Without the BBC we would be poorer in spirit. We would know less about the world: our cultural, musical, political lives would be diminished, our curiosity neither so piqued nor so sated. It threads itself through all our lives. The BBC, in my view, was unquestionably worth fighting for, worth preserving and worth championing. It was worth defending despite all its myriad flaws, flaws that the BBC ought to be better at acknowledging and solving, flaws that its audience and critics ought to be able to discuss subtly, without bullying and hysteria. The BBC needs constantly to reinvent itself; like a church, it must earn, and cannot wholly take for granted, the patience of the faithful. Those who love it expect much from it: we expect more from it. We cheer it on, but we urge it to do better. We still believe. We do not wish to see it stumble. We do not wish to hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.
A Note on Sources
Much of the research for this book was gleaned through interviews with BBC employees past and present and those who know the organisation well. When directly quoted, subjects are named except in the rare cases when individuals chose to speak off the record.
As I was finishing the project, too late to be of use to me, an important resource was made available by the BBC: a searchable archive of Radio Times listings at http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk.
BBC copyright material reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
1 Reith of the BBC
The key reading matter here is The Birth of Broadcasting (1961) the first volume of Asa Briggs’s The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Reith’s autobiography Into the Wind (1949) sketches out his early life, and his Broadcast Over Britain (1924) is a key statement of early BBC ideology. Ian McIntyre’s The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith (1993) reveals much of the darker side of the first director general. The Reith Diaries (1979), edited by Charles Stuart, are a heavily compressed volume of the man’s vast daily output. The Crawford Parliamentary Report of 1925 gives a crucial account of political thinking on the BBC.
Malcolm Muggeridge’s interviews with Reith, filmed for BBC2 in 1967, are held in the BBC archive. They give a vivid sense of the former DG’s looming presence and unquiet mind.
2 ‘People, telephones, alarms, excursions’: Hilda Matheson
Eric Maschwitz’s often hilarious account of the BBC’s Savoy Hill years is in his memoir No Chip on My Shoulder (1957). The recollections of Matheson by Lionel Fielden come from his rather whimsical memoir The Natural Bent (1960). He also wrote an account of her for her obituary volume Hilda Matheson (no editor credited) – a slim book with a small print run published by the Hogarth Press, fairly hard to track down but readable in the London School of Economics library. From this volume come the memories of her mother, her Oxford tutor Lettice Fisher and Nancy Astor as well as those of H. G. Wells and Ethyl Smyth. Richard Lambert’s book Ariel and All His Quality (1940) contains a sympathetic sketch of Matheson.
Her own words come from three main sources. First, her delightful, earnest and wise 1933 book Broadcasting, which she wrote after leaving the BBC. Second, the many bureaucratic traces (memos and letters) that she left, now held by the Corporation’s Written Archives Centre. Third and most vivid is her copious correspondence with Vita Sackville-West. Her letters are now held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Yale. Extracts are reproduced by kind permission of the Vita Sackville-West estate.
The most important secondary sources on Matheson are Stoker (1999), a biography by Michael Carney; and Kate Murphy’s PhD thesis, ‘“On an Equal Footing with Men?”: Women and Work at the BBC, 1923–1939’ (2011). The last is available online.
3 Inform, educate, entertain
Eric Maschwitz’s No Chip on My Shoulder (1957) is again useful for its lively evocation of the Savoy Hill years. Arthur Burrows’s The Story of Broadcasting and Cecil Lewis’s Broadcasting From Within (both 1924) were written more or less on the spot. The Grierson film is available via the British Film Institute DVD box set Addressing the Nation: The GPO Film Unit Collection, Volume 1 or else in libraries through screenonline.org.
The main sources on Edward Clark are his voluminous and often startling personal file in the BBC Written Archives Centre, and Jenny Doctor’s scholarly work The BBC and Ultra-modern Music, 1922–1936 (1999). Elisabeth Lutyens’s autobiography A Goldfish Bowl (1972) includes a sketch of her husband (though she fails to mention his son or first marriage) and the biography of Lutyens by M. and S. Harries, A Pilgrim Soul (1989), has further details. I am grateful to Dr Doctor for giving me a long and generous interview about Clark in particular and musical conditions in the early BBC in general.
It was my brother Rupert Higgins who first mentioned Ludwig Koch’s autobiography Memoirs of a Birdman (1955) to me. From his description it was a short leap to realising that Penelope Fitzgerald had based her character Dr Vogel (‘Dr Bird’) on him in her elegant BBC novel Human Voices (1980). Koch left a fascinating trail in the BBC Written Archives Centre (mostly vigorously conducted disputes about fees and time expended on projects), and a number of his programmes, as well as interviews with him, can be heard in the National Sound Archives at the British Library. There is a 2009 Radio 4 documentary about his work, Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature, available on the BBC website.
Lew Grade’s autobiography Still Dancing (1988) conveys how the Winogradsky brothers rose from being impoverished East Enders to giants of show business. His nephew Michael Grade’s autobiography It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (1989) is also useful.
The point about the alternative comedians of the early 1980s being sought out by the BBC’s head of light entertainment for BBC2 is made in Louis Barfe’s Turned Out Nice Again (2009).
For the paragraphs on The Great War, I drew on an interview with and a paper by Taylor Wilding. The paper was given at the Science Museum in April 2014 as part of ‘BBC2: Origin, Influence, Audiences – a 50th Anniversary Conference’. There is a selection of interviews extracted from the programmes (‘The Great War Interviews’) available on BBC iPlayer and episodes can be seen on YouTube.
Work by Adam Curtis can be seen at bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis.
Texts for all the previous MacTaggart lectures, including Dennis Potter’s, are available at the Guardian Edinburgh Television Festival website: http://www.geitf.co.uk/GEITF/mactaggart-hall-of-fame.
Matheson’s recollection at the end of the chapter is found in Broadcasting (1933).
4 ‘Television is a bomb about to burst’: Grace Wyndham Goldie
The first port of call on Grace Wyndham Goldie is her own book on politics and broadcasting, Facing the Nation (1977), which also includes memories of working at Alexandra Palace. Her key early writings on the power of television are ‘Viewing Television’ in the Listener of 16 June 1937 and a chapter entitled ‘Television’, in Made for Millions (1947). Her criticism can be read ad libitum in 1930s editions of the Listener – assuming you aren’t sidetracked by fiction reviews by E. M. Forster, stories by Elizabeth Bowen and other myriad delights.
For her detailed memories and well-articulated views on broadcasting there are also three long interviews conducted with her as part of the BBC’s oral-history holdings, covering her entire life and career as a critic, a civil servant, in BBC radio and finally in television. They were conducted by Tony Trebble, Huw Wheldon and Frank Gillard in 1977. My thanks to Robert Seatter and his colleagues in the BBC history department for making transcripts available. Material is reproduced by kind permission of the Grace Wyndham Goldie Trust. Unless otherwise stated, quotations from Wyndham Goldie in this chapter derive from these interviews.
The BBC Written Archives hold plentiful material on Wyndham Goldie, including a well-stocked file on the televising of the 1950 general election that encompasses memos, scripts and set layouts. Material was also gleaned from the WAC file on Tonight. Dr David Butler’s aptitude for television is described in Facing the Nation; the man himself very kindly shared
his memories of the night of the 1950 election with me in person. John Grist is the author of a biography, Grace Wyndham Goldie (2006), which draws on his own memories of working for her as well as archive material and her correspondence with her husband Frank (the last not consulted directly by me).
Goldie crops up in the autobiographies of those who worked for her, including Alasdair Milne’s DG (1988), David Attenborough’s Life on Air (2003) and Woodrow Wyatt’s Confessions of an Optimist (1985). Antony Jay’s memories of Tonight come from an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Reunion first broadcast on 2 May 2010, and available on the BBC website.
5 The great, the good and the damned
Former directors general like to write their memoirs. Of most use in this chapter were Reith’s Into the Wind (1949), Birt’s The Harder Path (2002), and Hugh Carleton Greene’s The Third Floor Front (1969). The last is not so much a memoir as a collection of speeches and writings. Birt’s outgoing lecture as DG, ‘The Prize and the Price’, given under the auspices of the New Statesman at Banqueting House in Whitehall on 6 July 1999, is a fascinating and revealing document. Hugh Carleton Greene’s Desert Island Discs can be heard on the BBC website. Balancing Birt’s account of his own tenure is a fascinating anthropological study of the BBC conducted over the period when his reforms were being enacted: Georgina Born’s Uncertain Vision (2004). A highly entertaining view, clearly sourced from journalists working under the new regime, is Chris Horrie’s and Steve Clarke’s Fuzzy Monsters (1994).
6 ‘A spot of bother’
Alasdair Milne’s own account of his director-generalship, DG (1988), gives his version of the Real Lives scandal. My colleague Lisa O’Carroll is the author of a fascinating article, ‘The Truth Behind Real Lives’, published on the Guardian website on 12 December 2005. The piece contains links to relevant documents including the minutes of governors’ meetings and the home secretary’s and chairman’s correspondence. A clear narrative of the events at Newsnight in 2012 is given by Vin Ray in Is the BBC in Crisis? (2013), edited by John Mair et al.
7 Independent and Impartial?
Anne Perkins’s book A Very British Strike (2006) gives a vivid day-by-day account of the General Strike. Reith’s own part in it is told in his diaries – though they were not written by the day, but after the strike had ended. The third volume of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, edited by A. O. Bell (1982), gives the view from Bloomsbury. Hilda Matheson’s Broadcasting (1933) and Richard Lambert’s Ariel and All His Quality (1940) contain assessments of the BBC’s role. Marcia Williams’s assessment of Harold Wilson’s views on the BBC is in her Inside Number 10 (1972).
8 Enemies at the Gate
Paul Dacre’s 2007 Cudlipp lecture, which makes for striking reading, can be found in full on the Guardian website. Peter Eckersley’s The Power Behind the Microphone (1941) is by turns revealing, angry and fascinating. The biography Prospero’s Wireless (1998), by his son Myles Eckersley, is also intriguing. The BBC Written Archives Centre is also a source of much material on this extraordinary man. Martin Le Jeune’s To Inform, Educate and Entertain? (2009) gives a useful account of objections to the BBC from a free-market perspective. Beyond the Charter (2004) by David Elstein et al. is also a useful critical document.
9 ‘The great globe itself’
Jon Day’s essay ‘Time and the City’ inspired some of the ideas of the opening paragraphs of the chapter. The letter from the listener in Malaysia is quoted by Dr Emma Robertson in her essay ‘“I Get a Real Kick out of Big Ben”: BBC Versions of Britishness on the Empire and General Overseas Service, 1932–1948’ (2008). Hilda Matheson’s thoughts on ‘standard English’ are in Broadcasting (1933). Linda Colley’s Acts of Union and Disunion (2014), based on a series of essays for BBC radio, is a useful and highly readable primer on the historical forces at work on ideas of Britishness. The second volume of Asa Briggs’s The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, The Golden Age of Wireless (1965), explains the beginnings of overseas broadcasting and the pressures on regional broadcasting. Alban Webb’s book London Calling (2014) has much of interest to say about the purpose and significance of overseas broadcasting after the war. Excerpts from Olive Shapley’s remarkable memoir, including an account of her back-street abortion, are published in Caroline Mitchell’s Women and Radio (2000). Eckersley’s trenchant views on regional broadcasting are found in The Power Behind the Microphone (1941). No archive recording of Auden’s On Hadrian’s Wall exists but the playscript can be found in the first volume of his collected works, edited by Edward Mendelson (1988). Details about the birth of Radio Stoke were gleaned from an article on the BBC website, ‘History of Radio Stoke’.
10 ‘The monoliths will shake’
The sense of the unknown, the sense of adventure in the early days of the BBC is conveyed in many accounts – Reith’s Into The Wind (1949) and Broadcast Over Britain (1924), Eric Maschwitz’s No Chip on My Shoulder (1957), Arthur Burrows’s The Story of Broadcasting (1924), Hilda Matheson’s Broadcasting (1933), Cecil Lewis’s Broadcasting From Within (1924) and Richard Lambert’s Ariel and All His Quality (1940). Peter Eckersley’s vision of a multichannel future is in The Power Behind the Microphone (1941).
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