The BBC
A People’s History
David Hendy
Having read it
★★★☆☆
It started out quite informative and interesting, certainly around the BBC’s beginnings and the company’s, then corporation’s contributions and effects in an early world of new radio, then TV, technologies and existing and developing in and around times of war, but to be honest, seemed to lose its way a bit in its middle part, not really offering much interest beyond a few passages or sentences here and there.
However, despite going on a bit, it chipped away throughout and its narrative gave a decent insight and context to the BBC’s history during the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first century) in a readable way and in its last part reclaimed a little more nous and good perspective and insight about what the BBC has dealt with over recent decades, achieved from that and taken on (and what it even led for with its online experiments and endeavours in the late 1990s and into the 2000s) and what it does take, certainly politically (even given the organisation’s achievements, stature and impact around the world) today in the 2020s, to run, sustain and develop TV and radio for all.
(Just might be worth it doing a bit less and doing that as only it can, rather than competing too much like and with the commercial world. Plus, more clarity, honesty and transparency about how licence fee money is spent so the public can clearly and better see and learn how the public service broadcaster it is obliged to fund, operates for them. Additionally, if it isn’t protected by its Royal Charter, like many a political right-winger and market-enthusiast would like to see ended, that commercial world will likely finish it off quite quickly and would probably pay to watch how it happened in a 3-part series from a TV subscription service!)
A good passage
The public clamour not to be ‘left out’ was complicated by pride in regional identity. In the early 1950s, North and South could still feel a long way apart, culturally as well as physically. When Holme Moss opened in 1951, and the North had its first look at programmes from Alexandra Palace and Lime Grove, the Manchester Guardian pointedly suggested that producers in London ‘may have to look again at some of their output’. The people of the North, it said, would show ‘a considerable distaste for airy-fairy trifles with a disguised educative purpose’. As to broadcasting’s great qualities of connection – its ability to ‘make the great new Northern audience feel part of the television “family”’ – the paper wondered aloud whether there might soon be an ‘alarming side’ to this miracle. Its metaphorically minded reporter had noticed that around the base of the BBC’s soaring new mast were hundreds of sheep grazing ‘incuriously’. And it had put ‘horrid thoughts’ into his mind. His worry? ‘What the world’s most powerful influence in mass communication could do to human beings.’29
A second good passage
In an organisation more tightly managed and market conscious than ever, looking to the future had sometimes been seen as wasteful effort. This was one reason why John Birt’s early enthusiasm for video on demand failed to ensure unqualified support for the iPlayer once he had left. Fortunately, the stories of Online and iPlayer also showed that the BBC still had on its payroll what one insider called ‘nippy, smart people working around the edges trying things out – and failing’. Their success – not just for the BBC but in building ‘Digital Britain’ – also provided an important lesson for policy-makers: the large-scale risks from which commercial companies recoiled could be taken on very effectively by a public institution such as the BBC – so long, of course, as it was allowed the capacity for long-term thinking and as long as failure was tolerated as a vital component of innovation.39
A third good passage
The BBC, so the argument goes, should abandon its efforts to do everything from football and dance shows to online news and podcasts, and concentrate on whatever the market fails to provide – opera, say, or reporting Parliament. It is a persuasive argument, and all too conveniently confronts the BBC with a horrible catch-22. The more successfully the BBC competes – by innovating, or by engaging more listeners and viewers and online users – the more complaints there are from its competitors about its ‘market impact’. Yet if its ratings drop, or it retreats from whole areas of programming, it is attacked for being irrelevant or too slothful to respond in a fleet-footed way to changing social trends. In short, it is caught in a pincer movement: punished for growing, punished for shrinking.