, there have been moments when artists and the times aligned and great things were created: one thinks of Monty Python and its successors, or the emergence of the alternative comedians of the 1980s such as French and Saunders, Rory Bremner and Victoria Wood, figures whom the then head of light entertainment, Jim Moir, deliberately sought out to give comedy on BBC2 a different flavour from that of its sister channel.
Ask those involved in these moments of creative blooming, and they will often tell you much the same thing: ‘management’ was discreet and enabling; artists were free to experiment; commissioning was not mired in lengthy bureaucracy; the stakes were relatively low and ambition high; failure was an option. Some argue that those conditions are in much shorter supply now. The often-expressed tension between ‘creatives’ and ‘managers’ has always been there. Matheson wrote, ‘There is a constant pull between the claims of administration and creation. Under what conditions shall the creative worker serve? Ideally he needs quiet, freedom from routine, time in which to lie fallow after a big piece of work, time to go to and fro seeking inspiration. Such behaviour may seem another name for idling to the rigid administrator.’
Sir David Attenborough’s career has spanned both creative work and administration. He was the second controller of BBC2 – which launched in 1964 – from 1965 to 1969. At the beginning, only a handful of people had the new sets capable of receiving the service, and at first it was available only in the south-east. We talked in his new library, built onto the house in Richmond where he has lived since the 1950s: a galleried, top-lit space with a grand piano in its centre (Haydn sonatas on the stand) and set about with African sculptures and his collection of modern British studio ceramics. The walls were lined with thousands of art books, all neatly arranged by type from Aegean art to Indian sculpture. The natural history library, presumably yet more vast, was elsewhere.
The principle behind BBC2 was that it should not be higher brow than the BBC, but distinct from it. ‘The idea that you could do it by height of brow was nonsense. I mean there are plenty of people who like string quartets and plenty of people who like football, and plenty of people who like both, and so just to put on chamber music opposite football was irrelevant,’ he said. At the same time, ‘it felt very free, creatively free, because you couldn’t use the normal statistics, because the audience was changing all the time, because the coverage [of the transmitters] was changing all the time. I mean it was a doddle of a job. I was shielded from the pressures that BBC1 was taking.’ He added, ‘Occasionally I get nice c
ompliments for inventing Civilisation [Sir Kenneth Clark’s series on Western art]. They say, “How brave.” It wasn’t in the least brave. It was just that I thought it was a good idea. And there was nobody with a big stick saying, “Naughty, naughty, you didn’t get 3 million viewers, you only got 2.5 [million].” And that was why it was the dream job, running BBC2. A paradisiacal job.’
Civilisation had endured as a classic series, he argued, because of its great writing, and the power of Clark as an intellect and a communicator. Attenborough despaired of some of its successors. He picked out as typical a programme that had been aired just before we met: Apples, Pears and Paint: How to Make a Still Life Painting. ‘It had a typical crappy kind of sense of “Oh we can’t have a mandarin point of view, so what you will do is to get 10 different people, we’ll interview them and then we’ll just sling little slices of it together.” And so there’s no thesis, there’s no continuity, there’s no central thought … it was exasperating, empty-headed. The trouble is that we live in a populist culture where we can’t accept that there’s anybody who actually knows more about things than you do.’ Broadcasting, he said, ‘should be the cream of thinkers in society who have been given by the BBC a platform on which they may speak. But the BBC doesn’t believe that now.’
The young David Attenborough, behind the camera
An early programme on BBC2, commissioned by Attenborough’s predecessor, Michael Peacock, was The Great War. Marking fifty years since the war began, it mixed archive footage with testimony from survivors, and was the first of the great blockbuster history series on television – the progenitor of Jeremy Isaacs’s classic series for Thames, The World at War. The idea for it came from producers Antony Jay and Alasdair Milne, the buccaneering youngsters who had been making a splash with Tonight, the early-evening current affairs show. At first the notion was simply to find a way of showing archive footage held by the Imperial War Museum. But the young guns decided to treat The Great War as if they were putting together Tonight – ‘approaching the world today with a popular voice’, in the words of historian and producer Taylor Downing.
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