This New Noise

by Charlotte Higgins

  Later, I spoke to Ajmal Hussain, who presented a show on the station: he told me about trying to present a nuanced picture of the sizeable local Asian community. ‘They just really want an honest view of themselves without the conversation automatically turning to grooming, to forced marriages, to terrorism, which is where it tends to go to,’ he said. Terry Goodwin, the station’s news editor, spoke to me of the importance of reflecting back to itself ‘a place that it doesn’t feel like it’s very well loved from the outside. That’s the thing that Radio Stoke does: it really cares about the city and it cares about the area, which, let’s be honest, a lot of the country doesn’t.’

  *

  In Scotland, I had found that one did not have to talk to many people about the BBC before hearing a note of exasperation. There was clearly a great deal of passionate love for the BBC – enough for the Scottish National Party’s white paper on independence to have felt the need to reassure voters that ‘programmes like EastEnders, Doctor Who, and Strictly Come Dancing, and channels like CBeebies will still be available in Scotland’. But people both within and beyond the BBC spoke to me – off the record, in the sensitive period running up to the referendum – of decades-long frustration, despite a number of concerted efforts by the BBC to improve, in its news coverage, its feeling for national difference. Scots told me of waking up to headlines on nurses’ pay – except in Scotland it was different. Of teachers strikes ‘across the country’ – except in Scotland it was different. Of legal matters, of the NHS, of cigarette packaging, of school examination results, of local elections. Except in Scotland it was different. The inverse was also true: serious events in Scotland were, it was felt, under-represented on the national bulletins.

  As far back as 1944, a pamphlet, published in the run-up to a charter renewal by the Saltire Society, urged that ‘revenue from Scottish licence fees’ should be ‘spent in Scotland’, and demanded the development of an ‘enlightened and stimulating Scottish Broadcasting Service … What we have aimed at is best described, perhaps, as a Broadcasting Service with frequent international contacts, initiated from Scotland and designed to meet the needs and wishes of Scottish listeners.’ Not a million miles away from what was being proposed by the Yes campaign in 2014.

  A sense of dislocation between Scottish listeners and the BBC was only increased when the nation gained a devolved parliament in 1998. With colleagues, the then head of BBC Scotland, John McCormick, devised the notion of a Scottish six o’clock TV news bulletin. It would run for an hour, replacing the regional bulletin, Reporting Scotland, which started at 6.30 p.m. In Queen Margaret Drive, the old Glasgow HQ, it didn’t feel like an especially radical move: after all, the nation had its own news bulletins on BBC Radio Scotland. And there would be a fresh news agenda provided by Holyrood. There would be some tweaks to the running order and a consolidation of news concerning Scotland. Viewers had found it irritatingly repetitive, for example, when a Scottish story that had been low down the running order in the British bulletin was the lead five minutes later on Reporting Scotland. The notion was to keep the 1 p.m. and 9 p.m. programmes untouched: the 6 p.m. had always been weighted towards domestic news.

  The Broadcasting Council for Scotland, which provided audience feedback from the nation to the governors, and the impeccably establishment Norman Drummond, a Church of Scotland minister and the BBC governor for Scotland, were strongly in favour of the idea. The governors as a whole were divided, with the chair, Sir Christopher Bland, keeping his cards close to his chest. The director Sir Richard Eyre, then a governor, was pro. He recalled, ‘[The DG] John Birt’s thesis was that the BBC was a crucial binding agent in making Great Britain great. My view – I’d lived in Scotland for six years – was that it was the opposite. I think it’s incredibly divisive and you only have to spend a bit of time in Scotland to realise that the BBC is regarded as English broadcasting and those feelings run very, very deep. I said you could achieve a very clever piece of politics by enfranchising a Scottish news at six.’

  Birt was utterly opposed to the Scottish Six. In The Harder Path, he described the episode as ‘a bitter battle to prevent the BBC being split apart by the fissiparous forces of devolution’. The Scottish Six risked the unity of the BBC, and in turn of Britain itself. The Six would be the thin end of the wedge:

  I was deeply resistant to the proposal. It could have dire consequences for the BBC and unintended consequences for the United Kingdom … once the Six was conceded there would be no argument for resisting the takeover of the One and the Nine as well. Within a few years there would be no UK-wide news on the BBC. I calculated that this domino effect would continue, with a momentum of its own, until eventually the BBC itself was either turned into a weak, federal institution – each part going its own way – or was broken up, with an English Broadcasting Corporation headquartered in London.

  Talking to a BBC employee who had been connected with the process at the time, it was clear how frustrating this reasoning had been: Birt, with his perhaps rather literal turn of mind, was convinced that the other bulletins would follow the Six into Scottish oblivion – but, I was told, just because there was a certain logic to his prediction, did not mean that it would actually happen, or that anyone particularly wanted it to happen.

  Arguments were spat forth over October and November 1998. There was horror when a document on news strategy was published – with no mention of a potential Scottish Six – before the governors had taken their decision. It looked like a stitch-up, a fait accompli. The splash in the Daily Record for 26 November 1998 read: ‘Wanted: for the cold-blooded murder of Scotland’s own news programme.’ There were mugshots of the BBC executives concerned – including that of Tony Hall, now the director general, then the head of news.

  Only later, courtesy of his memoir, did it emerge that Birt had made a direct approach to the prime minister, Tony Blair, to keep the powerful cohort of Scottish Labour MPs on side. A Scottish Six would ‘encourage separatist tendencies’, Birt argued. Blair agreed, and asked Peter Mandelson to marshal Labour’s forces; later James Purnell, then an adviser at Number 10, who later returned to the BBC as director of strategy and digital, took on the task. A decade and a half later, Birt’s appeal to the government still hurt and bewildered those who were involved in the Scottish Six plans – BBC loyalists whose intention was not to threaten the institution but to improve its service for its audience.

  Bland, at the time pleading compromise, sounded implacable on the argument when I spoke to him before the Scottish referendum, in early 2014. ‘The idea that there’s a Scottish view of the war in Kosovo or the Afghanistan war is just nonsense,’ he said. ‘It would be hugely expensive, totally pointless and just satisfying a foolish wish for a tartan-badged news.’ The ideas for an SBS were fanciful, he thought. ‘If there were genuinely to be a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation with a Scottish licence fee and Scottish audience, it would be strapped for cash and talent. The Scots benefit, as do the Welsh and the Northern Irish, as do we all, from a unified and strong organisation because of the importance of scale. You can’t afford four separate newsrooms. You just can’t.’ Birt also entered the fray before the referendum: writing for the Guardian, he warned of a Yes vote resulting in a diminished BBC for the rump of the UK and a small, enfeebled Scottish Broadcasting Service. Scottish viewers would end up having to pay to see BBC programmes, whether by subscribing to channels or by the SBS’s buying in shows. ‘Whatever is asserted wishfully in the white paper, the BBC will have no alternative but to act in the interests of its licence payers and to seek the best possible commercial terms for the sale of its programmes in Scotland, not least because of the financial impoverishment it will just have suffered. And, of course, there may be commercial broadcasters in a new Scotland willing to pay more for the BBC’s most successful programmes than an impecunious SBS,’ he wrote. It was all about scale, he argued: a Yes vote would result in Scots being unable to enjoy the possibility, open to them since the 1707–8 Act of Union,
of making a ‘massive impact on a big stage’.

  Needless to say, that was not the view of those behind the SNP’s white paper on the future of Scotland. The SNP’s vision was of a Scottish Broadcasting Service built on Scotland’s share of the licence fee and a proportionate share of BBC Worldwide profits. Viewers would be better off than they had been hitherto because, according to the SNP’s figures, they would have twice the income as the sum currently spent by the BBC in Scotland (£345 million a year as opposed to £175 million). Under a proposed joint venture with the BBC, Scottish audiences would continue to receive BBC channels and services in exchange for programming created in Scotland. The SBS would also create a new TV channel and radio network. The SNP was looking towards Germany, with its federalised, regional broadcasters; and Denmark, with its successful recent stint of international drama hits, with enthusiasm.

  This negotiating position hung in the air: there was no sign that the BBC accepted the SNP’s figures, or would be willing to embark on a joint venture, or would regard Scottish productions such as River City and Shetland as a fair ‘swap’ for EastEnders and Strictly Come Dancing. Notions of precisely how a new national broadcaster would be constituted were only lightly sketched in. Independence from government, regulation and governance were unclear: there was no detailed blueprint. Meanwhile, staff at BBC Scotland were nervously awaiting their fates. The white paper stated that the SBS would be ‘initially’ founded on the staff and assets of BBC Scotland.

  On 18 September the voters decided, by a margin of 55 to 45 per cent, to remain in the Union – and, by extension, to continue their relationship with the BBC. But, like the UK as a whole, the corporation still had choices to make in the wake of the existential debates that renewed and animated political discourse in Scotland. How the BBC responds in the long term is crucial – not just for the population of Scotland, but for everyone in the UK. Its actions will go beyond narrow questions of broadcasting policy and into the realms of nationhood and identity, of which the BBC is such a profoundly important carrier. In the future, the BBC will have to demonstrate that it can express multiple and interlocking identities through all parts of the UK with suppleness, sensitivity and understanding.

  10

  ‘The monoliths will shake’

  ‘There were no sealed orders to open. The commission was of the scantiest nature. Very few knew what broadcasting meant; none knew what it might become.’ So John Reith in 1924 recalled the previous eighteen months of his life as the general manager of the brand-new British Broadcasting Company. What Reith did recognise, instinctively and immediately, was the magnitude of his responsibility: ‘There was something big, even colossal, conveyed in the nature of the contract which had been undertaken.’ Reith and his ‘bohemian flock’ (as head of variety Eric Maschwitz described the band of early colleagues) were out to invent the future. Reith, that monstrous, tyrannical, tortured man, set his furious gaze at the new technological world of wireless telegraphy and saw that it could be, should be, placed in the service of society as a whole. The job was to ‘establish a certain number of broadcasting stations and transmit therefrom, at certain times, programmes composed of whatever a programme can be composed’, he wrote, but he knew that was only the most mechanistic and banal way of describing the task and the opportunity. What Reith saw was that he had in his hands an instrument that could inform, educate and entertain not just the privileged – but everyone.

  In 1922, only a handful of wireless pioneers actually owned sets (we might think of them as like the Internet enthusiasts of the early 1990s, eccentric outriders in whose footsteps few realised we were all to follow). Peter Eckersley had yet to stud the landscape with the transmitters that would allow a BBC service to fan out to all parts of the UK. And yet Reith saw that broadcasting could one day have a number of extraordinary qualities. First, that the licence fee – often now characterised as an unpleasant piece of regressive taxation – was in fact a passport to equality. No one would be able to pay more and get a better BBC; there would be no first, second or third class. ‘The same music rings as sweetly in mansion as in cottage … There is nothing in it which is exclusive to those who pay more, or who are considered in one way or another more worthy of attention.’ So wrote Reith in Broadcast Over Britain.

  Second, everyone would be able to access the BBC in private. Your tastes, your culture, your enthusiasms, your politics – all of these could be developed without the eye of anyone upon you. If you closed the door, no one, not the busybodies down the road, nor the religious authorities, nor the government could track what you were listening to. (It is no coincidence that, during the Third Reich, communal television viewing in Fernsehstuben, public ‘television parlours’ was encouraged: private tastes and ideas are dangerous to a certain kind of regime.) ‘An event, be it speech, or music, or play, or ceremony is certainly broadcast for any and all to receive, but it seems to be personal to the individual hearer, and is brought to his very room,’ wrote Reith of the simultaneously public and private quality of broadcasting.

  Third, Reith was convinced that broadcasting, with this peculiar capability of reaching everyone, should also provide for everyone. Using the privilege brought by the income from the licence fee, it should serve the thinly scattered few as well as the many. ‘With us, “minorities” are very important sections of the community, and a “limited appeal” may still involve many hundreds of thousands,’ he wrote.

  In the 1920s, the BBC had no past, only a future. It had plenty of difficulties to negotiate – then as now, a hostile and protective press, a government to convince of its ideas, enormous practical and technical hurdles. But compared with the present time, when the BBC is both beloved institution and political and cultural battle ground, an organisation whose every movement is minutely examined and raked over, it was free: a start-up with an inventive young team, idealistic and experimental. Maschwitz recalled the company’s first headquarters: ‘Savoy Hill was like a small, excited club whose members came in to work in the early morning and stayed on until Big Ben chimed midnight – for the good reason that there was always something interesting afoot.’ The first chapter of Broadcast Over Britain is called ‘Uncharted Seas’, and that was what there was: a vast and empty ocean of possibility. The first BBC director of programmes, Arthur Burrows, in The Story of Broadcasting, also published in 1924, used the same metaphor: ‘What lies ahead in that uncharted sea, the future? Broadcasting today, despite its appeal to the public imagination, is really only in the position of the prehistoric fisherman who put out a few hundred yards from shore in his frail coracle or dug-out … We may be certain, therefore, that the work of the past few years … is but shallow-water fishing in relation to ocean navigation.’ In those early days, it had the rickety sense of possibility and excitement that we might associate with a start-up today. Cecil Lewis was already nostalgic by 1924:

  Great days! Already I look back on them with a certain wistfulness and regret … The microphone that is tied up with bits of string, the switches that are falling to pieces, and the gadgets that won’t work unless they are coaxed by someone who knows how. When things don’t always work infallibly! When something goes wrong and one has to step into the breach and talk nonsense for half an hour … isn’t it preferable, after all, to the watertight compartments and petty differences that come later in the well-built organisations? … It was a democracy – short-lived alas! A democracy of young pioneers … doomed to be swept quickly into the inexorable mills of civilisation and organisation.

  There is a quality of inventiveness, ingenuity and resourcefulness that has run through the BBC. That no engineer, digital or otherwise, now sits on the executive board, would have surprised Peter Eckersley – for him the BBC was as importantly an engineering company as a broadcaster, and he and his successors had the institutional clout to match. He himself foresaw multichannel cable TV (as well as air-conditioning and double-glazing) in 1941. ‘I have a dream about the future. I see the interior of a living
room. The wide windows are formed from double panes of glass, fixed and immovable. The conditioned air is fresh and warm … flush against the wall there is a translucent screen with numbered strips of lettering running across it … These are the titles describing the many different “broadcasting” programmes which can be heard by just pressing the corresponding button,’ he wrote.

  John Birt had a similar moment of vatic clarity, albeit over a shorter time frame, in his last speech as director general, in 1999. In years to come, he said:

  You will carry with you wherever you go a mobile device to gain instant access to the many bounties of this world … it will enable us to call up programmes and services on demand, at a moment of our choosing … anyone will be able to make and to publish their own programmes … In a total digital world, no one will wait about for a programme of their choice to be transmitted. They will want all programmes on demand at a time of their choosing. They will want services that focus on their personal passions, perspectives and needs. And they will want those services to be available on all media, wherever they are – at home; in the workplace; or on the move.

  It was a pretty accurate piece of prophecy bearing in mind that he was speaking six years before YouTube was activated in February 2005, and eight years before the release of the iPhone in June 2007 and the launch of iPlayer that December. In fact iPlayer was the product, so BBC folk memory goes, of a drunken night out in 2003 after a digital worker got into trouble posting an inappropriate photograph of the model Katie Price on the BBC Three website. Requiring a redemptive idea to stave off disgrace, he and colleagues came up with the notion of a video -on-demand service for the channel. Four years and 86 internal meetings later, iPlayer was born. Such is the frequently unheroic nature of invention.