Isabelle Stuart
Auntying
A review of The BBC: A People’s History by David Hendy (Profile Books, 2022).
In its centenary year, the BBC occupied an unenviable position. For decades, it has been the site of an ongoing ping pong match of bipartisan attacks: too successful to be competitive, and yet too out of touch to be successful; patronizing and elitist but also too concerned with chasing ratings; excessively conservative for many, and a hotbed of socialism for others (Churchill, mostly). Even the witticisms of these anti-Beeb campaigns have worn thin. 2022 also marks a century of derogatory alternatives to what Asa Briggs called ‘one of the most familiar combinations of letters in the country’, from Virginia Woolf’s Betwixt and Between Company (her disdan fuelled by Vita Sackville-West’s long affair with Talks pioneer Hilda Matheson) to the Baghdad Broadcasting Company during the Iraqi war, via Denis Thatcher’s British Bastards Corporation. The critiques are familiar, as are the series of disabling cuts they have generated, but at the same time the BBC has never convincingly become a victim in the eyes of the UK public. A byword for Establishment Britishness–the domain of the shipping forecast, Melvyn Bragg and Eastenders– it has seemed too reliably mundane to be under real threat.
For David Hendy, it is this complacent familiarity that poses the BBC’s most existential threat, and which his anniversary history attempts to dispel. In his hands, the corporation’s beginnings in the closing days of 1922 reads more like a noir-toned detective novel than the work of a media studies professor:
London, early evening, Tuesday 19 December 1922.
The year is almost at an end, the working day nearly done, the light fading. […] The windows of the big West End department stores– Selfridges, Whiteleys, Gamages, Swan and Edgar– are glowing invitingly, and a steady flow of customers wander inside. Those weary of shopping are searching for the comfort and warmth of the nearest Lyons Corner House– one of the city’s ‘palaces of pastry’, promising decently priced food and a touch of opulence.
Compare the opening lines of Norman Collins’ 1945 novel London Belongs to Me:
It was four-thirty p.m. Four-thirty on Friday, the 23rd of December, 1938.
They hadn’t done very much work in the office that afternoon because in their various ways they had all been getting ready to celebrate. […] The typists had rushed off to the neighbouring Lyonses and Express Dairies and Kardomahs and Cosee Cafés (two flights up and mind the old oak beam), and had stuffed themselves with slices of rich dark pudding or hot flaky mince pies.
While in Collins’ book the scene is an introduction to the Dickensian residents of 10 Dulcimer Street and their lives of petty crime, in Hendy’s the enigmatic onlookers to the bustling pre-Christmas scene are none other than Cecil Lewis, John Reith and Arthur Burrows, the three men tasked with setting up something called, for the time being, only ‘our enterprise’. The overlap is eerie: the same abrupt scene setting, the same crowds at the same time of year winding their way through the same streets and cafés.
But is it a coincidence? Collins was an early BBC luminary, working there throughout the forties and fifties, before leaving to set up its first competitor, ITV, after being passed over for promotion. From Hendy himself we learn that as a young man Collins’ ‘fizzing energy’ was ‘infectious’, partially redeeming the fact that, according to a colleague, he looked ‘exactly like an advertisement of a young businessman who uses all the right products and is bound to become head of the firm’. During his time at the corporation, he initiated Woman’s Hour and devised the iconic radio adventure series Dick Barton: Special Agent. This unexpected shadowing turns out to be an example of how deeply Hendy’s book is steeped in the BBC; of how close both form and content stay to its subject. In the same way, Una Marson’s forced deportation to Jamaica after a stint at the BBC Empire Service, which saw her develop the influential Caribbean Voices, becomes a midnight abduction: ‘On the evening of Monday 14 October 1946, in the darkness of Swansea’s windswept harbourside, a BBC producer was bundled against her will on to a ship bound for the other side of the Atlantic.’ Even the young BBC producer Johnny Beerling’s excursion to the pirate Radio London ship to poach their DJs takes its cue more from 1960s Bond films than the buttoned-up BBC programmers satirized in popular mythmaking: Beerling is ‘dispatched on a covert mission’ looking especially ‘to make contact with its star presenters’ without arousing suspicion.
These reconstructive flourishes are balanced with meticulous recontextualization of iconic moments in BBC history, often through attention to performance conditions which have been elided in the intervening years. For many, including Tom Mills in his 2016 call to arms, the BBC’s role in defanging the 1926 General Strike marked the first and most important of its betrayals of the left. Acknowledging this legacy, Hendy details the young company’s (these were the pre-corporation days) intense internal conflict about their treatment of the strike, and the prolonged wrangling that took place before it conceded to the government’s strongarming. His account begins to feel like promised deliverance when we are told that Reith closed his speech announcing the Strike’s termination with the acknowledgement that ‘we have laboured under certain difficulties, the full story of which may be told someday’– before reciting the last lines of ‘Jerusalem’ to plaintive orchestral accompaniment. But Blake’s stirring lines were not Reith’s final words on the Strike. Hendy wryly includes the weather report that truly ended the broadcast for the millions listening: a ‘complex depression’ was moving across the country. ‘Further outlook: unsettled.’
As its subtitle proclaims, this is ‘A People’s History’, relaying some of the stories of the thousands of people who shaped the BBC. Hendy tells us that this is simply one solution to the Sisyphean task of writing any BBC history at all. Anyone who has visited the BBC archives at Caversham, where old school cabins conceal maze-like reams of documentation, can sympathize with this need to pick a through thread. It is also a solution which sets itself in opposition to the definitive but, at five volumes, much less portable Asa Briggs version of the same. Briggs tends towards a chronicle of committees, meetings and summits, depicting political conflicts and staff appointments as climactic forces that shape the BBC’s development: with the inevitable exception of Reith it is never a personal history, and certainly not a people’s history. Briggs’ BBC is the sum of its parts, whereas Hendy is interested in the parts of that sum, from the departmental heads to the messenger boys and night porters. His method involves quoting from a wide range of testaments, reader reports, diaries and memoirs, fleshing out the details of the BBC’s development and putting faces, or at least briskly outlined character sketches, to names. The careful negotiation between individual narratives and the mammoth mass of history the book covers occasionally falters, miring the reader in various Cecils and Francises whose exact roles within Talks or Drama or the Light Programme are tricky to pin down. But these are only walk-on parts: the main character is the BBC, and its story, as mediated by Hendy, is an engaging one.
***
The first national broadcaster in the world, and one of few remaining public services in the UK, the BBC’s essential strangeness is easy to pass over a hundred years down the line. Unlike in the United States, where radio took off in a bottom-up rather than top-down fashion, quickly to be dominated by commercial concern for advertising revenue, the BBC was able to impose its own ethos: the notorious Reithian mission ‘to inform, educate, and entertain’ forming its hierarchy of priorities, along with a trenchant, if often threatened, commitment to remaining independent from the government. The fledgling national broadcaster was given a unique opportunity to cultivate, direct and encourage broadcasting’s creative swell. It has had an indelible impact on the media we consume today, an impact which repays unpicking.
In the 20s and 30s, the BBC developed alongside the possibilities of the radio as a creative medium. Early BBC producers were fascinated by the form’s artistic potential: in 1934 Lance Sieveking defined the difference between himself and his colleague Val Gielgud in his critical distinction that ‘He thinks the instrument should be “operated”, I think it should be “played”’. 1922 saw the publication of The Waste Land and Ulysses as well as the BBC’s birth, and the new medium attracted modernist writers and musicians in droves. Hendy’s account, which devotes 110 out of 570 pages to the six years of the Second World War, understates the corporation’s place in the history of twentieth-century artistic endeavour. Ezra Pound claimed that the radio mimicked his own poetics, writing to his father that he ‘anticipated the damn thing in the first third of the Cantos’. His infamous fixation with this ‘new medium, something between speech and action (language as cathode ray) which is worthy of any writer’s study’, would come to play a significant part in his loyalty to Lo Stato Fascista. Back in London, and to very different effect, T. S. Eliot and even the technophobic W. B. Yeats were using the BBC to bolster their positions as the Great Men of the 1930s and 40s, while between 1931 and 1956 the BBC broadcast more than one hundred programmes relating to James Joyce’s work. As well as in front of the microphone, the BBC attracted a younger generation of creatives behind the scenes, where they determined the fabric of the growing institution. George Orwell and Louis MacNeice both put in lengthy stints at Broadcasting House, the art deco monolith purpose-built in 1932 to be the BBC’s offices. For MacNeice, the relationship lasted unto death. When recording his final radio play, the poet-producer was part of a BBC team who ventured into a damp Yorkshire cave in order to record sound effects for the programme. Most think he contracted the viral pneumonia which would kill him from this excursion: he passed away a mere four days after the programme’s broadcast. Somewhat eerily, that play, Persons from Porlock, centres on death– specifically the protagonist’s drowning in a cave– as the ultimate interrupter of artistic pursuit, a role MacNeice had also truculently assigned to the BBC in the past. Ten years earlier Dylan Thomas had also died of pneumonia midway through recording his radio play, Under Milk Wood, for its BBC premiere in January 1954. The play itself was crucially shaped by the interventions of a BBC producer, Douglas Cleverdon, who spend five long years coaxing the script out of Thomas, including, legend has it, rescuing the manuscript from a pub he had left it in. While perhaps lacking the glamour of golden age Hollywood–always more three-piece suits and pints than tuxes and cocktails– in its early days, the BBC was an equally centripetal force for the British literary scene, complete with its own founding fathers, myths, and tragic deaths.
While neglecting the poets (who perhaps do not quite qualify as ‘people’) Hendy does carefully trace how the quotidian conditions of the BBC’s development have had a lasting impact on the shape of British media. He outlines the initial, fraught alliances with West End productions, largely opera, classical concerts and plays, which were soon dropped in favour of forms created specifically for the radio. In 1923 an early set of notes on ‘Playwriting for Wireless Broadcast’ offered guidance to writers on how to build a ‘mental picture’ of the characters and events, encouraging the use of the widest range of vocal styles to distinguish between different characters, as well as frequently referencing characters, locations and appearances throughout. The combination of intimacy and scope these experiments entailed is keenly appreciated even at this early point: given that ‘each listener creates his own conception of such scenes’, these scenes could assume ‘a reality which can be far greater than any effect provided on an ordinary stage’. This cultivation of creativity through technical precision is repeated throughout each of the BBC’s innovations in cultural formats that we now see as commonplace: the emergence of sound montages through the elaborate mixing desks that became available in the late 1920s; the development of audio serialisation as popular ways to fill drama slots in the 30s and 40s, culminating in the launch of The Archers in 1951; and the early days of the sitcom in 1925, which required very little in the way of extra setting or characters. So unthinkably dominant was the BBC in determining media forms in the last century that for many the biggest novelty of the launch of Independent Television (ITV) in September 1951 came not with its first programme offerings at 7pm, which carefully mimicked the grandiose speeches and variety formats viewers were already familiar with from BBC content, but at twelve minutes past eight, when viewers were exposed to the first ever ad break on British television.
The BBC’s commitment to scriptedness is a peculiar case study of how profoundly twentieth-century media was the product of its idiosyncratic policies. The combination of a lack of tools for recording and editing speech and the Reithian commitment to propriety meant that in the 1920s all talks were recorded live, but had to be subject to a lengthy process of initial discussion (while a stenographer took notes), revision alongside producers and then repeated rehearsals to create an often clumsy simulation of spontaneity. This practice remains visible in the written archives: scripts often have minor alterations or additions by hand to make the printed words sound marginally more colloquial, presumably added during these rehearsals before the programme. Even as recording and editing technologies improved, the BBC remained wedded to its scripting. The few deviations from this policy, including Geoffrey Bridson’s ground-breaking programmes featuring the live voices of working-class Mancunians, tended to meet with strict censure: after one coal miner uttered both ‘bloody’ and ‘bugger’ on the programme, Bridson feared for his job. By the 1930s these practices had crystalised the homogeneity that most listeners associate with the BBC, which Hendy summarises with a stream of exclusions, ‘no free-flowing conversation, no authentically earthy speech, no regional dialects or idiosyncrasies, no real spontaneity at all’. Most voices were therefore thoroughly mediated by teams of (mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle-class) BBC producers, stenographers and managers before they were even permitted near the studio. The war further entrenched this reliance on exact scripting: news output came under direct ministry control to avoid spreading any potentially useful information to the enemy ears which listened in 24/7, but talks, plays and features were also required to stick exactly to their previously agreed scripts, with a ‘switch-censor’ system in place to direct away from the programme at the very moment of any deviation. This extreme scriptedness was gradually eroded by an influx of ex-pirate radio hosts in the 1960s. It was only with the launch of Radio 1 on 30 September 1967 that Tony Blackburn, who had recently jumped ship from Radio London’s MV Galaxy, outright refused to submit scripts beforehand. He was outraged at the example script he had been given, which featured a line that read ‘And right now, pop pickers, ah…’– with the ‘ah’ written in. Thereafter, the station dispensed with scripting in advance, though every programme was still rehearsed, and images from Radio 1’s launch show the station’s controller Robin Scott hovering over Blackburn at the decks.
Scriptedness was only one facet of the paternalism the BBC struggled with throughout the twentieth century. Hendy does a good job of teasing out the idiosyncrasies of its Reithian policies, with frequent recourse to the obsessive, Bordieusian mapping of the audiences’ preferences and reviews according to profession, marital status and class that the BBC carried out through its listener reports from the 1930s onwards. The complex geometries of the negotiation of high, low and middle brow that the BBC constantly tried to strategize are also gently satirised by highlighting their inconsistencies. In the late 1920s one listener complained that the most acceptable topics seem to have landed in a capacious middle field of talks focussed on ‘how bats sleep, where papier mâché comes from, common faults in humming, secrets of sardine tinning, the evolution of braces’. By the 1930s, when complaints were levelled instead at ‘lectures’, ‘Elizabethan music’, ‘readings from unknown poets’, ‘weird quartets and quintettes’ and, most commonly of all, the dreaded ‘Chamber Music’, Reith offered the somewhat nebulous advice that ‘The BBC must lead, not follow, its listeners, but it must not lead at so great a distance as to shake off pursuit.’ William Haley’s post-war pyramid construction for the BBC is the most famous of the resulting strategies, imagining a broad base in the all-pleasing Light Programme, dominated by dance music and comedy, ascending to the bread-and-butter informative talks and features of the Home Service, and finally the radiant capstone of The Third Programme, intended to broadcast only the very best of human creative, intellectual and cultural endeavour. Yet Hendy’s determination to probe the individual perspectives behind this strategy exposes how mixed their metaphors were at the time. For one producer, the Third would be a ‘pace-maker’ of tastes; for another, it was the ‘activating process’, somewhat strangely allegorising culture as cheese; for Reith, who opposed the scheme, it was straightforward ring fencing. Halley’s initial blueprints for the pyramid itself are also included. Rather than remain static, looming behind popular culture, he envisioned it moving the British public up through its ranks over the course of decades until, eventually, it stood on its head: the majority of the British public coming to like ‘the best’ rather than ‘the worst’. From its beginnings, then, we are led to view this unrealistic architectural manoeuvre with suspicion, yet we can also appreciate how persistent these unfeasible geometries were in the BBC’s day to day output.
A strange late flowering of Reithianism emphasises this pervasiveness: in 1972 the cult DJ John Peel, another pirate radio recruit, explained that ‘The programmes with which I’m involved are aimed at turning y’all onto some musicks that you might not otherwise investigate’. These ‘musicks’ were Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead than Schubert or Dvorák, but the sentiments remain remarkably similar. Formally, these commitments to cultural ‘improvement’ are visible across the range of the study: from the ubiquity of ties and blazers behind the scenes in the studios to the anachronistic stronghold of RP on air and minute debates about what counted as ‘bad’ language (in the 1960s, ‘damn’ was often deleted, ‘bloody’ needed a referral and ‘bugger’ onwards completely excluded; post-Chatterley, however, Harold Pinter got away with several ‘shits’ and even a single ‘fuck’ in the 1968 broadcast of his play Landscape– on account of artistic merit). Hendy’s engagement with the details of these cultural negotiations is a refreshing return to the terms on which they were conducted and heard by listeners, mediated by the day-to-day grappling of producers rather than lying inert in high level strategy documentations.
***
The history of the BBC has at its centre a history of different ways of listening, and Hendy’s diligence when it comes performance contexts enables him to put a chronicle of these shifting modes at his study’s heart, culminating in a clear-eyed appreciation of where the corporation stands today. In its embryonic state in the early 1920s, most radio listeners were in fact eavesdroppers, hobbyist ‘listeners-in’ to signals which were largely not meant for them. These amateur radio fans approach the voyeuristic: they are a ‘cultish tribe’ who thrived on the ‘real thrill of handling the arcane hardware of wireless’. From 1922, the audience for radio slowly and then rapidly expanded, but the BBC’s limited capacities did not initially allow for non-stop programming. It was only with time and the move to bigger offices at Broadcasting House, as well as the all-important shift from ‘Company’ to ‘Corporation’ in January 1927, that the increasingly fixed daily schedules could become a pervasive element of domestic life, ‘someone who might almost be regarded as part of the family’. This newly central position in the nation’s culture was reflected in its position in the home: no longer voyeurs, we now see the radio carefully positioned on tabletops, with family gathered around and eyelines fixed on the motionless box with avid attention. The rhythms of BBC programmes structured national life for decades: a hallowed progression of ‘lunchtime music, programmes for school in the afternoon, Children’s Hour, then, after dinner, plenty of dance tunes’, punctuated by news bulletins at 7 p.m. and 9.30 p.m.
These rhythms became so ingrained that the increase to five daily news bulletins during the General Strike generated its own alarm, with one woman writing in her diary that ‘The sensation of a general strike centres around the headphones of the wireless set’. By 1936, radio had taken off and 98% of the UK population could listen to the BBC. The corporation consciously cultivated its infiltration of domestic rhythms, taking advantage of its near monopoly over the airways to instigate a level of nannying (or auntying) that sometimes seems parodic. The ‘Toddler Truce’, for example, was in force in the early 1950s, where television transmissions would cease for a period at 6pm on weekday evenings, so that parents could put their youngest children to bed. There was also Reith’s notorious insistence that Sundays be kept free of secular programming, or anything other than determinedly highbrow music, an insistence which, Hendy shows, drove listeners in their thousands to listen to Nazi-run German radio stations in the run-up to WWII, if only to escape the torments of yet another Mendelssohn concerto.
Hendy’s detailed attention to listener’s reports, photographs, diaries, internal memoranda, and earwitness accounts stress how engaged the BBC’s early listeners were, and how far the corporation encouraged this reciprocity. In the 1930s ‘wireless discussion groups’ proliferated, encouraged by the Adult Education department of the BBC to instil active listening in its listeners. The spirit of these discussion clubs can be traced through to Woman’s Hour in the 1950s, which producer Janet Quigley described as ‘a kind of club’ whose members resist ‘passive listening’; instead, ‘listeners write about the programme and about themselves, they criticize, encourage, suggest, and occasionally broadcast’. Establishing a link between watching or listening and actual action was at the heart of the mid-century BBC, with one 1950s TV executive claiming her aim was a ‘constantly diminishing audience’. The idea was that watchers were being stimulated to activities beyond watching the set– an attitude which would bewilder the Netflix algorithm. Programmes were often imagined and reported to have tangible physical effects on their listeners: the first broadcasts of American Jazz in the 30s apparently led to listeners fainting, while the (slow) move away from R.P. from the 1950s led some listeners to claim that the radio was inspiring a ‘moral degeneration’ among the people of Britain.
This active listening took its most literal form during WWII. Hendy’s description of the famous ‘V for Victory’ campaign orchestrated by the BBC across occupied countries is especially striking in its attention to the unique acts of listening it cultivated. The organisers realized that the BBC was especially suited for spreading sonic symbols across occupied Europe: the perceived proximity of the Morse code signal for the letter V (dot, dot, dot, DASH), could be translated into three soft strikes followed by one louder one, a rhythm with a fortuitous resemblance to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, while also ‘evoking the idea of fate knocking on the door’. Soon, the pattern had spread across the whole of Europe, tapped out on café tables and bars when German officers walked in, filling the gaps between BBC programmes (often listened to with blankets over the listener’s heads), even manifesting as a ‘V for Victory Foxtrot’, which– of course– comprised three short steps followed by one longer one. At the same time, BBC presenters were slipping hundreds of coded messages from Europeans who had escaped to the UK to resistance fighters and allies back home. Sometimes these messages were unwittingly warped by new BBC recruits, who were unaware of the importance of playing certain records at certain times, with alarming consequences: the wrong bridge blown up in Poland.
Given this history of active engagement, it is no surprise that in the 60s and 70s BBC staff worried incessantly about the growing passivity and ebbing concentration of their audience. By 1967, the radio’s relegation to a background medium seemed inevitable, moved from sitting rooms to cars and kitchens, prompting both drastic rearrangement of the radio services provided and a reconsideration of the content towards ‘the kind of stuff that could be listened to casually and in short bursts’, or, as one BBC memo from the time dolefully puts it, ‘unobtrusive accompaniment’. At that point, the rival for listeners’ attention was at least largely internal: cannibalization from the BBC’s own television services. Over the next fifty years, as competition was introduced first in the form of ITV’s growing popularity, then Channel Four, other TV and radio channels, and finally the culminating blow of internet-based entertainment services, ‘inattentive’ listening came to seem about the best on offer. This shift from active to passive dovetails with the increasing ostracization of the BBC from political and popular support, even though the hard facts of the service are not a million miles away from the radio heyday of the 1930s. In 2020 over 91% of UK households accessed some form of BBC service in any given week; in the same period, the figure for podcast listeners stands at only 18%, and yet podcasts receive the media attention no longer paid to BBC programmes. Still more suggestive is a 2015 trial which offered a sample of households who claimed that the license fee was poor value a refund if they agreed to be deprived of all BBC services. By the second week two thirds of the participants had changed their mind: ‘they had not realized radio and online were covered by the license fee; the BBC had been a bigger part of their daily routines than they had thought; they had felt detached from national life’.
Though he acknowledges the urgency generated by the present government’s hostility towards the BBC, an urgency which has only increased since publication, with CBBC, Newsnight and BBC 4 falling victim to the latest spate of cuts, Hendy’s book does not aim to join in the political debates currently raging as to the corporation’s future. His contribution is subtler: he sets out to remind us of what is at stake in these endless back and forths, and how seriously we should be taking them. While alive to the corporation’s many flaws, Hendy is unboudtedly a sympathetic observer. He has one or two good words for everyone–– including Reith, a byword for paternalist elitism but also, apparently, ‘capable of great kindness and loyalty’. But, unlike his subject, his aim is not neutrality. Instead, he is interested in illustrating the corporation’s successes alongside its failures, retuning the conversation to the service the BBC has offered over the last century. A few years before his death, in a lyric titled ‘To Posterity’, MacNeice asks if we will experience life in the same way when ‘other, less difficult, media’ have replaced those we are used to. As MacNeice and Hendy both illustrate in their different ways, the BBC might be one difficulty worth sticking with.