This New Noise

by Charlotte Higgins

  A wartime propaganda sheet proclaimed: ‘Men, women and even children risk imprisonment and death to hear broadcasts from London. They are the inhabitants of the occupied countries of Europe. They do so because they have learned that the British broadcasts tell them the truth … FROM LONDON COMES THE VOICE OF BRITAIN … THE VOICE OF FREEDOM.’ Tangye Lean, brother of the filmmaker David, who was director of External Services during the war, wrote in his book Voices in the Darkness (1943) of a letter published in 1942 by Goebbels, supposedly having been sent to him from a frontline soldier. The letter analysed ‘the motives inspiring the BBC’s apparent preference for the truth’. What Britain counted on was ‘the slogan already spread abroad before the war, and unfortunately one which had become a fixed conception about the decency and “fair play” of the English’. The notorious truthfulness of the BBC had morphed almost into a national characteristic – or at least a piece of useful national mythology. The ‘truth’ notion played into a centuries-long rhetoric of British exceptionalism: British liberty, British fair play, British imperial virtues.

  In her novel Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald put it like this: ‘Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that the truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective.’ The BBC, she wrote, was ‘scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe’. Fitzgerald was too sly a novelist to write without ambiguity. Human voices are just that: human, and therefore fallible. She compared the truthfulness of the BBC to that of the Delphic Oracle – notorious for locking the truth inside slanted speech, for tricking the unwary with riddles.

  Towards the end of the war, much soul-searching occurred at the BBC about the future of its overseas broadcasting. Even before the onset of the cold war, the government was already recognising the value of continuing directly to fund it in what was likely to be a scenario of post-war ‘disturbance’. The BBC, on the other hand, was anxious about the danger of political interference in its broadcasting agenda, unprotected as it was by the added distance from the state provided by the licence fee. From the end of the war until Foreign Office funding for the World Service ceased in the spring of 2014, there was a continuing negotiation between the BBC’s ‘notions of editorial integrity and independence on the one hand, and the desire to exert influence over programme-making to bring it in line with British geopolitical interests, on the other’, in the words of Webb in London Calling, his history of the World Service during the cold war. Sir John Tusa, managing director of the World Service from 1986 to 1993, described his relationship with the Foreign Office as ‘a rather sophisticated quadrille: they knew perfectly well that if they were ever seen to be directing or shaping World Service output it would undermine the whole basis of its credibility and authority worldwide’.

  What of the World Service now? I spoke to Peter Horrocks not long before he stepped down as its head in 2015. He envisioned a modern service that was more about exchange and reciprocity than the old metropolitan idea of wisdom radiating into the world from Bush House. Increasingly, locally based, bilingual journalists were bringing fresh insight to stories for the World Service, he said, and they were in turn enriching the BBC’s foreign news operation as a whole – Kenyan Anne Soy, for example, who reported on the Westgate shopping mall shootings in Nairobi in 2013; or Nomsa Maseko, a South African journalist who, on the day Nelson Mandela died, movingly recalled her own memories of when he was set free. This approach in turn, Horrocks told me, might be seen as reflecting a modern sense of Britishness: one that is multicultural; one that is more porously open to world influence; one that looks a little more like what one might actually see in the streets of that world city, London.

  But there remained many questions. Why should the British citizenry pay for this soft diplomacy through their licence fee? What was in it for them when the BBC supports Hausa or Somali or Kirundi services? The services in turn were placed in a position where they would have to fight their corner against domestic output rather than being protected by a separate funding structure (though the BBC would still need a Foreign Office sign-off to wholly cut, or indeed introduce, a language service). Would the World Service end up being simply absorbed into the foreign news operation, with no identity or role of its own? At the same time, moves to support the World Service commercially were also causing disquiet, on two fronts – first, that the BBC’s enormous brand power could attract advertising revenues away from less mighty competitors; second, that the enduring reputation of the World Service for accurate, even-handed news coverage could be undermined by the intrusion of commercial concerns.

  Allan Little had been a BBC foreign correspondent in many countries. When we met, in a cafe in Edinburgh in the spring of 2014, he told me about reporting from Freetown during the Sierra Leonian civil war, seeing the whole of Siaka Stevens Street stop dead as people crowded ‘in every doorway, on every market stall’ round transistors to hear the World Service’s Focus on Africa. He remembered the elderly Jewish man in Paris who agreed to give him an interview because as a boy in hiding in wartime Poland the BBC was the only way he knew to keep on hoping; he remembered the old independence fighter in Zimbabwe who ‘hated the British’ yet ‘in secret, when he wanted to know what was happening in the world, he said, “We listened to you and we trusted you.”’ Little regarded the trust placed in the World Service and the BBC, fiercely guarded across the world and over generations, as a kind of covenant. ‘What a legacy. What an inheritance,’ he said. ‘I worry that this is not understood in Britain by the licence-fee payer who just reads how crap the BBC is every day in the papers. I worry especially now that the World Service is funded by the licence fee and has to take its chances alongside the ballgowns of Strictly Come Dancing and the special effects in Doctor Who.’

  When we spoke, Little was in the thick of reporting the run-up to the Scottish referendum on independence. The months before the vote had seen the BBC occupy a delicate position. Its own institutional fate was intimately bound up with the fate of the union. And, unlike any other organisation that stood to be divided in the case of a yes vote, it was also charged with reflecting and reporting the referendum campaigns impartially. The BBC had reacted to that problem by declining to comment on or discuss any potential break-up of the corporation, even in private – there was no paper trail inside the organisation that could have been subject to a freedom-of-information request. And yet there must have been internal conversations, scenario-planning quietly taking place off the books.

  There were some in Scotland who believed that the BBC’s very nature, as a pan-British broadcaster, hampered its attempts to report fairly the events that could lead to its own transformation; as a British broadcaster, it must inevitably have a pro-union bias. Many felt that the vivid and urgent debate on Scottish nationhood had been under-represented by the BBC, certainly in its main UK coverage, until the months immediately preceding the vote. For others, objections to the nature of the coverage lay in the observation that knowledge of the Scottish situation varied wildly between individual journalists. There were those within the BBC in Scotland who complained of a lack of understanding from colleagues in London: a certain failure of imagination in grasping the emotions and arguments of the Yes campaign, even a sneer creeping into the voice when the Yes camp was discussed. As the referendum approached, disquiet about the BBC’s coverage increased to the point where protests were held outside its Glasgow headquarters, with the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, marked out for special ire from elements of the Yes camp, who saw his reporting as unbalanced. For some, the BBC became a metonym of the argument as a whole. Just as to many in Scotland it seemed objectionable that decisions about Scotland should be taken in Westminster, so it seemed objectionable that decisions about Scottish broadcasting should be taken in Portland Place.

  The relationship between the BBC and the UK at large has never been uncon
tested or straightforward. Of Scottish audiences, only 48 per cent, according to the corporation’s 2012–13 annual report, believed that the BBC was good at representing the life of their nation (as opposed to 50 per cent of Northern Irish, 53 per cent of Welsh and 58 per cent of English audiences). Since 1922 the BBC has had an especially careful path to tread in Northern Ireland. David Elstein compared the great buildings established by the BBC outside London – the new MediaCity HQ in Salford; Pacific Quay, the David Chipperfield glass-and-sandstone box on the Clyde in Glasgow – to the castles thrown up by Edward I in Wales.

  Be they imperial fortresses or not, they are also projections of certain specific kinds of modernity – prefigured by John Birt’s last speech as director general, in which he urged, ‘We need to dismantle the dingy, cramped mid-twentieth-century warrens we currently inhabit, and to create modern, open, technically advanced workplaces’ – as if only certain kinds of architectural carapace could contain and project the digital future he glimpsed on the horizon. Peter Salmon, head of BBC North, told me that he had visited California tech companies to seek inspiration for the Salford building: ‘We wanted the place to be very obviously a BBC building, you know, full of BBC values but to feel like it was a younger media company with the colour schemes and the collaboration areas and the kitchens, and the use of space, and the use of technology.’ Salmon was dazzled by the Google offices, but those of Pixar were those he felt most drawn to: ‘I loved the feel, I loved the way it felt non-hierarchical. I loved the sense of creatives as heroes, as it were, with a creative mission that everybody seemed to share.’

  The Pacific Quay building in Glasgow is a simple design with sandstone-built studios stacked in the centre of a vast top-lit box edged with offices. The feeling, when I visited in May 2014, was calm and austere. Reith’s imposing, eighteenth-century clawfoot desk struck a curious note, a grand old object stranded amid the defiantly new, its leather-covered surface indented with the stains left by the first DG’s tea cups. It stood near the workstation of Ken MacQuarrie, the controller of BBC Scotland – who would sit there, he said jokingly, when he wanted to feel ‘particularly Reithian’. From the window I spotted the square towers of the church where Reith’s father preached. In the foreground was the imposing Finnieston crane, once used for loading locomotives on to ships for export, now retained as a symbol of the Clyde’s heritage.

  The BBC was the new industry for this patch of Glasgow. But, rising up four square and imposing from the riverbank, it looked a little lonely, a great vessel stranded. Despite the new hotel that was being thrown up alongside it when I visited (soon, I was sure, to be filled with visiting BBC staff), despite the scattering of digital businesses around it, the economic downturn had put paid, at least for a time, to the bustling townscape that was supposed to have accompanied it: a street of shops and restaurants was to have been constructed, stretching from the BBC offices to the nearest subway station. The BBC buildings at Salford and at Pacific Quay had been conceived not simply as broadcasting offices and studios but tools of post-industrial urban regeneration.

  The early BBC contains a story of the waxing and waning of the power of its non-metropolitan stations. In the 1920s local and relay stations – in places such as Stoke, Hull and Nottingham – broadcast their own services, a distant precursor to the BBC local-radio networks established in the late 1960s. But as the building of high-power transmitters enabled London to broadcast nationally, the local services were swept up into larger, tidier regional schemes, providing listeners with an ‘alternative programme’ to that on the national service. The essential move, according to Asa Briggs’s history of the BBC, was towards metropolitanism: ‘The BBC was following all the other mass media of the early twentieth century in bolstering London’s supremacy, and the proud “provincialism” of the Victorian age, already in tatters in many parts of the country, continued to fade unlamented until long after the Second World War.’ There were rearguard actions: reporting on conditions in the regional services in 1936, Charles Siepmann, Hilda Matheson’s successor as head of talks, urged against over-centralisation, noting that ‘the provinces are the seed ground of talent’.

  Siepmann was thinking of broadcasters such as Olive Shapley, who had started work for the Manchester station in 1935. (On her first day she said to a female colleague, ‘I know nothing about broadcasting; you must help me.’ The reply came: ‘The first thing you have to know, dear, is how the gentlemen take their tea.’) Two years later, she was given access to one of the first mobile broadcasting units, a 27-foot truck that toddled along at a maximum speed of 20 mph. Her first programme made on the road was called £sd: A Study in Shopping. ‘We caused a sensation when we parked the thing in Sowerby Bridge. I, feeling an utter fool and holding a microphone at the end of a long lead … recorded a conversation between a shop assistant and a millworker … In a humble way, I think we were making broadcasting history,’ she recalled in her memoir. ‘For a year or two I lived a strange life, in the cabs of long-distance lorries, down coalmines, in dosshouses, on longboats on the canals … nothing could stop me.’

  But her efforts to describe the warp and weft of northern life were not always well received. In 1939 she made a series called Canal Journey, interviewing men and women working on the Leeds–Liverpool waterway. She recalled that the Listener radio critic complained of ‘obscure dialect’ that was ‘downright unintelligible’; the writer was ‘prepared to swear that very few Londoners understood more than one word in six’. Shapley remembered thinking, ‘So much for bringing the voice of the people to the nation!’

  The theory of the regional stations, according to Peter Eckersley, was that each should be ‘typical of the taste and culture of the region it served … [The scheme] gave full scope for enthusiastic and non-conforming programme directors to use their new wavelength experimentally.’ Eckersley strongly deprecated what happened in practice: he felt that they had been unable to liberate themselves from the stranglehold of Broadcasting House, and the scheme was ‘used as an overflow of accumulated “hotchpotch” material rather than an outlet for new ideas’. (This was perhaps somewhat unfair, given the work of Shapley and others; there comes to mind, for example, W. H. Auden’s play On Hadrian’s Wall, with a score by Benjamin Britten, broadcast from Newcastle in 1937.) As so often an anti-establishment voice within the BBC, Eckersley reached the conclusion that a true ‘alternative programme’ would be provided only if the regional stations were cut free and funded commercially.

  But as Eckersley himself pointed out, commercial broadcasting was already a going concern in Britain by 1929, ‘if not illegal … [then] frowned upon by grandmotherly authority … Wireless waves flip across frontiers with persistent disregard for regulation,’ he wrote. Stations such as Radio Normandie sprang up, based on the Continent but broadcasting into Britain. Their success, he drily noted, was aided by Reith’s strong sabbatarianism: Sunday programming at the BBC was limited in quantity and dull in quality. ‘The ordinary listener did not feel that he was committing any sin in being amused on Sunday and turned from what he considered dreary local broadcasting to amusing foreign programmes,’ he wrote.

  Radios Normandie and Luxembourg were the ancestors of the buccaneering offshore ‘pirate’ stations such as Caroline and London – training grounds of figures such as Kenny Everett, Dave Lee Travis and John Peel, in the early 1960s providing the musical education of many a young listener for whom the BBC’s Light Programme was an irrelevance. In 1967 the pirates were effectively outlawed by the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, and Radio 1 created as a nationalised pop station employing many of the former offshore DJs.

  That same year, and as a result of the recommendations of the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting of 1962, BBC local radio was also established. It was intended, wrote Frank Gillard, then the corporation’s director of sound broadcasting, as ‘a running serial story of local life in all its aspects … the relationship between local radio station and local paper would not be one of
competition’ (a claim that has long been disputed, especially in the current era of depletion of the local press). The third local station to start broadcasting, on 14 March 1968, was Radio Stoke. One of the voices first heard was that of John Snagge, who had broadcast for the 1920s relay station 6ST, Radio Stoke’s ancestor. He began: ‘This is BBC Radio Stoke-on-Trent. We must apologise to listeners for the break in transmission which occurred at twelve o’clock midnight, on October 30th, 1928. This was due to circumstances beyond our control. Normal transmission has now been resumed.’

  Radio Stoke was four years old when I was born, and it broadcast into the neighbourhood where I grew up. I spent a day in the station in the spring of 2014. In the years that separated that visit from my childhood, Stoke had transformed completely: when I was young it was a landscape of pottery factories and mines, but, though some manufacturing remained, it was much diminished. But Radio Stoke was still there, vying for listeners with the local independent station, Signal. In the 10.10 a.m. news meeting (only one woman present), the stories were of the potential impact of the high-speed rail link HS2; of the possibility of fracking in the county; and of the extraction of methane gas (the last a remnant of the long-gone mining industry). A hugely important, long-running story had concerned the poor care and high mortality rate at Stafford Hospital in the south of the county, which had led to a public inquiry and the dissolution of the trust that ran it. Someone talked about the compulsory purchase of a city-centre pub for development; another of cars parked on pavements, causing problems for disabled people and those with young children.