It made for arresting reading. He began with the traditional Daily Mail claim that the BBC is too big (the Mail has pretty consistently since the 1920s set itself against the monopolistic nature of the corporation, on principle and for reasons of commercial anxiety). From there, he quickly moved on to argue that the corporation exerts a kind of ‘cultural Marxism’. This, he says, attempts to undermine ‘the values of conservatism, with a small “c”, which, I would argue, just happen to be the values held by millions of Britons’. He picked out for special mention what he saw as the BBC’s pig-headedly liberal stance on immigration and Europe.
The corporation, he said, though it ‘glories in being open-minded, is, in fact, a closed thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak … this, I would argue, is perverting political discourse and disenfranchising countless millions who don’t subscribe to the BBC’s worldview’. Thus, he argued, the BBC had been responsible for ‘the current apathy over politics’. Even the greenish-centrist stance projected at the time of the lecture by David Cameron was, argued Dacre, a result of a kind of emasculation wrought by the BBC – a ‘blood sacrifice to the BBC God’.
The word ‘worldview’ was key. The Daily Mail’s own worldview (and, to be fair, that of all newspapers, to a greater or lesser extent) is a fabrication, a jigsawing together of structural templates, stock narratives and character types. The Daily Mail’s worldview is especially seductive; it is bought into on a massive scale by the British public. If one were looking for the most internally consistent ‘closed thought system’ in the domestic media landscape, one would, surely, have to turn to the Mail. And if one actually believes that the Daily Mail offers a complete and accurate reflection of Britain as it really is, then no wonder that the BBC looks inadequate or out of step. But I also wondered whether there were something else afoot in this long-nursed enmity – consciously or not. The Mail, founded in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, comes from the same era of mass communication that spawned the BBC. It was the Mail that saw some of the early potential of broadcasting: it sponsored Dame Nellie Melba’s broadcast from the Marconi headquarters. The Mail and the BBC are sprung from the same time and the same set of historical conditions. Far-seeing Reith got it wrong when he wrote, in Broadcast Over Britain, ‘Some prophets are foretelling a colossal struggle between the powerful Press interests and ourselves. I do not believe there need be any such thing.’ There was a colossal struggle and, arguably, the Mail lost.
Dacre also claimed in the lecture that he would ‘die in a ditch defending the BBC as a great civilising force’ and would ‘pay the licence fee just for Radio 4’. For the fact is that few principled BBC critics have cursed the corporation entirely out of existence. (Direct commercial rivals may be another thing: Christopher Bland, for example, is not alone in believing that Rupert Murdoch ‘would be the happiest man in the world if the BBC were abolished, or, even better, if he were allowed to buy it’.)
There is a sense from a number of its critics that the BBC would be entirely tolerable – if only it would conform to one’s own view of what it ought to be, a view often infused with a certain nostalgia about an older, better, half-remembered corporation; certainly one that was smaller, probably with Radio 4 at its heart. Quentin Letts, the Daily Mail columnist, whose articles are capable of boiling over with fury about the BBC, has, paradoxically, applied to be its director general, twice. Was he serious? Well yes, up to a point. ‘I was so angry,’ he told me in the canteen at the Palace of Westminster, where he is based as a parliamentary sketch writer. ‘I saw all these bloody careerist lefties prospering at the Beeb, and I thought, “Why should they have it?” I mean some of those people are as nuttily left-wing as I am nuttily right-wing, and yet they all get bloody top executive jobs, and not a sniff of a rightie.’ He smiled. There was something immensely disarming about his candour – though I wasn’t sure that he had much evidence for the BBC’s being full of ‘lefties’. For example, in December 2014, one of the BBC’s producers, also based in Westminster, made a high-profile departure to become director of communications of Ukip. And Letts himself had hardly been banished from Broadcasting House; he was the presenter of a successful series on Radio 4. ‘I knew I didn’t have a chance,’ he added of his DG applications, ‘but I thought, well, I’ll try and make the point … complete failure!’
Margaret Thatcher, of course, looms large in the story of the BBC, as the avenging fury of the private sector, under whose premiership the door was opened to Murdoch’s Sky, and in whose later, hawkish cabinets were those who would have seen the BBC privatised. She herself, according to her biographer Charles Moore, a former editor of the Telegraph, lacked the appetite to raze it. She disapproved of the licence fee in particular as a regressive tax, and the BBC in general as, in Moore’s words, ‘left-wing, monopolistic, anti-her’. She listened to the Today programme; Denis paced the ramparts to tell her how awful the rest of the BBC was. Coverage of Northern Ireland, the Falklands, and her contention that the BBC was grotesquely inefficient and overstaffed (based on personal observations of the BBC’s turning up mob-handed to film her) provided the backdrop for an especially fraught and hostile period of the BBC’s relations with the government. But as for destroying the BBC wholesale, Moore said, ‘I think if you look at it politically it just probably wasn’t worth the effort. It was useful politically to keep on attacking it, to take the wind out of its sails and make it try to examine itself and get a bit frightened.’ He added, ‘There was a strand in the BBC that she liked – a sort of high-minded public service broadcasting ethos – the daily service, covering state occasions, that kind of thing.’
I met Moore in a formal members’ club in the City, all wood-panelling and discreetly attentive service. I had asked him to tell me about his time as a licence-fee ‘martyr’. Softly and precisely spoken, he described his antipathy towards the licence fee, comparing it to
the tithes that the Church of England used to live off. Very much the same argument was advanced for them, which is that we are doing God’s work – which is basically what the BBC says; it has broadly the same role in society as the Church used to. We’re doing God’s work, and so you’ve got to pay for it. And as with the licence fee so with the tithes. They (a) bore heavily on the people financially, and (b) they were being made to pay for beliefs that they didn’t necessarily share. So they were keeping Archdeacon Grantly in a style to which he was accustomed, even if they were dissenters or atheists.
Moore reached the end of his tether, he said, in 2008 when presenter Jonathan Ross and comedian Russell Brand were heard on BBC Radio 2 leaving messages on actor Andrew Sachs’s answering machine, joking that Brand had, in Ross’s words, ‘fucked your granddaughter’. ‘I thought that this was an absolutely classic example of the sort of arrogance of power that organisations like the BBC get, where they think they can do what the hell they like. It seemed to me to be the BBC’s credit crunch, the equivalent of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and for quite a similar reason: hubris. And I thought it was disgusting, a remarkably disgusting thing to do by Ross and Brand personally, but in a way even more disgusting that the BBC thought they should run it.’ Moore particularly disliked that the whole thing was cloaked in humour. ‘How did a public-service organisation think that its highest-paid person should be a sort of foul-mouthed comedian, and how could they think that they should pay him so much?’ (Ross’s contract was reportedly worth £6 million.) Moore decided not to pay his licence fee until both had left the BBC; eventually he went to court. ‘I was hoping for more publicity on the day, but then Gordon Brown called the election.’ He laughed.
I thought about Moore’s remarks about Thatcher’s tactical abrading of the BBC – pecking away at it, aggressively but gradually – when I encountered Rob Wilson, the Conservative MP for Reading East, who, in his single-minded pursuit of the organisation, had made a modest name for himself. We met in early 2014 in the canteen at Portcullis House, he – thickset, ruddy-faced and square-jawed – making an oddly Di
ckensian-looking couple with his lanky, pale, earnest researcher, who wore dark-rimmed hipster spectacles and took notes of our conversation. Between October 2012 and March 2014 the BBC Trust received 33 letters or emails from Wilson; the DG received 34 – or so I discovered by putting in my own freedom of information request. (‘God knows what the cost of it is; and each one provides a kind of rent-a-quote for The Times or the Sun or whatever,’ said the BBC’s then chairman, Lord Patten, of Wilson’s letter-writing.)
I wondered what Wilson’s constituents made of it. ‘The letters pretty much all deal with what I would regard as significant issues in the public interest,’ he said. Was the BBC a route to a certain kind of fame, I wondered? Was it by adopting a role as the BBC’s most vocal parliamentary critic that he had decided to try to make his name? ‘It’s certainly not about self-promotion, because there are lots of ways you can do that as an MP, and I wouldn’t say the BBC is necessarily the easiest way to do that. But I mean if you’ve got strong opinions, why shouldn’t you write to the BBC Trust?’ Wilson had become the ‘go-to’ MP for journalists seeking a swift anti-BBC quote – though he said he turned down 50 per cent of requests for interviews.
The BBC had enormous culture problems, argued Wilson:
You could draw comparisons with the NHS, because the NHS has similar problems. Management don’t like criticism, staff don’t feel they can speak, change is very difficult to move through the organisation … the BBC has to make a decision about what it wants to be in the future, and with charter renewal coming up this is a good opportunity to do so. But the idea that it can just go on and on and on growing and stuffing people’s wallets full of money at senior level is just not on. It just can’t continue.
Wilson’s analogy with the NHS began to niggle at me: I wondered whether there was a shared technique at work from the right: not to demand anything so radical as the eradication of either the health service or of the BBC, but to undermine them so that public trust might be gradually blunted. Towards the end of our interview, Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, happened to wander over. He asked me jovially, ‘What are you doing talking to this right-wing loony?’
One of the more eloquent critics of the BBC was David Elstein – a veteran broadcaster who had begun his career as a trainee in the corporation. We met at a cafe local to his home in south London; he was leafing through the New Yorker and the London Review of Books as I arrived. The whole BBC structure was perverse, he told me; and its domination of Britons’ news coverage simply bad for democracy. The BBC principle of universality – that it provides something for everyone, and everyone pays the same – was a false goal, he argued, a ‘fraudulent piece of rhetoric’ that existed only in order to justify the licence fee. A smaller licence fee to fund a central corpus of freely available public-service broadcasting would be fairer, he said, with subscription funding the rest and acting as an incentive to make better programmes – more like the 2013 Netflix remake of the 1990 BBC drama House of Cards, or indeed the BBC’s own 2013 detective series The Fall, and less like the wildly popular Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which he regarded as ‘hugely overpraised: juvenile and dismissive of the audience’.
The BBC, he said, caused him to feel a mixture of ‘pride and frustration’. Pride because it was a bastion of Britishness at its best. Frustration that, despite its high level of public funding, it fell short of his expectations: ‘I think the BBC is a fantastic institution, right up there with the monarchy, Parliament; it’s less than a hundred years old and we have a collective identification with it. But on the other hand I feel frustration that it doesn’t do better with such a powerful position. It does a lot of mediocre programming. Not bad programming, just mediocre programming.’
I was curious to know how Elstein had forged his views, and asked him about his family background. Both his parents, he told me, had been brought to Britain from Poland as orphans by the Rothschild Foundation. They had together run a ladies’ outfitter’s in Golders Green. A scholarship boy, he emerged from Cambridge University at nineteen with a double first in history and, in 1964, went straight to the BBC as a trainee. He later worked on Panorama and The Money Programme, and moved to senior positions at Thames, LWT and, later, Channel 5 and Sky, as well as working in independent production. He also applied for the director-generalship of the BBC in 1999, though he didn’t get a final-round interview. But most of his first year at the BBC was spent on attachment to the newly founded Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, where sociologists Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall were doing pioneering work. Hoggart had recently sat on the Pilkington Committee on the future of broadcasting, which had tightened regulation of commercial TV and paved the way for BBC2 and local radio. This was a formative experience: Elstein wrote a paper on the effects of mass media and a mini-thesis on public-service broadcasting. His views ‘did not entirely please Richard’. By contrast with Hoggart, he found the Pilkington view of broadcasting ‘oppressively paternalistic’.
Elstein’s view that subscription should gradually take over from the licence fee was first aired in the 1980s. His disobliging views had caused him to be viewed as a prophet by some; by others as a broken record, harping on about his pet theories, disappointed not to have become DG, informed by his career working for the rivals of the BBC. There is perhaps something of a Cassandra about him: ‘People occasionally mock me and say, “David, it’s only been thirty years since you started this debate. How does it feel not to have succeeded so far?” … There’s a whole parade of BBC executives, media academics and newspaper columnists who hold the licence fee as a kind of article of faith … it’s become almost more important than the BBC itself, or public-service broadcasting itself, and I just feel mildly bewildered by it. It’s just a funding mechanism; it has no moral significance.’ Politically, he called himself a ‘radical centrist’, and said that he had voted for everyone from the Communists to the Conservatives, via the SDP. According to Lord Burns, ‘I think that in the long term he is probably right about some things. David’s problem, though, is that the way he puts his arguments is not designed to build an alliance.’ Another broadcasting veteran said, ‘He actually makes it quite difficult to agree with him: it doesn’t matter how far you go towards him, he will always move himself so that he’s at a more extreme position.’
Such heterodox thinking is as old as the BBC. Captain Peter Eckersley was one of the most significant figures in the early history of British broadcasting, and the BBC’s first chief engineer. He was forced, however, to resign from the corporation in 1929 after it became clear he was having an affair with Dolly Clark, a singer and the estranged wife of BBC conductor and programme organiser Edward Clark. (An undated note in Eckersley’s BBC personal file recounted that ‘on one occasion they were more or less drunk together at a public dinner and the affair created a good deal of talk and scandal, which was used as an opportunity for effecting his departure’.) They married; and after Dolly met Hitler through Unity Mitford, they both became entangled with Oswald Mosley’s fascists, and were enthusiastic pre-war tourists to Germany. But by the time war broke out the couple had separated. She, with her son James Clark, spent the war in Germany, working in the Reich’s English-language radio unit, to which she recruited William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’), notorious for his propaganda broadcasts. Eckersley, remaining in Britain, found his reputation tarnished and was turned down for war work.
All this lay far in the future though, when, in the years before the First World War, young Peter – a cousin of Aldous Huxley – was a schoolboy at Bedales (cold baths, wholesome food and adolescents ‘completely unaware of the world’s unreason’). He was a talented boy in a talented family – his younger brother Roger would go on to become director of programmes at the BBC and his elder brother Thomas was an accomplished physicist who also worked in the field of wireless. In his book The Power Behind the Microphone he remembered a formative event: one night he came home from school to find that Thomas had ‘set up some
experiments on high-frequency currents … I found our playroom filled with lovely and exciting experiments. There were induction coils to make fat sparks, Leyden jars, long black rods of ebonite wound with green silk-covered wire, X-ray tubes and galvanometers. The things, their touch and shape, gave me a sensual pleasure and made me want to understand what they were for.’
In 1906, still a schoolboy, he and a friend set up what they called Wavy Lodge in the school grounds – an old henhouse with benches set up for experiments to test the relative merits of different aerials. They would use wireless to relay the results of cricket matches to the school buildings from distant grounds, using a mobile transmitter carried about on a soapbox fitted with wheels from a perambulator. A decade later, he was a wireless equipment officer in the Royal Flying Corps, where the possibilities of the thermionic valve – which ‘has the power to shrink the world to the compass of a living room’ – were being explored. He was standing next to Major C. E. Prince, who had been a Marconi engineer since 1907, when Prince became the first person to speak by radio to an aeroplane pilot in flight. (‘Hello, Ferdy. If you can hear me now it will be the first time speech has ever been communicated to an aeroplane in flight. Dip if you are hearing me.’ The plane obligingly dipped.)
After the war Eckersley joined Prince at Marconi at Writtle, near Chelmsford, Essex. There he continued to research wireless equipment for aircraft. The young engineers also built a transmitter and made experimental broadcasts to amateur wireless enthusiasts. ‘More and more people became interested in the possession of an apparatus which, fantastically, picked music out of the air,’ he recalled.
The Writtle engineers broadcast from a hut in a field for half an hour a week on Wednesday evenings. ‘We only thought of it as another job of work for which we would be blamed if it went wrong and hardly noticed if it went right,’ remembered Eckersley. One evening he went out for a pub supper before coming in to broadcast. He took charge of the microphone suitably fortified. ‘A certain ebullience, which often overcomes me when I have an audience, prompted a less formal attitude towards the microphone than was customary,’ he remembered. ‘I failed to play all the records … and I went on talking and talking.’
This New Noise Page 14