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Sixty years ago, inspired by the tumultuous civil rights struggle in the US, BBC Radio aired a groundbreaking series of documentaries, music and drama exploring black culture. David Hendy explains how African-American voices were beamed into British living rooms
BBC Television was in buoyant mood in 1964. A purpose-built Television Centre had opened in London; BBC Two launched that April; audiences were booming. In comparison, the corporation’s ‘senior service’, Radio, was showing its age – undervalued and under-resourced, losing its audiences and uncertain about its future. Yet even this supposedly dying medium could still pull the occasional rabbit out of a hat. Read more | The history of the BBC And when it came to covering that November’s US presidential election, it would be BBC Radio, not Television, that came up with the year’s most original idea: a blockbuster series about the black American civil rights struggle that would expose British listeners to sounds, voices and opinions they were unlikely to have ever heard or seen before. BBC Radio had an uneven history when it came to diversity and racial politics. In the 1930s, listeners to the National Programme would have heard music from black artists such as Paul Robeson and Guyanese bandleader Rudolph Dunbar with his ‘Coloured Orchestra’. In the 1950s, the Home Service broadcast hard-hitting reports about the racism experienced by Britain’s ‘Windrush Generation’ of immigrants. Yet, whatever their fine intentions, broadcasters had often slipped into stereotyping black contributors: if they weren’t playing walk-on parts as entertainers, they were appearing as part of a ‘problem’ to be solved. Read more | The forgotten history of Windrush This was symptomatic of a wider failure. When the veteran features producer Geoffrey Bridson told the Home Service he wanted to make a programme about “the integration struggle” in the US Deep South, it had been rejected out of hand – as had his other proposals about the atom bomb and anti-nuclear campaigners. The Home Service, he reckoned, just “never regarded itself as a pacemaker for public opinion”. Even in the 1960s, when the BBC’s new director-general, Hugh Carleton Greene, urged programme-makers to give audiences a healthy shock or two, the radio schedules still had an air of stolid, unadventurous safety about them. So it seemed all the more novel and exciting when, in July 1963, the Third Programme’s controller, Howard Newby, proposed a whole series focusing exclusively on what he called “the Revolt of the Negro”. It would offer an important perspective on a coming US presidential election in which race looked like being a prominent issue. It might also demonstrate the continued vitality – the continued relevance – of radio itself. To no one’s surprise, it was Bridson who leapt at the chance to produce the series. He promptly told his boss that the original title was no good: what was needed was something that conveyed the contribution of black creativity to US life – and how this creativity had given the black American what Bridson called “the self-respect out of which his demand for integration springs”. Bridson had one other condition. Newby had suggested enlisting the writer James Baldwin as a part-time adviser; Bridson asked for the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, to be hired instead. “Apart from what he can contribute himself,” Bridson explained, “he would be the best possible contact for securing the co-operation of all leading negro artists.” It helped that the two men had a friendship stretching back to the war, when Bridson had been in the US collaborating with Hughes on programmes and discovering a shared joy in poetry, jazz and progressive politics. Hughes was offered – and accepted – the role of co-producer. Bridson spent the spring and summer months of 1964 in New York City, meeting leading civil rights activists, visiting the jazz clubs and record stores of Harlem, watching off-Broadway shows, and talking long into the night with Hughes at his East 127th Street home. By August, there was enough material ‘in the can’ to create 19 programmes. Their umbrella title would be The Negro in America. Listen | US Civil rights: fighting for freedom podcast series Rights denied The series launched at the end of September. The first programme, advertised in The Sunday Times as “an ideal pace-setter”, was supposed to have been a broadcast of Martin Duberman’s recent New York stage drama In White America, which traced the black American story “from the War of Independence to the present day”. Unfortunately, US rights holders withheld their permission at the last minute. An anthology of black American poetry was hurriedly brought forward instead. Listeners were left distinctly underwhelmed, telling the BBC’s team of audience researchers that many of its items were “nearer to prose than to poetry” and characterised by “bitterness”. Some said that they wanted to like the poems but failed to understand them because of the “strange accents”. Other programmes endured a similarly bumpy reception. A survey of jazz curated by The New Yorker columnist Nat Hentoff was condemned for featuring music that was “harsh, complex and disturbing”. Many found Trouble in Mind, Alice Childress’s comedy about a theatre troupe from the Deep South attempting to stage a play in New York, generous in spirit but “slow-moving”. Hughes’s own musical, Jerico-Jim Crow – a huge off-Broadway success – was found by British listeners to be either “too blatantly sentimental” or too full of “hysterical yelling”. The professional critics were largely more tolerant. The Listener found hearing poetry set to jazz “enormously exciting”. The Glasgow Herald described Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, an off-Broadway play about a young black girl’s fraught relationship with her white lover and white landlady, as “a ruthless, forceful piece”. It was clear, however, that in 1964, even the supposedly discerning minority of Third Programme listeners were discomfited by a series so full of material that was unfamiliar in content and style – and with culture that had a distinctly political edge. When it came to the jazz programmes, they were exposed not just to a modern, experimental form, but to voices explaining that this shift was in part a reaction against the assumption that black American musicians were there merely to entertain. In Jerico-Jim Crow, they were confronted with something more than an enjoyable bit of musical theatre: it was what Bridson called “a piece of impassioned pleading”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/02/GettyImages-517262070-CMYK-06ef39a-e1741795264905.jpg" width="620" height="396" alt="MartinLutherKing speaks in Nashville, Tennessee in May 1964 during anti-segregation demonstrations. (Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images)" title="MartinLutherKing speaks in Nashville, Tennessee in May 1964 during anti-segregation demonstrations. (Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images)" /> The problem of tone haunted the series. If ordinary listeners found the poetry rough-edged, yet The Sunday Times wanted more “raw anguish”, how could such conflicting tastes be accommodated? Hughes and Bridson were aware of the precarious balancing act. Whether in poetry, music, drama or politics, they wanted to give airtime to a uniquely black American voice. They also – like many black American artists they featured – wanted to address a predominantly white audience. They wanted to avoid giving listeners at home the feeling that they were being attacked, but had to convey the anger of a people oppressed – and the point that anger was often the most important engine of creativity. Events stateside complicated matters, though. The Negro in America had been scheduled to coincide with an important political moment, but this very timeliness soon added to Bridson and Hughes’s difficulties. One of their programmes was a conversation they had recorded with each other earlier that year. It sounded exactly what it was: two old friends enjoying each other’s company late at night. Bridson had even asked Hughes beforehand to bring some extra laughter into their conversation: “As we cannot see your beatific smile on radio we should very much like to hear it.” Ever more fractious Unfortunately, since the recording was made, the atmosphere in the US had changed dramatically. In July, rioting had broken out in Harlem after police fatally shot a 15-year-old black American boy, and violence quickly spread to other parts of New York City and beyond. The series had been conceived in 1963 in a spirit of hope – that the civil rights issue was about to reach some sort of final settlement, that ‘integration’ would succeed. Instead, the US seemed to be becoming ever more fractious. Read more | Who were the key figures of the civil rights movement? So when the conversation between Bridson and Hughes was finally broadcast in December 1964, its geniality felt peculiarly inappropriate. The Listener’s critic said that it sounded as if the two men were travelling through the States “sitting in deep chairs in an observation car, drawing at long cigars and sipping highballs”. Where, he asked, was the clash of opinion? In fact, there were clashes aplenty in the documentaries that formed the spine of the series. Ten Years of Integration traced the history of the civil rights movement across three densely illustrated episodes. Freedom Now! focused on the struggle for integration in Birmingham, Alabama in May 1963, at a time when white racists set off two bombs, nearly killing Martin Luther King’s brother and his family. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/02/GettyImages-3231436-CMYK-806816c-e1741795418249.jpg" width="620" height="406" alt="The Montgomery Brothers in New York, 1961. Hughes and Bridson bonded over a love of jazz. (Photo by Sam Falk/New York Times Co./Getty Images)" title="The Montgomery Brothers in New York, 1961. Hughes and Bridson bonded over a love of jazz. (Photo by Sam Falk/New York Times Co./Getty Images)" /> Narration was kept to a minimum in all of the programmes; the main witness in Freedom Now!, American reporter Dale Miner, was constantly in the thick of it, his microphone capturing the immediate aftermath of the bombing inside the family home and the confusion and anger as a second bomb exploded nearby. As one listener put it, “The fact that it was often a blurred mass of sound added to its authenticity... It let us... be present at that awful time.” This was vivid, raw, up-close, subjective, immersive – the radio equivalent of what Tom Wolfe later hailed as “the New Journalism”. It allowed listeners to understand the black American experience in a visceral rather than abstract way. And it had been achieved through a radio language that was strikingly new to British ears. Black perspective When the series was over, Hughes expressed his delight. “The BBC – I love it!” he wrote. The press, too, had been persuaded of its merits. The Glasgow Herald called it “Not only the best series of the year, but possibly the best of all time.” “Plays, poetry, music, and documentaries,” it said, “have fitted together to make one composite feature.” And The Listener cheered the BBC’s shift from analysing events with its usual detachment towards allowing listeners to see things from a distinctively black American perspective. The Negro in America was an augury for a radio medium that would match the egalitarian spirit of the decade. The late 1960s would see more and more of the BBC’s programme-makers leaving the studio and using their portable recorders to capture the subjective experience of life “out there”. There would be less of the scripted and polished stuff, more of those raw tape recordings used so brilliantly for Freedom Now! As for any wider impact on racial politics in Britain, it would be expecting too much of a series broadcast to a tiny minority of Third Programme listeners – perhaps fewer than 100,000 – to be transformative. Even as the series was being aired, a Conservative Party candidate unexpectedly won a parliamentary election in the West Midlands constituency of Smethwick, despite having endorsed explicitly racist language – evidence that it was not just the US that harboured stubbornly deep reservoirs of anti-immigrant prejudice. Read more | Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech: Britain and race in the mid 20th-century Bridson had always hoped that a survey of the American scene would inform debates about race relations in Britain. And there were some signs of progress. In 1965, rattled by the events at Smethwick, the Labour government brought in the first Race Relations Act. One minister, Maurice Foley, also asked Hugh Carleton Greene, “about the role broadcasting can play in breaking down barriers”. Within months, the corporation was planning its first regular programmes for immigrants: Make Yourself at Home. Yet change proved horribly uneven. The BBC’s anachronistic peak-time Black and White Minstrel Show survived for another 13 years. There is, however, a postscript to the story of Hughes’s and Bridson’s landmark series: it went on to play a small part in the belated downfall of the Black and White Minstrel Show. In the early 1960s, when Bridson had been attempting to rekindle his links with Hughes and life in Harlem, the man who helped him most was Barrie Thorne, based at the BBC’s New York office. Through working with Bridson and Hughes, Thorne became captivated by the cultural ferment of the civil rights movement. And it stayed with him. Years later, and back in London as the BBC’s chief accountant, it was he who would lead a campaign within the corporation that eventually saw the Black and White Minstrel Show axed in 1978 – a ripple in the broadcasting universe that would undoubtedly have cheered the two creators of that pivotal 1964 series. This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Radio Times at 100: a "vivid running commentary" on a century of British life
Since its launch in 1923 as the BBC’s official listings guide, the magazine has charted enormous shifts in media and society alike. David Hendy explores how its pages reflected changes across Britain
When Radio Times first hit newsstands, on Friday 28 September 1923, few predicted that a printed schedule of programmes would become what one of its editors proclaimed “the most prosperous and successful timetable in the world”. It was initially described somewhat ponderously as “The Official Organ of the BBC”. Broadcasting, and broadcasting alone, was to be its subject matter. Yet broadcasting would soon bring the entire world into our sitting rooms, and broadcasting’s ‘shop-window’ would become a vivid running commentary on British life. The magazine was launched in response to a temporary newspaper boycott of broadcast listings. In January 1923, the proprietors of Fleet Street – perceiving radio to be a threat to their business – had refused to publish details of the BBC’s upcoming programmes unless it paid a hefty fee. The solution was to go it alone – though, to begin with, the BBC needed the help of a commercial printer. Read more | The history of the BBC The first edition, priced modestly at 2d for 36 pages of closely typeset text and a smattering of pictures, ran to a quarter of a million copies – and quickly sold out. Its central offer was a bald day-by-day list of output from the BBC’s six stations in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Newcastle and Glasgow. The listings expanded in lockstep with broadcasting’s wider evolution. In the 1930s, readers could enjoy a choice between the ‘National’ and ‘Regional’ Programmes, and the first output of experimental late-night television. During the Second World War, the Forces Programme appeared. In the 1960s, BBC2 (now BBC Two) and local radio arrived. More recently, a plethora of satellite and digital channels were launched, competing since the 2000s with streaming services such as Netflix. The growth in column inches was not quite unceasing. Paper rationing during the Second World War meant drastic cuts in size and quality, not fully reversed until the 1960s. There were stripped-down issues for the 1947 fuel crisis, too, and none at all during later industrial disputes. There were also dramatic shifts in layout. When the BBC’s first regular television service began in November 1936, and despite all the razzmatazz of the launch at Alexandra Palace, the magazine allocated just two back pages for its schedule. In 1953, television was integrated with the daily radio schedules. Then, in 1957, it leapt confidently on to the front pages – as clear a sign as any that Britain’s ‘television age’ had arrived. Media rivals By then, ITV had been running for two years, and the BBC no longer enjoyed a monopoly. Nor did Radio Times: even in the 1930s, glossy rivals such as Radio Pictorial appeared on the newsstands. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all came in 1991, with the deregulation of television listings. This allowed Radio Times to feature the schedules of commercial rivals for the first time – but also, of course, allowed any other publication to feature the BBC’s. Purely as a source of information about the week ahead, Radio Times was increasingly redundant. Circulation figures, though, had always been impressive: 1 million in 1928, 3 million in 1939, and 8 million in 1950. For decades, Radio Times remained Britain’s biggest-selling weekly – an advertiser’s dream and an editor’s nightmare. Even before the war, Maurice Gorham, general editor from 1933 to 1941, grumbled that readers had to “turn over 10 or 12 pages to get to one day’s programmes”. Those pages now offer a fascinating timeline of consumer life. A 1923 issue is stuffed full of adverts for the arcane paraphernalia of early wireless receivers; a 1945 edition offers a Ministry of Food sandwich recipe – “Choose one-day old bread, and cut fairly thin” – that drives home the grinding reality of postwar austerity. Snappier and peppier In fact, Radio Times was always going to be so much more than a printed programme schedule. Its four prewar editors – Leonard Crocombe, Walter Fuller, Eric Maschwitz and Maurice Gorham – were all cultured men with valuable connections in the arts and media, and commissioned the best writing and artwork they could afford. Articles typically came from BBC insiders who were leaders in their own fields, with graphic art supplied by renowned illustrators such as Arthur Watts, Frank Brangwyn and Austin Cooper. In May 1937, Christopher Nevinson – who’d achieved great fame as a war artist – painted the cover for Radio Times’ ‘Coronation Number’; in November, Rex Whistler did the same for a ‘Woman’s Broadcasting Number’. Such special editions culminated at the end of the autumn ‘fireside’ season with a lavish Christmas double issue, the creative and commercial highpoint of the Radio Times year. By the end of the 1930s, Gorham boasted, it was “the most catholic illustrated paper in the country”. Among its riches, the letters page performed a distinctive service. Lord John Reith, the BBC’s first director-general, saw Radio Times as “the connecting link” between broadcasters and their audience, so publishing correspondence – even from the most disgruntled of listeners – would offer reminders of the harsh realities of public taste to those sequestered in the company’s ivory tower. The very first issue printed a missive by ‘P.J.’ from Birmingham, complaining about the dreariness of talks programmes – lectures such as ‘The Decrease of Malaria in Great Britain’ or ‘How to Become a Veterinary Surgeon’. The BBC, ‘P.J.’ concluded, was for those who “own expensive sets and pretend to appreciate and understand only highbrow music and educational ‘sob stuff’.” In May 1926, the magazine even published a mauling from the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, accusing the BBC of causing “pain and indignation” across Britain through its lopsided reporting of the General Strike. “I feel like asking the Postmaster-General for my licence fee back,” she wrote menacingly. Over the long term, the trend was for snappier articles, more pictures, more celebrity puffs. By the 1970s, broadsheet newspapers were starting to vacuum up some of the best long-form feature writing with their rapidly expanding Sunday supplements, and every weekly publication had to adjust – as did broadcasters. In the 1970s, Radio 4 merged several much-venerated Home Service programmes into cheery catch-all series. A glance at the Radio Times revealed that The Critics, which had once served up rarefied conversation in the classic ‘talks’ manner, would be replaced by Kaleidoscope. This programme took a breezier, more fragmented approach: a three-minute interview with Joan Baez, a short studio discussion about Picasso, musical excerpts from Diana Ross. The Times labelled the trend “magazinismus”, while the celebrated critic Richard Hoggart used the 1971 Reith Lectures to revive a theme he’d introduced in his 1957 classic The Uses of Literacy, bemoaning a media landscape in which “everything is interesting – as interesting as the next thing – if only it is short, unconnected and pepped-up”. Complaints about a steady dumbing down were, though, exaggerated. Radio Times had always sought a mass-market appeal, with editorial teams of the 1920s and 30s encouraged to personify their target customer as ‘the cabman’s wife’. Staff were told that this fictional everywoman would buy Radio Times for its programme listings – but, as long as the writing avoided “being highbrow”, she might read the rest of the magazine, too. In fact, Radio Times’ founding philosophy was clear: just as Reith’s BBC operated on the principle of the maximum benefit to the maximum number, its house magazine embodied the belief that the more people who could be educated through reading its pages, the better. Changing times Educated about what, though? About the world at large, naturally, but also – and above all – about broadcasting itself. Radio Times – published since 2011 by Immediate Media, which also produces BBC History Magazine – aimed to create a more discriminating audience: one that might better appreciate what the BBC’s own programme-makers were trying to achieve. Over the past century, article after article has taken readers behind the scenes at the BBC. ‘Both Sides of the Microphone’, a regular column almost from the start, was the template for countless others featuring mildly propagandist gossip about programmes and personalities. In 1966, when pirate radio ships were the rage, an item entitled ‘Why No Continuous Pop?’ provided a lengthy exposition on the agonising ‘needle-time’ restrictions facing the corporation. Elsewhere, articles have explained everything from the art of radio drama to the challenges of filming wildlife in remote locations. This kind of output, part of the magazine’s vast range of informed but accessible writing, has helped shape the public image of the BBC – indeed, the whole place of broadcasting in British life – for 100 years. For a modestly titled ‘timetable’, that’s an important and dangerously underappreciated role. With the BBC under increased pressure, one suspects that Radio Times – or something very much like it – will continue to be needed over the years ahead. The BBC has a searchable archive of previous editions of Radio Times This article was first published in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
The technological innovations of the 1980s and 1990s enabled the BBC to bring audiences fresh content via new platforms. Yet, as David Hendy explores in the final episode of his series charting the national broadcaster’s history, the rapidly changing media world also poses a threat to the future of the corporation
The playwright David Hare wrote recently that, alongside the NHS and the welfare state, the BBC represents “the finest expression of mid-20th-century public idealism”. Yet, from our vantage point in the third decade of the 21st century, such praise can be a dangerous thing. It associates the BBC with past glories: the analogue era, “old media”, the world of radio and television. This raises a profound existential question for an organisation marking its 100th birthday. Having emerged in the first wireless age, can it survive in anything like its current form in the era of internet, mobile social media and high-spending multinational streaming giants? Before reaching for the most pessimistic answer, it’s worth remembering that the BBC kick-started Britain’s own media revolution in the first place. In the early 1980s, the corporation’s education department, alert to warnings of a shortage in computing skills, began working with colleagues in research and development, and with scientists employed by Acorn, to develop what became the BBC Micro. A personal computer designed to be both cheap and easy to use, the Micro – with its distinctive chunky keyboard and orange function keys – became a fixture in homes and classrooms. It enabled tens of thousands of adults and children with no previous computing experience to learn the so-called Basic programming language. And it was just one part of a wider computer literacy project built around TV programmes, instructional books and a support network for teachers. Explore the history of the BBC This is the final part in a 13-part series by David Hendy that charts how the BBC shaped the nation. Read more about the history of the BBC: Part 1 | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions Part 2 | Broadcasting House: a new home for the BBC Part 3 | Andy Pandy to Blue Peter: how the BBC captivated little citizens Part 4 | From "exotic" attractions to changing racial attitudes: the BBC's slow progress to mirror multicultural Britain Part 5 | The BBC changes its tune to play the sounds of the sixties Part 6 | The BBC's Third Programme troubled championing of "high culture" Part 7 | The BBC goes into the wild: the rise of natural history television and David Attenborough Part 8 | The battle for ratings: how EastEnders saved the BBC Part 9 | Politics and public broadcasting: 1950s friction between government and the BBC Part 10 | The BBC and the birth of the television age Part 11 | BBC & scandal: in the eye of the storm This multi-pronged approach provided the template for another BBC project launched a decade later, focused this time on introducing the British public to the then-unfamiliar joys of the internet. The Net was a TV series that created “live” dialogue with its audience by setting up online bulletin boards and an email address. A “BBC Networking Club” also sprang up to help viewers get online. By this stage, the corporation’s own programme-makers were also starting to connect to the world wide web. In large part this was thanks to one of its engineers, Brandon Butterworth, who had created an internal network of desktop computers and secured a website domain: bbc.co.uk. A thousand initiatives bloomed in the mid-1990s as staff throughout the corporation began to explore the internet and create web pages of their own. In one corner, the Hungarian Service created its own pages to accompany programmes; in another, “Trumptonshire Web” sprang up to celebrate the children’s TV series, Trumpton. Radio 1 created a live chat facility, and the recently launched news-and-sport network Five Live turned its 606 phone-in for football fans into one of the busiest messageboards in the country. Then, for the May 1997 general election, journalists came up with an 8,000-page site to provide up-to-date details of the results as they came in. Blazing a trail Initially this digital evolution was all rather organic and spontaneous, but in 1997 there was a decisive intervention from the top. The BBC’s director general, John Birt, had been talking to Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital. This book had set out a striking techno-utopian vision of the future in which an “information superhighway” would deliver entirely virtual newspapers and personalised forms of entertainment to millions of private computers. After flying to the US to visit companies engaged with this new technology, including Netscape and Microsoft, Birt returned a fully fledged convert. He was, he said, convinced that the internet “was a Very Big Thing that was going to change the world, and that the BBC had to be at the centre of it”. Over the next six months, all of the experimental work which had been simmering away was pulled together into a slicker, more-coherent offering. The first tangible outcome of this concerted effort was supposed to be the autumn launch of an online news service. The sudden death of Princess Diana at the end of August forced the pace: this was the kind of dramatic, fast-moving and increasingly complicated story that required web pages to be constantly updated. Presented with an unending supply of fresh interviews on radio and TV, BBC journalists began experimenting with embedding short “grabs” of audio and video. They created a tribute site, and arranged a live “webcast” for the princess’s funeral. The success of that coverage prompted an injection of extra cash for new servers and, when BBC News Online was launched formally later in the autumn, it had the capacity to stream the day’s main television news bulletins on a regular basis. The BBC’s other online services quickly adopted a similar multimedia style. Birt subsequently claimed that producing video-on-demand had been his “obsession” all along. If so, the launch of the BBC iPlayer 10 years later marked the first real step towards what he’d seen as the ultimate destination of the digital revolution: the merging of TV, radio and the internet into a single platform. The evolutionary origins of the BBC iPlayer can perhaps be discerned in a development of 1996, when programme-makers at Radio 1 created a virtual mixing desk that allowed anyone anywhere in the world to “listen again” to an archive of recent broadcasts. Six years later, a group of technologically adventurous BBC staff came up with the idea of creating something similar for TV. Ben Lavender, a young engineer in the BBC’s New Media Technology department, took up the challenge of turning what he called an “internet personal video recorder” into what became iPlayer. The technological obstacles proved more straightforward to overcome than the political ones. Senior staff at the BBC needed lots of convincing: many of them refused to believe that anyone would ever want to watch TV on a computer screen or mobile phone. Once they were satisfied, regulators then demanded a “public value test”. This was the opportunity for commercial rivals to argue that the proposed new BBC service would damage their own interests. When it was finally launched to the public at Christmas 2007, the BBC’s original ambitions for iPlayer – which included sharing the platform with ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, as well as including whole “box sets” of past TV series – had been drastically trimmed back. Nevertheless, iPlayer brought the concept of catch-up TV to the British public. Here was something stable, easily navigated and gloriously free from advertising. By 2012, it was voted the UK’s number-one brand. As the chief executive of the streaming giant Netflix later admitted, if anything had “blazed the trail” for his own company’s success it was iPlayer. And together with BBC Online, iPlayer showed that – even in a media future dominated by the internet, always-on mobile phones and new social platforms – the BBC might retain a centre-stage role. Alchemical advances There was rarely a single “eureka” moment in this story of invention. Rather, a complex, almost alchemical mix of factors enabled the BBC to take its leading role: a depth and range of skill and experience on its payroll that allowed for what one insider called “nippy, smart people working around the edges trying things out”; the spending power that came with a licence fee still keeping pace with inflation; and, above all, a capacity for long-term thinking – and a tolerance of failure as a vital component of innovation – that contrasted with the private sector’s nervousness over untested, potentially unprofitable investments. In this sense, the part played by the BBC in the digital revolution merely reflects its wider role over the past century. This is a role nurtured by those founding figures – John Reith and his lieutenants – who first set it on its path in 1922. For them, the BBC was never about creating a nation of radio listeners or, later, TV viewers. It was about helping to spread ‘“the best that has been thought and known in the world” to as many people as possible. Radio or television were merely the means of delivering this larger ethical vision. The goal ever since has been to employ whichever medium seems most effective for this purpose at any given moment. It was also crucial to use the corporation’s privileged position as a publicly funded body, beyond direct state control or the pressures wrought by ratings-driven advertising, to provide that famous triumvirate of “information, education and entertainment”. Future challenges Whether the BBC will retain this capacity in years to come is less clear. There’s no intrinsic reason why it shouldn’t be capable of continued technological agility. The success of Radio 1 in becoming “the most subscribed-to radio station on YouTube” is a reminder that the BBC is by no means wedded to the old FM dial – or, indeed, the terrestrial TV signal – in its efforts to reach large and youthful audiences. Economists even suggest that, as an “investor of first resort”, the BBC stimulates a virtuous circle from which the whole media sector benefits. Yet the outsourcing of so much of its work now threatens the reservoir of know-how that enabled it to be a creative powerhouse in the first place. The freezing of the licence fee for most of the period since 2010 is also having a devastating effect on its ability to invest for the future. And new technology brings its own dangers. The much-touted switch from a universal funding mechanism to a subscription service would restrict the BBC’s riches to those who could afford to pay. It would be the one technological innovation that might end for good what David Hare saw as the BBC’s extraordinary aim of shaping for the better the life not just of individuals but of an entire nation. Six of the best BBC programmes They may not be the most famous, but these TV and radio programmes embody the spirit and ambition of the BBC over the past century, says David Hendy In Town Tonight 1933 The BBC featured entertainment from the start, but it was the launch of In Town Tonight in 1933 that truly announced the arrival of a new, confident age of popular variety at the corporation. The show’s mix of guest interviews and live stunts, all delivered in a slick, chatty style, provided the template for our now-familiar fun-packed Saturday night TV schedule. Woman’s Hour 1946 There had already been plenty of programmes for women, but Woman’s Hour, which began in 1946, offered more than the traditional mix of fashion and housekeeping. It covered social issues, politics, the menopause and more. The aim, its producers said, was to take listeners beyond the four walls of the home. It refused to see domestic topics and public affairs as mutually exclusive, and it paved the way for programmes such as Radio 4’s long-running Today. Grandstand 1958 The BBC’s flagship sports show has been described as “the all-encompassing behemoth of sport on television”. For nearly five decades, Grandstand demonstrated the technical mastery and reach of the BBC’s outside broadcast operation for several hours every Saturday afternoon, leaving millions of viewers with indelible memories of great sporting moments. Z Cars 1962 When Sydney Newman took over the reins of BBC TV drama and launched The Wednesday Play in 1964, Z Cars provided his inspiration. It depicted the rough-and-tumble of ordinary men and women serving in a northern police force, with the restless visual style of a documentary. It was gritty and dark, and showed messy, complex lives. As its writer, John McGrath, explained, “the cops were incidental”. Top Gear 1967 No, not the TV series about cars – rather, the Radio 1 programme that launched the BBC career of John Peel. The show established the Reithian approach to music Peel displayed over the following 37 years: introducing listeners to sounds they had little chance of hearing anywhere else on British radio. Small Axe 2020 This anthology of five films directed by Steve McQueen powerfully captured the experience of black Britons – and the decades of institutional racism they’ve endured. By placing these films in the Sunday evening slot usually reserved for cosy television drama, the BBC showed its willingness to make the perspective of marginalised communities part of our shared national story. David Hendy is emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The BBC: A People’s History (Profile, 2022) This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
The past two decades have seen the BBC rocked by a series of scandals that raised questions about its culture and practices – and tested its relationship with politicians and the public alike. David Hendy charts the revelations and their aftermath, in part 11 of our 13-part series on the history of the BBC
In the entrance to the BBC’s London headquarters, Broadcasting House, there’s an interesting Latin inscription that refers to broadcasting in the original biblical sense of scattering seed: “And they pray that good seed sown may bring forth good harvest, and that all things foul or hostile to peace may be banished thence, and that the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, may tread the path of virtue and wisdom.” In the years since those words were inscribed, “things foul or hostile” have proved frustratingly hard to erase. And the BBC has been rocked by a number of scandals erupting from within its own portals. As The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins observed, the BBC “is where the British gather to fight their most vicious culture wars… it has crisis in its bones”. But some fights prove more damaging than others. And over the past two decades, a 24-hours-a-day media world has made it easier than ever for its opponents to amplify any mistakes – large and small. Nor has an increasingly nervy BBC always defended itself well against their attacks. The first major crisis of the new century to hit the BBC concerned the invasion of Iraq by British and American forces, and precipitated a bitter falling out with Tony Blair’s government. Hostilities opened on the morning of 29 May 2003 with a soon-to-be-infamous broadcast on Radio 4. Just after 6am, the Today programme’s defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, took to the microphone to talk about the latest twist in the saga of Iraq’s elusive “weapons of mass destruction” – weapons the government had suggested could be launched against British interests within 45 minutes, and which had therefore become a major justification for military intervention. Gilligan now suggested not just that the 45-minute figure mentioned in an intelligence dossier was wrong but that the government had known it was wrong. Explore the history of the BBC This is part 11 in a 13-part series by David Hendy that charts how the BBC shaped the nation. Read more about the history of the BBC: Part 1 | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions Part 2 | Broadcasting House: a new home for the BBC Part 3 | Andy Pandy to Blue Peter: how the BBC captivated little citizens Part 4 | From "exotic" attractions to changing racial attitudes: the BBC's slow progress to mirror multicultural Britain Part 5 | The BBC changes its tune to play the sounds of the sixties Part 6 | The BBC's Third Programme troubled championing of "high culture" Part 7 | The BBC goes into the wild: the rise of natural history television and David Attenborough Part 8 | The battle for ratings: how EastEnders saved the BBC Part 9 | Politics and public broadcasting: 1950s friction between government and the BBC Part 10 | The BBC and the birth of the television age Worse, he claimed that Downing Street had ordered the same document to be “sexed up, to be made more exciting”. In other words, a BBC correspondent was making the incendiary claim that the prime minister had deliberately misled the nation – and he made the claim on a breakfast programme that often set the day’s news agenda for the national media. The response from Downing Street’s press operation, led by Alastair Campbell, was speedy and unrelenting. As well as denying the story outright, Campbell accused Today of basing its report on a single anonymous and uncorroborated source. With the BBC’s director general, Greg Dyke, resolutely standing by Gilligan, what began as a dispute over a reporter’s choice of words in a single interview rapidly blew up into a debilitating conflict over journalistic standards. Several weeks later, Gilligan’s source was revealed: David Kelly, the former UN weapons inspector. Soon after, Kelly went missing from his Oxfordshire home. And on Friday 18 July his body was found slumped against a tree: he had taken his own life. The subsequent inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death, led by Brian Hutton, the former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, published its findings the following January. They contained devastating criticism of the Today programme’s editorial processes: Gilligan’s central allegations had been “unfounded” and the editorial system that allowed him to make his claims had been “defective”. Within 24 hours, the BBC’s chairman, Gavyn Davies, and the director general had both resigned, while a caretaker chairman, Richard Ryder, had apologised “unreservedly” for the BBC’s failures. There were plenty inside the BBC, especially in its news departments, who felt that the government and corporation had each overreacted. A 2004 government review suggested the intelligence on which the government relied had indeed been “seriously flawed” – a finding the Chilcot Inquiry would later reinforce. In the immediate aftermath of the row, Kevin Marsh, Today’s editor, pointed out that “very senior sources” had also confirmed many of the details in Gilligan’s report. The BBC’s man had been substantially right. He had also been prepared properly by his editorial team: it was merely his loose phrasing in the heat of a live conversation which had caused the problem. Many fellow journalists feared a long-term chilling effect on the corporation’s news instincts. Yet the BBC’s former business editor, Robert Peston, later claimed he for one never “felt haunted by Hutton”. Roger Mosey, who ran television news at the time, also described a subtle recalibration taking hold after Hutton: a BBC that was simply reasserting its commitment to higher standards of proof. From the historian’s point of view, what’s perhaps most striking about this whole episode is what it reveals about the huge influence of newspaper values on BBC journalism during this period. There was a constant turnover of staff between Fleet Street and the corporation, and in the BBC’s newsrooms a great deal of time and attention was devoted to perusing the press, especially the Mail and Telegraph. The result, according to the Financial Times journalist John Lloyd, had been not just a newspaper culture ravenous for conflict but also a BBC that had come to believe that “this was the way true journalists should behave”. If so, the recalibration Mosey described was probably overdue. Institutional failings The 2012 row over Jimmy Savile also touched on journalistic standards. But it sent shockwaves well beyond the BBC’s newsrooms. When Savile’s death was announced in October 2011, reporters on Newsnight were preparing an expose of his tawdry history of sexual abuse. Their investigation was then halted, leaving a team from ITV to broadcast the allegations a few months later. Had the corporation’s senior executives intervened because a tribute show was also being planned for the Christmas schedules? Had they feared what would emerge about historical allegations of abuse committed by Savile at the BBC? Or was it both? Given the whiff of a cover-up and swirling rumours of sex offenders on the payroll, the BBC felt it had little option but to expose itself to some very public investigations. The first of these, conducted by the former ITN journalist Nick Pollard, would eventually clear Newsnight and senior managers of improper attempts to suppress the truth. The real issue, Pollard concluded, had been an editorial decision that set the bar of proof too high by insisting that the testimony of those women who were Savile’s victims was not in itself sufficient for the BBC to proceed. By now, the crisis had escalated horribly. In what appeared to be an attempt to prove its commitment to robust investigative journalism, Newsnight alleged that a senior Conservative had been involved in child abuse. He wasn’t named, but speculation on social media soon identified him as the former Tory party treasurer Lord McAlpine. Unfortunately, it was a case of mistaken identity: McAlpine was innocent. Within days, the director general, George Entwistle – just weeks into the job – had been forced to resign. Meanwhile, the chairman, Chris Patten, talked publicly about “a tsunami of filth” engulfing the corporation. A second investigation saw High Court judge Dame Janet Smith spend nearly four years interviewing more than 380 witnesses. Her findings, published in 2016, revealed that a catalogue of sexual assaults had indeed taken place. She identified more than 70 allegations of inappropriate conduct or sexual assault, many of them associated with TV shows Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It. There had been no institutional cover-up, she concluded, but those who had witnessed Savile’s behaviour had repeatedly failed to pass on complaints. Staff had been more concerned with damage to the BBC’s reputation than victims’ welfare. Moral danger The account of witness “C16” was all too typical. She was just 16 years old in 1969, and had been in the Top of the Pops studio dancing next to Savile when he attacked her. When she complained to a member of the studio floor staff, she was told she must have been mistaken and escorted off the premises. On other occasions complainants were told to keep their “mouth shut” or that Savile had just been “mucking about”. The DJ would often meet his victims at the recording of a show and then entice them away from BBC premises in order for the abuse to take place elsewhere. But he would also “gratify himself sexually” at Television Centre, Radio 1’s offices at Egton House, and other regional centres. These, Smith said, had become places where young people were “at risk of moral danger”. Taking a legalistic approach, Smith decided the BBC as a corporate entity could only have been guilty of a cover-up if heads of department or those above had been aware of specific allegations and done nothing. This, she said, was not the case. There had been plenty of gossip, and several junior staff had clearly been aware of Savile’s actions. But none of the complaints – even those from the BBC’s own staff – were fully documented or passed up the chain of command. Such lack of concern was not uncommon at the time, but a destructive “macho culture”, especially among the BBC’s technical staff and TV light entertainment, had been revealed. In the following years there would have to be wholesale reform behind the scenes: better child protection and whistleblowing guidelines, staff awareness training, and, above all, a healthier gender balance on the payroll. The BBC’s two biggest recent scandals both seem so shocking, in part, because they concerned an organisation that its first director general, John Reith, had once imagined would set a new gold standard in corporate management. But while the rows surrounding both Gilligan and Savile undoubtedly raised profoundly serious issues – as did the scandal surrounding Martin Bashir’s 1995 interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, and ongoing accusations of age discrimination at the corporation – they were also examples of an institution facing intense scrutiny and yet still committed to unusual levels of public accountability. The BBC’s initial response to embarrassing revelations has often been overly defensive. But principles of transparency have usually kicked in – sometimes to the point of painful self-excoriation. Perhaps more damaging to the corporation’s image is the stream of less spectacular – and sometimes vexatious – disputes over editorial balance or lapses in taste. In a creative organisation responsible for thousands of hours of output every week, mistakes are inevitable, and sometimes forgiveable. The BBC’s difficulty is that it is these, as much as the more serious disputes, which continue to provide a rich vein of ammunition for any politician or commercial rival intent on weakening its public standing for their own benefit. This article was first published in the November 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
The BBC and the birth of the television age
In 1936, the BBC launched its new TV service – and changed British broadcasting at a stroke. In part ten of our 13-part series on the history of the BBC, David Hendy charts the technological innovations that produced the so-called “magic rays” – and explores the delights they offered the viewing public
For the first 14 years of its life, the BBC had been synonymous with radio. But on 2 November 1936, the corporation launched the world’s first regular “high-definition” television service. And although it would take more than two decades for this new medium to become a mass social phenomenon, the meaning of the term “broadcasting” changed almost overnight. The BBC was now on the path of becoming supplier to the nation not just of sound but of sound and vision. Shortly after 3pm at the Alexandra Palace studios on the slopes of Muswell Hill, the BBC Television Orchestra began to play. The musical comedy star Adele Dixon then stepped out before the cameras to sing some freshly minted lines about “a mighty maze” of magic rays soaring through the sky. Soon after, the African-American song-and-dance duo Buck and Bubbles, plus Chinese plate-spinners the Lai Founs, also arrived at the studios for short turns before the cameras. These performances were beamed out live from the 90-metre-high steel transmitter soaring from the building’s roof, and in several hundred living rooms across London and the home counties, the BBC’s “magic rays” served them up on strange-looking receivers around which were gathered the nation’s small but dedicated tribe of “lookers in”. There would be more entertainment later that evening, though not until the service had shut down for five hours: evening meals and children’s bedtimes were sacrosanct. Explore the history of the BBC This is part nine in a 13-part series by David Hendy that charts how the BBC shaped the nation. Read more about the history of the BBC: Part 1 | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions Part 2 | Broadcasting House: a new home for the BBC Part 3 | Andy Pandy to Blue Peter: how the BBC captivated little citizens Part 4 | From "exotic" attractions to changing racial attitudes: the BBC's slow progress to mirror multicultural Britain Part 5 | The BBC changes its tune to play the sounds of the sixties Part 6 | The BBC's Third Programme troubled championing of "high culture" Part 7 | The BBC goes into the wild: the rise of natural history television and David Attenborough Part 8 | The battle for ratings: how EastEnders saved the BBC Part 9 | Politics and public broadcasting: 1950s friction between government and the BBC Though that day would go down in history as the official start of the television age, it was by no means Britain’s first experience of the new medium. Members of the public – some of them, at least – had been enjoying the spectacle of moving images in their own homes for several years. What it really marked was confirmation that, in the hands of the BBC, television finally had the long-term institutional backing it needed after more than a decade struggling to get off the ground. The first practical steps towards what some called “seeing by wireless” had been taken back in 1924 by the young Scottish engineer John Logie Baird. In his cramped Hastings workshop, Baird had lashed together an old tea chest, assorted cardboard boxes, several darning needles and a pile of scrap timber, all balanced precariously on top of a washstand and festooned with wiring. After much testing and tweaking, he succeeded in using this bizarre contraption to send a beam of light through a rapidly spinning disc punched with holes and, by doing so, “scan”, transmit and display on a screen just yards away the faint and wobbly image of a Maltese Cross. Within months he was attracting investors salivating at the prospect of swiftly transforming this home-made technology into a lucrative product. Their money, along with Baird’s own perseverance and the support of several friendly engineers, ensured that over the next few years both picture quality and the distances over which an image could be transmitted slowly improved. Transforming transmissions Casting a beady eye over Baird’s operation, the novelist William Le Queux declared that very soon everyone would “be able to both see and hear a thousand miles away”. BBC insiders were more guarded. Most, including the director general John Reith, accepted that television was bound to come. The corporation even held out a helping hand for a series of experimental broadcasts. In 1929, it granted shared access to its transmitters, and three years later – only months after moving into Broadcasting House – it donated its lavishly equipped basement studio for a specially assembled team of Baird Company and BBC staff to transmit a series of hour-long programmes up to four times a week. This offered the chance to work out some of the techniques of the new television craft, including lighting, camera angles and make-up. “Take-off” remained elusive, however, and the BBC’s engineers soon wondered if Baird’s own technology was approaching its natural limits. TV receivers were still pricey and the picture quality – with screens barely bigger than a postcard – still unsatisfactory. Worse, transmissions required the same medium-wave frequencies that the BBC used for its radio broadcasts, which meant that any further improvement in the picture – for just a few thousand TV viewers – would come at the expense of many millions of listeners to the National or Regional Programmes. For a corporation dedicated to what Reith called “the maximum benefit to the maximum number”, the public value in devoting more resources to what remained a service for a tiny, well-off minority was far from clear. It was the prospect of an entirely new technological approach that transformed matters. In 1934, the BBC’s engineers became aware of a rival electronic system being developed by EMI and Marconi, involving cathode ray tubes, different wavelengths and much sharper images. It seemed the answer to the BBC’s prayers, and by the time its own fully fledged service was launched in 1936, the new system had already been installed at Alexandra Palace. Something of everything All the years spent collaborating with the Baird Company had not been entirely wasted. For a start, the Post Office insisted that, for now, the BBC had to continue using Baird’s mechanical method alongside the new electronic one. More importantly, all of those trial broadcasts had given programme-makers the opportunity to think about the actual content of their transmissions. After all, the general public would be enticed to buy a set only if there was something sufficiently entertaining to watch on it. In 1930, Baird had enlisted Harold Bradley – in effect, the first television “director” – to arrange a stream of studio-based puppet-shows and piano recitals. Two years later, transmissions from Broadcasting House’s basement often featured performers who had just done a turn in the BBC’s radio studios. Among those who ventured down from the upper floors were singers such as Josephine Baker, ballet dancers from the London stage, and a motley array of exotic animals including a boa constrictor, an alligator and Sally the Seal, brought before the camera to blow a saxophone. The most ambitious productions came during the months immediately preceding the first official broadcasts from Alexandra Palace, when the BBC was asked at short notice to produce programmes for the August 1936 Radiolympia exhibition of new broadcasting equipment held in Earl’s Court. Three regular “hosts” had been recruited to act as comperes: Jasmine Bligh, Elizabeth Cowell and the debonair Movietone News commentator Leslie Mitchell. It was Mitchell who introduced the BBC’s first TV variety show for Radiolympia, Here’s Looking at You, which featured Helen McKay singing a specially written theme song, a male trio from the Cole Porter show Anything Goes!, a pair of Chilean dancers and Pogo the pantomime horse. The Radiolympia schedule also featured occasional newsreels and extracts from British or American films. But the overall flavour was one of fast-changing variety, with plenty of pleasant conversation and vaudeville. All this provided a ready formula for the service launched in November. It was also familiar to millions who had tuned in to radio variety shows such as Music-Hall or In Town Tonight – what the Listener’s critic Grace Wyndham Goldie later referred to as “something of everything and nothing for long”. In the months that followed, dedicated viewers would be offered a talk by the artist John Piper one moment, and witness a man tearing a telephone directory in half the next. Senior figures at Alexandra Palace – such as the director of television, Gerald Cock, and his right-hand man, Cecil Madden – were old BBC hands and, while they talked passionately of putting the stamp of difference on their latest venture in Alexandra Palace, they inevitably brought with them all sorts of ideas and practices picked up from years working in the older medium. The Reithian “rich mix” – with entertainment as important as edification – was in their bones. It would be less than three years before a declaration of war demanded the complete suspension of activities at Alexandra Palace. But by then the team gathered there had accumulated more television programme-making experience than anyone else in the world. The number of viewers was nearly 20,000 and growing fast. And perhaps most significantly of all, British television was on the way to being a popular medium formed very much in the BBC’s own image. The black performers who added stardust to BBC Television’s early years Josephine Baker’s appearance in those early experimental transmissions from Broadcasting House offered a tantalising foretaste of the distinctive role that black performers would play on British TV screens in the years either side of the war. Between 1936 and the sudden closedown in September 1939, the list of artists appearing before the cameras included actor Nina Mae McKinney, singer and entertainer Elisabeth Welch, and jazz singer Adelaide Hall. Baker herself appeared on more than one occasion, as did stage and screen actor Paul Robeson. When TV returned in 1946, Trinidadian actor Edric Connor was chosen to introduce a performance by Europe’s first black dance company, Les Ballets Nègres. One factor driving the presence of such stars, especially in the 1930s, was the sheer quantity of high-class American entertainment then being staged in London’s West End. The BBC’s Cecil Madden recalled a capital city “packed with cabarets… Every hotel, the Berkeley, the Ritz, Quaglino’s, anywhere you like, they all had acts which could be bought quite cheaply at the times we wanted.” Madden proved adept at drawing on this reservoir of Broadway and off-Broadway talent to add a generous sprinkle of African-American stardust to the Television Service’s evening schedules. Yet senior staff at Alexandra Palace had plenty of blind spots when it came to race – and sometimes showed themselves rather too willing to bend to the prejudices of viewers. In 1950, the controller of television, Norman Collins, responded to complaints about Black Magic, a variety show that featured a black artist singing to a white woman. “Love songs between white and coloured artists must be very scrupulously considered,” he told colleagues afterwards. “Such acts are not expressly forbidden, but are better avoided.” Eight years later, the BBC would launch The Black and White Minstrel Show. Despite numerous complaints from inside and outside the corporation about the offence it caused, the show went on to run for another 20 years. David Hendy is emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The BBC: A People’s History (Profile, 2022) This article was first published in the October 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Politics and public broadcasting: 1950s friction between government and the BBC
The 1956 Suez Crisis caused long-simmering tensions between the BBC and the government to boil over – and, as David Hendy explores in part nine of our 13-part series on the history of the BBC, marked the start of a shift in the relationship between politicians and the public
In November 1956, a 14-minute televised address to the nation by the British prime minister Anthony Eden triggered possibly the single biggest Cold War-era clash between government and the BBC. It stripped bare the intimate, if awkward, relationship between professional broadcasters and the worlds of Westminster and Whitehall. But behind the row lurked another battle between sharply different views on the proper role of television in reporting politics. The broadcast, on the evening of Saturday 3 November, represented Eden’s hurried attempt to justify a botched and ill-judged military adventure of his own making. In the wake of Egypt’s recent nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Israeli forces had invaded the Sinai Peninsula at the end of October. Israel’s action had been secretly planned in collaboration with Britain and France, in order to justify a subsequent occupation of the Canal Zone by British and French paratroopers. Read more about the Suez Crisis Eden’s collusion had initially been a secret known only to a handful of close ministers and advisors. Yet there was disquiet about Britain’s whole response to Egypt’s nationalisation. Even before the first British paratroopers had landed, Eden felt compelled to go before the BBC’s cameras to explain what was happening. In his broadcast, he spoke of Britain’s military intervention as a form of “police action” and claimed that he had acted “rightly and wisely”. His words weren’t enough to assuage the UN, which condemned the use of force, nor the US, which pressed for an almost immediate ceasefire. Before long, British and French troops had been forced into a humiliating withdrawal. The problem for the BBC was that the crisis had already divided public and political opinion. The Labour party, in particular, was vehemently opposed to Eden’s policy. Oliver Whitley, the assistant controller of the BBC’s Overseas Services, later explained the dilemma facing senior staff at the time. Explore the history of the BBC This is part nine in a 13-part series by David Hendy that charts how the BBC shaped the nation. Read more about the history of the BBC: Part 1 | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions Part 2 | Broadcasting House: a new home for the BBC Part 3 | Andy Pandy to Blue Peter: how the BBC captivated little citizens Part 4 | From "exotic" attractions to changing racial attitudes: the BBC's slow progress to mirror multicultural Britain Part 5 | The BBC changes its tune to play the sounds of the sixties Part 6 | The BBC's Third Programme troubled championing of "high culture" Part 7 | The BBC goes into the wild: the rise of natural history television and David Attenborough Part 8 | The battle for ratings: how EastEnders saved the BBC Part 10 | The BBC and the birth of the television age “We had all got used to the fact that there wasn’t a great deal of difference in foreign policy between the two main political parties,” he said, “and here suddenly the nation was split right down the middle, pro and against Suez, and the BBC felt it its duty to reflect accurately, as accurately as it could, the situation.” It meant news coverage both at home and abroad had to feature at least some commentary opposed to Eden. It also meant that, with Eden having defended himself on primetime TV, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell demanded – and expected – the same treatment. The BBC thought this reasonable; the government did not. Throughout this unfolding drama, the director general, Ian Jacob, had been in Australia. In his absence, Norman Bottomley, the BBC’s director of administration, and Harman Grisewood, the director general’s chief assistant, were the two senior corporation officials summoned to Whitehall for a dressing down. Grisewood recalled “a lot of soldiers and some Air Force people” telling them that full wartime conditions applied – conditions that obliged the BBC to support the government of the day just as it had done during the Second World War. Grisewood and Bottomley refused to accept these terms, and were warned privately that Eden had ordered a legal instrument to be drawn up allowing his government to take over the BBC. It was in the fractious aftermath of this ominous development that the BBC’s board of governors agreed to grant Gaitskell his request. On 4 November, just a day after Eden’s address, the Labour leader used his own broadcast to launch a blistering attack on the PM, describing the attack on Egypt as “a criminal folly” and calling on Eden to resign – which, not long after, he did. Under the media spotlight The government was reluctant to let the corporation go entirely unpunished over its impartial approach. In an attempt to exert greater control, the Foreign Office insisted on the appointment of a “liaison officer” in the Overseas Service, hoping the government line would thereby be given more prominence. It had the opposite effect. Oliver Whitley watched a succession of “usually rather young Foreign Office men” turn up at Bush House only to become “firm friends and often very useful advocates of the whole BBC External Broadcasting operation”. On the domestic front, the BBC’s willingness to grant Gaitskell his turn before the cameras has often been seen as emblematic of a corporation proudly asserting its independence from government. The reality was more complex. In his memoirs, Grisewood suggested that the row arose not because the BBC had taken sides but because “Eden’s aim was secrecy and the BBC’s was enlightenment”. Yet in the 1950s, when TV was still finding its feet, broadcasters and politicians alike saw that the medium might not always be the ideal forum for hosting important debates. For a start, there seemed an element of artifice that was absent in radio. Among the BBC team responsible for organising Eden’s Suez broadcast was the young, freshly recruited producer David Attenborough, who recalled a bizarre scene unfolding inside Downing Street: the prime minister in bed, “looking dreadful, in his pyjamas”, pill bottles lined up next to him and his wife frantically dabbing mascara on to his moustache. In the aftermath of his 1945 election defeat, Churchill had set out in no uncertain terms why he believed “the BBC must do no political broadcasting of any kind” when it came to television: “I’ve spent 50 years on my feet having to watch the effect of what I was saying as I was saying it,” he told the director general. “If I’d also had to worry about how I was looking, politics would have become intolerable.” Some in the BBC might have agreed, at least in private. Grace Wyndham Goldie, who ran the BBC’s television current affairs, claimed afterwards that Eden’s appearances on screen “never did him justice”. Nervousness, she said, drove him to adopt “a kind of self-conscious charm which… to my mind conveyed a kind of meretriciousness and an intention to deceive”. Goldie was among the fiercest advocates for television’s right to cover contemporary affairs – yet even she could recognise its distorting lens. The decline of deference Whatever the doubts, television could hardly be kept away from politics forever. Since no broadcasting from parliament was allowed, younger politicians in particular were ready to embrace the TV studio as a place from which they could reach their electorate directly. They saw, too, the necessity of not just looking the part, but also being quick on their feet. By the end of the 1950s, not only was television overtaking radio in popularity, the launch of commercial broadcasting had also prompted a step-change in the way politicians were treated on air. ITN’s star interviewer, Robin Day, set the tone through his famously combative interviews. It was therefore a significant moment in the history of British TV journalism when he jumped to the BBC in 1959, and, during the 1960s, the corporation was nudged into an altogether less deferential approach by its new director general, Hugh Carleton Greene. The cockpit of national debate was shifting: from the precincts of Westminster to Broadcasting House, Television Centre, and Lime Grove – the shabby but energetic base for the BBC’s ambitious and rapidly expanding TV current affairs team. A decade after Suez, viewers were able to watch politicians having to account for their actions on heavyweight series such as Panorama. Listeners to the Home Service could catch William Hardcastle’s quick-fire but authoritative probing of MPs on The World at One. A little over four years later, Day would host BBC radio’s first regular phone-in, It’s Your Line, in which politicians ranging from Enoch Powell to Barbara Castle would answer questions put to them directly by voters. Politicians’ increasing willingness to enter the gladiatorial arena of the studio came at a cost. There had always been friction between government and the BBC. But the rise to prominence of current affairs in the 1950s and 1960s – and the abandonment of an older, deferential approach among programme-makers – raised the stakes. The more fascinated the BBC became with politics, the more that politicians were going to take a close interest in the BBC. Grace Wyndham Goldie: the executive who set the agenda for the BBC’s political programmes Grace Wyndham Goldie has been described as sharp-witted and practical as well as quixotic and something of a bully. She was also profoundly influential in shaping BBC Television’s approach to the reporting of politics. Her BBC career had begun in 1935, as a critic for The Listener magazine. But it was her wartime career as a civil servant that fired an interest in the worlds of Westminster and Whitehall. She had worked at the Board of Trade, organising food supplies to bomb-shattered cities. There, she had come to appreciate the “severe responsibilities” carried by politicians and civil servants. When she later became head of BBC television’s Current Affairs Group, that appreciation forged a culture in which programmes under her control tended to view topical events almost entirely from the rarefied summit of the British political establishment. Panellists on a series such as In the News – the Labour MP Michael Foot and Tory MP Bob Boothby became regulars – were relied on to provide the wit and common sense she saw as vital programme ingredients. As for achieving “balance”, she trusted in her producers’ editorial sensibility, believing they would instinctively know what was right without having to be constantly monitored. There had long been a natural affinity between senior BBC staff and those who controlled the levers of state: a shared faith in applying rational solutions to the problems of society. But under Grace Wyndham Goldie the relationship was more intimate than ever. Her protégés in the Current Affairs Group – insiders called them Grace’s “boys” – included not just bright young graduates but a cluster of ex- or future MPs: highly ambitious young men such as John Freeman, Christopher Mayhew, Michael Peacock, Alasdair Milne and Donald Baverstock. Their supreme self-confidence would eventually bring a heavyweight – and distinctly undeferential – energy to some of the BBC’s most successful TV series of the 1950s and '60s, including Panorama, Tonight, and That Was the Week That Was. David Hendy is emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The BBC: A People’s History (Profile, 2022) This article was first published in the September 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
The battle for ratings: how EastEnders saved the BBC
In the 1980s, the BBC devised a new weapon in its ratings battle against ITV: EastEnders. In part eight of our 13-part series on the history of the BBC, David Hendy explores how a mix of masterful publicity and melodramatic plots propelled the drama to popular success...
One of the most unlikely episodes in British television history unfolded on an isolated Devon hillside one evening in September 1986. It was then that around 60 inmates at Dartmoor Prison, who had been spending “free association” watching the BBC’s hit drama serial EastEnders, started rioting. Chairs and tables were broken up, and lightbulbs smashed. Afterwards, officials launched an urgent investigation. Had the poor quality of food just served for supper triggered the outburst? Not, it seemed, in this case. It had been TV – or rather, its temporary absence – that had apparently caused the fracas. On the night in question, EastEnders had featured one of the main characters, the teenage mother Michelle Fowler, jilt her sweetheart, Lofty, at the altar and declare her love instead for the father of her baby: the landlord of the Queen Vic pub, “Dirty Den” Watts. In soap-opera terms, it was a classic moment of high drama, and around 20 million Britons – roughly half the adult population of the entire country – had tuned in. At the crucial moment, all reception in Dartmoor Prison had been lost – the latest in a growing list of reception failures at the institution. By the time the picture returned to normal, all the inmates could see was Lofty crying alone in his bedsit. Explore the history of the BBC This is part 8 in a 13-part series by David Hendy that charts how the BBC shaped the nation. Read more about the history of the BBC: Part 1 | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions Part 2 | Broadcasting House: a new home for the BBC Part 3 | Andy Pandy to Blue Peter: how the BBC captivated little citizens Part 4 | From "exotic" attractions to changing racial attitudes: the BBC's slow progress to mirror multicultural Britain Part 5 | The BBC changes its tune to play the sounds of the sixties Part 6 | The BBC's Third Programme troubled championing of "high culture" Part 7 | The BBC goes into the wild: the rise of natural history television and David Attenborough In less than two years after its February 1985 launch, EastEnders had become compulsive viewing. Indeed, it had been designed by the BBC with this goal in mind – conceived as a finely honed weapon in an ongoing TV ratings war that the corporation desperately needed to win. The broadcaster had been doing reasonably well when it came to peak-time programmes. Its evening schedule featured, among other hits, Dynasty, Top of the Pops, The Generation Game, ‘Allo ‘Allo!, Only Fools and Horses, Blackadder and The Young Ones. Yet by 1983, ITV seemed to be doing even better. While the BBC’s licence fee income was stagnant, advertising revenues for the regional commercial companies were buoyant, and they had used their wealth to splash out on big, audience-friendly series for the most lucrative mid-evening slots. The BBC was also being held back by programme starting times. Although it did not carry advertising itself, many of its series were being sold abroad and had to be made the right length for networks that did. This meant a steady stream of programmes about 25 minutes or 50 minutes in length, leaving the poor British viewer with an untidy schedule that was almost impossible to follow. ITV’s programmes, which started on the hour or the half hour, were much easier to grasp. The result of all this in ratings terms was that five of the top six series were now ITV’s. It was a dangerous position for the BBC to find itself in. It might not be obliged to think only of ratings – but if its audience share ever dipped below something like 30 per cent, life could become politically very difficult. How could the corporation carry on justifying a universal licence fee if a growing portion of the public were no longer using its services? A new peak-time soap opera – something that could perhaps take on ITV’s hugely popular Coronation Street – presented itself as the obvious solution: a programme that would have as its prime objective the maintenance of audience share. Don't miss our podcast series on the history of the BBC – listen to all episodes so far A window on society The idea of the BBC broadcasting a soap opera – or, to use the BBC’s preferred term, a “popular drama serial” – was neither new nor revolutionary. As was often the case, radio had led the way. The corporation’s wartime North American Service had featured Front Line Family, the ongoing story of the Robinson family’s gutsy determination to endure bombing, blackout and rationing. Its producers had worked on the basis of a simple rule of thumb: “British in content, American in appeal,” and Front Line Family’s 15-minute episodes, beamed across the Atlantic every weekday, had provided US and Canadian listeners with what one critic called the “refreshing sea-breeze of strength and determination”. In the decades since, two other radio serials had successfully woven their way into Britain’s own national culture: The Archers and Mrs Dale’s Diary. Val Gielgud, the BBC’s long-serving head of Radio Drama, loathed them both. Mrs Dale’s Diary, in particular, he dismissed as “sociologically corrupting” because it encouraged what he saw as a “mediocrity of mind” among listeners. He also thought the standardised “production line” approach that such serials required, with staff asked to make essentially the same programme week after week, year after year, was inimical to good morale and the overall quality of the BBC’s drama output. Yet Gielgud failed to acknowledge their ability to dramatise real social problems. Mrs Dale’s Diary, for instance, grappled throughout the 1950s and 1960s with many of the issues that millions of women listening at home would have recognised: the conflict between the demands of home-making and the desire to go out to work, the pressures of motherhood, failing marriages. But, as with The Archers, the overall tone was certainly one of cosiness and respectability. And when BBC Television dipped a very tentative toe into the same brew in 1954 with the launch of The Grove Family, the portrayal of life in their Hendon home had much the same feel. EastEnders was designed to be altogether more gritty. And the high stakes involved meant that little was left to chance. Two existing TV drama series – Triangle and Angels – were axed so that a ring-fenced budget of more than £1.6m could be deployed on a dedicated set in Elstree. New directors were hand-picked rom London’s top theatres. Casting, rehearsals and scriptwriting went on for months, and a full-time producer and scriptwriter were recruited: Julia Smith and Tony Holland, who had worked on Z Cars together. In focus: EastEnders’ Christmas special attracts the highest ratings of the decade In 1986, staff from the social research organisation Mass Observation asked thousands of volunteer diary-keepers to record how they spent Christmas Day. The replies proved – if anyone still needed convincing – that, in many homes, Christmas meant Christmas TV. And, this year in particular, it meant EastEnders. Since it was already the most popular programme on British screens, the BBC opted to treat viewers to not one but two instalments, the first just after 6.30pm, the second at 10pm. Programme details in Radio Times offered tantalising clues as to what would unfold across the evening by including two short snatches of dialogue. The first was apparently from Angie, whose husband “Dirty Den” was the landlord of the Queen Vic pub: “Nothing can go wrong, Den. I want this to be the best Christmas we’ve ever had.” For the second instalment, the magazine’s listings featured an altogether darker line: “They should bring back hanging for people like Den Watts.” What on earth was capable of provoking such a terrifying outburst after that initial display of goodwill? The diaries reveal a nation of viewers on tenterhooks. “Ate Christmas pudding with cream and sauce in lounge in front of TV,” wrote one, “Watched EastEnders with great glee and everybody determined to watch second half at 10pm.” “9.35pm: more conversation then more TV as we were all waiting for the day’s second episode of EastEnders,” another recorded. “We all agreed that the Beeb had been very crafty.” By 10.30pm, all had been revealed. Den had discovered that Angie had lied to him about being terminally ill, and now served her divorce papers in cold blooded revenge. If that wasn’t dramatic enough, Pauline Fowler had also discovered that Den was the father of Michelle’s baby – another long-running plotline that had sparked much audience speculation. It was melodrama with the dial turned to maximum. But it proved to be a ratings winner, too. Thirty million of us watched – the biggest television audience of the 1980s. Compulsive viewing The programme they created had all the classic soap-opera elements familiar to viewers of Coronation Street: strong female characters, a pub at the centre of the community, and in Albert Square a working-class neighbourhood that, whatever the personal fallings out behind closed doors, remained closely-knit at heart. Yet EastEnders added to this familiar mix a touch of the “Blitz spirit” and storylines that self-consciously tackled pressing social issues such as unemployment, imprisonment, rape, drugs, racism, homophobia, and suicide. For now, the BBC’s new serial also went considerably further than Coronation Street in capturing the increasingly multicultural character of late 20th-century Britain. What perhaps distinguished EastEnders most of all from its BBC predecessors was the hard-headed publicity machine that helped to ensure that half the British adult population would soon be watching regularly. A stream of gossipy titbits about cast members or up coming plot twists was fed to the tabloid newspapers so that it became “the soap opera they cannot stop writing about”. Read more | 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London “[Coronation] Street is old-fashioned and corny,” the editor of the News of the World said. “EastEnders with its violence, sex and crime is much more like the real world.” The result of saturation coverage was that the so-called “Dallas effect” kicked in: the serial became so talked about that viewers felt they were missing out if they failed to watch. In less than 12 months, the journalist Andy Medhurst wrote in the Observer: “‘Who was the father of Michelle’s baby?’ had replaced ‘Who shot JR?’ as the country’s favourite soap question.” It was Medhurst, too, who later put his finger on what all this meant for a BBC under constant attack from Margaret Thatcher’s government during the 1980s. Popularity was the shield which allowed the corporation to also pursue quality. It would, he wrote, “only be a slight exaggeration to say that it was EastEnders which kept the BBC safe from privatisation: every time you’re grateful that a film, football match or opera isn’t scarred by the intrusion of ads, it’s the inhabitants of Albert Square you ought to thank.” David Hendy is emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The BBC: A People’s History (Profile, 2022) This article was first published in the August 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
The BBC at 100: what can history tell us about its future?
Media historian David Hendy explores what the corporation’s history can tell us about its future
In the final instalment of our series marking the BBC’s centenary, David Hendy explores what the corporation’s history can tell us about its future. He spoke to Matt Elton about the challenges that the corporation has faced in the 21st century – and what looking back at its past can tell us about its future. David Hendy is the author of The BBC: A People’s History (Profile Books, 2022). Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
The BBC changes its tune to play the sounds of the sixties
Facing fleets of pirate radio stations and teenagers hungry to hear the latest hits, the BBC had to change its tune. In part five of our 13-part series on the history of the BBC, David Hendy explores how it appealed to young new audiences with the launch of Radio 1, and turned their roster of irreverent and finger-on-the-pulse DJs into stars...
At 7am on Saturday 30 September 1967, in a windowless studio in London, a pop revolution was ignited. Watched by his producer, the 24-year-old disc-jockey Tony Blackburn switched on his microphone, welcomed listeners across Britain to “the exciting new sound of Radio 1” and placed onto his turntable Flowers in the Rain, the latest single from The Move. “It wasn’t one of my favourite records,” Blackburn later confessed, but “I wanted something nice and happy, something that reflected that era.” As the “Summer of Love” – a season of flower-power, love-ins and teach-ins – reached its psychedelic close, the BBC unveiled a new radio station dedicated to the latest tunes. The newspapers were agog. The Sunday Telegraph talked of a “gimmick ridden” corporation sending the nation’s teenagers into orbit. The Observer declared it “Auntie’s first freak-out”. Never had a freak-out been so widely advertised in advance or so meticulously prepared for. Back in 1964, the fleet of unlicensed “pirate” radio ships that suddenly began beaming non-stop chart hits to mainland Britain from just outside its territorial waters had prompted a flurry of activity both within the BBC, understandably anxious about losing millions of listeners, and in the corridors of government, which worried about copyright and its obligation to enforce international laws over wavelengths. Explore the history of the BBC This is part 5 in a 13-part series by David Hendy that charts how the BBC shaped the nation. Read more about the history of the BBC: Part 1 | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions Part 2 | Broadcasting House: a new home for the BBC Part 3 | Andy Pandy to Blue Peter: how the BBC captivated little citizens Part 4 | From "exotic" attractions to changing racial attitudes: the BBC's slow progress to mirror multicultural Britain Part 6 | The BBC's Third Programme troubled championing of "high culture" Part 7 | The BBC goes into the wild: the rise of natural history television and David Attenborough By August 1967, legislation initiated by Tony Benn in his previous role as postmaster general had effectively sunk Radio Caroline, Radio London and the rest, paving the way for the BBC to provide a replacement service. For months the BBC had been eavesdropping on the pirates, despatching staff on clandestine missions to recruit their best disc jockeys, copying their studio designs and jingles, and conducting dummy-runs of their own new shows. But handing responsibility to the corporation seemed to many observers an unlikely solution to the public’s insatiable desire for more pop music. When Benn first floated the idea of a new service, the BBC’s chairman is reported to have replied: “You can’t have popular music all the time – it would be like having the pubs open all day.” In pictures | English life in the 1960s, photographed by Tony Ray-Jones Nor, apparently, were such attitudes confined to the BBC’s uppermost ranks. Terry Wogan, who had recently joined from the Irish broadcaster RTE, found a corporation acting like “the British empire under Queen Victoria – incredibly self-confident, indeed probably complacent… entirely convinced of its own rectitude, of its own brilliance, of its own status in the world”. It was a self-confidence that Wogan admired, but it had clearly left Britain’s national broadcaster floundering to keep pace with musical tastes mutating at lightning speed. The BBC offered listeners to the Light Programme “the best of today’s ‘pop’ entertainment” on shows such as Saturday Club and Pick of the Pops; TV viewers could watch the latest hits on Top of the Pops. Yet as far as the young music journalist Annie Nightingale was concerned, the rest of its output remained “utterly atrocious”, with presenters “talking down” to listeners and playing hours of middle-of-the-road records including Twenty Tiny Fingers, Twenty Tiny Toes or Tulips from Amsterdam. On the podcast | Historian, author and broadcaster Dominic Sandbrook answers popular search queries and questions about Britain in the 1960s There were, however, people inside the corporation desperate to drag it firmly into the sixties. The director-general himself, Hugh Carleton Greene, had called on staff to throw open the windows and clear the place of its “ivory-tower stuffiness”. He had also told producers that “if you don’t upset part of your audience most of the time, you’re not doing your job properly”. This signal from the top – that not every programme had to please everyone – was hugely liberating. It encouraged a concerted push to recruit younger staff: men and women who were not just in touch with contemporary culture but who enjoyed a healthy irreverence towards authority figures. Adverts for openings at new television channel BBC Two, for instance, went out of their way to specify the need for “new blood”; talent-spotters from Radio Light Entertainment scurried to Cambridge to dangle BBC contracts under the noses of freshly graduated Footlights performers such as John Cleese and Graeme Garden. By 1967, the old guard of producers – described somewhat cruelly as the “chaps with cravats”– had largely made way for a new generation. In focus: how John Peel became the DJ who broadened the horizons of generations of listeners Tony Blackburn might have embodied the cheery, cheesy style of the BBC’s new pop station during the day. But the DJ who did most to establish its reputation for showcasing the esoteric outer reaches of contemporary music at night was John Peel. He made his debut on Sunday 1 October 1967 co-presenting the free wheeling, three-hour long, rock-focused radio programme Top Gear. Within months, he was a regular on Night Ride. And in the years ahead he would host, among others, Sounds of the Seventies, In Concert, and the eponymous, seemingly everlasting John Peel Show. The Radio Times billed him rather blandly as the man who would play “the coolest sounds around”. But Peel did more than that. Having spent his young adult life drifting through dead-end jobs in the United States, browsing the record stores and doing late-night shifts on any radio station that would take him, he had accumulated a vast knowledge of the prog rock, R&B and blues scenes. His tastes were ever-curious and largely unpredictable. For the show he presented on the pirate station Radio London, he dropped the adverts and weather reports to make way for more of the music that had taken his fancy. It was this languid, hippyish style and uncompromising approach that had convinced Radio 1’s controller that he would attract a huge cult following on the BBC. Once installed, Peel stuck to his belief that it was his civic duty to introduce listeners to music they had little chance of hearing anywhere else on Britain’s airwaves. And although it was hard to imagine the corporation’s founding father ever tuning in, these late-night shows were entirely in line with John Reith’s own enduring philosophy: that, in making the strange familiar, the BBC could shape public taste, rather than merely reflecting it. As John Peel put it in his own inimitable way: “The programmes with which I’m involved are aimed at turning y’all on to some musicks that you might not otherwise investigate.” Don't miss our podcast series on the history of the BBC – listen to all episodes so far Inside Broadcasting House, there had also been much agonised debate about the whole future of radio. For more than a decade, television had soaked up an increasing share of resources, publicity and audiences. A medium that had once held listeners entranced in the nation’s sitting rooms looked as if it would have to settle for “background” status, half-listened to in short bursts. The pirates merely confirmed what managers already knew: that the BBC needed to provide more continuous music, and give each of its radio networks a more predictable “generic” identity. This thinking lay behind a reshuffle of programmes in the middle of the decade that saw a clutch of the speech programmes on the Light and Third programmes moving across to the Home Service, and music series heading the opposite way. The overall direction of travel was clear: the Third and the Light programmes would become more akin to music-only services; the Home Service would be the place for talk and debate. Some wondered whether soon all those carefully crafted plays and features would survive at all. The decision by Radio 1 staff to mark launch day by wearing shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Death to the Home Service” was a light-hearted publicity stunt. It also had an ominous ring. In the strictest sense, the Home Service had just died. At the precise hour of Radio 1’s birth, the old triumvirate of Light, Third and Home also disappeared – reborn as Radio 2, Radio 3 and Radio 4 respectively. All the press attention, however, was on the BBC’s new pop station, and those early reviews were far from friendly. Ludovic Kennedy complained of ignorant DJs mangling the English language. In The Observer George Melly suggested that, despite comprehensively plagiarising the pirates, the BBC had created something “lifeless”. This was all a little unjust. It was presenter Tony Blackburn who decided to wear a suit and tie in the studio; his producers preferred the latest flowery shirts. “There was nobody who came to me and said: ‘Oh, we’d rather you did it that way or this way,’” he recalled. “They wanted that pirate radio sound, and that’s exactly what we gave them.” Read more | The Beatles: 8 landmark moments that chart the changing face of sixties Britain If anything held Radio 1 back, it was the music industry’s strict limits on the amount of copyrighted music that could be played on air. The BBC had previously been allocated roughly 30 hours a week for all its networks combined. The arrival of Radio 1 extended this by a measly two hours. The result was a schedule bulked out with royalty-free versions of the latest hits performed by a BBC house orchestra or long stretches of time-filling chat. The constant ad-libbing was clearly a departure for the BBC – and proved discomfiting to older listeners. But at least it meant, in the words of the station’s controller, that the corporation was finally speaking to its younger listeners in “the language of the mid-60s”. This, he added, was now “the new style of radio… the way to go”. His prediction turned out to be accurate. By the next year UK record sales were up noticeably, Radio 1’s audience ratings were buoyant, and a rota of appearances on Top of the Pops – plus a carefully managed image as “boyfriend” substitutes for young female listeners – had cast the new station’s DJs as real-life pop stars, mobbed everywhere they went. It all felt a world away from the postwar atmosphere of the Home, Light and Third. But by now even the controller of Radio 4 was telling staff that he wanted less of the “slightly stiff, slightly buttoned-up formats” inherited from the Home, and more of what he called “the raw stuff” of spontaneous talk: his own station’s schedule was now under review. Whatever the future might bring, a ripple of satisfaction could be felt throughout Broadcasting House. Radio, once deemed old-fashioned, was back in the public eye: a little more spry, a little more confident, reaching tentatively toward a looser, livelier style in tune with the age. David Hendy is emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The BBC: A People’s History (Profile, 2022) This article was first published in the May 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
The BBC goes into the wild: the rise of natural history television and David Attenborough
From its earliest days, the BBC set out to chronicle the natural world, but this ambition reached new heights from the late 1970s. In part seven of our 13-part series on the history of the BBC, David Hendy explores how David Attenborough’s string of wildlife blockbusters enthralled television viewers and transformed our view of the natural world...
At ten past eight in the evening on Tuesday 16 January 1979, British viewers were invited to embark on the opening stage of what would turn out to be one of the most spectacular and ground breaking journeys in British television history. The 50-minute programme was advertised in Radio Times as the start of an ambitious attempt across 13 weekly episodes to explore “the incredible variety of living things, and fossils, which throw light on the ancestry of life”. The series was called Life on Earth, its presenter David Attenborough. It decisively announced not only a new phase in natural history TV, but the beginning of a decades-long era in which the BBC and, in particular its own Natural History Unit, would become a dominant player in the global broadcasting marketplace. Explore the history of the BBC This is part 7 in a 13-part series by David Hendy that charts how the BBC shaped the nation. Read more about the history of the BBC: Part 1 | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions Part 2 | Broadcasting House: a new home for the BBC Part 3 | Andy Pandy to Blue Peter: how the BBC captivated little citizens Part 4 | From "exotic" attractions to changing racial attitudes: the BBC's slow progress to mirror multicultural Britain Part 5 | The BBC changes its tune to play the sounds of the sixties Part 6 | The BBC's Third Programme troubled championing of "high culture" In some respects, Life on Earth started rather unspectacularly. Since this was the story of evolution, the first episode was largely about single-cell organisms. The next featured sea snails and shrimps. In fact, the series would be more than halfway through before it served up that familiar medley of giant lizards, lions and zebras that viewers of natural history had come to expect. Nevertheless, only two episodes in, the renowned critic Clive James was writing in the Observer of watching “enthralled… Slack-jawed with wonder and respect”. Nor was he alone. Such was the startling intimacy of those first images of translucent floating amoebas that millions of other viewers around the country were also glued to their sofas. By the penultimate episode, which featured Attenborough in an extraordinary unscripted sequence sitting on a Rwandan mountain side being caressed by gorillas and whispering to camera about the “mutual understanding” between them, the Observer critic was reaching new heights of ecstasy. This, James wrote, was stunning proof that television could be an “instrument of revelation”. Don't miss our podcast series on the history of the BBC – listen to all episodes so far Here too, he suggested, was perhaps the clearest example yet of the BBC’s “collective genius” for creating blockbusters. For James, Attenborough was undoubtedly crucial to the series’ success: he was the arch-communicator, deeply knowledgeable about science yet able to convey complex ideas through simple statements. Yet the sheer quality of the BBC’s film footage – “so magnificent that it would have been inconceivable even a decade ago” – struck him as equally important. What viewers witnessed in the opening months of 1979 was the result not of one man’s efforts but of team intelligence: Life on Earth marked the inauguration of a long and distinguished lineage of epic wildlife series fronted by Attenborough for the BBC. It was also the culmination of more than half a century of broadcast professionals busily working out how to feature animals on air in a way that was both entertaining and scientifically sound. When it came to natural history broadcasting, the Corporation had its own evolutionary story to tell. The birth of a genre Back in the 1920s, the BBC’s Savoy Hill studios had often been filled with pets and other readily available creatures. Two widely publicised programmes from 1924 featured the “Great Howl” from a rescue dog named George, in which young listeners to Children’s Hour were invited to report on their own pets’ reactions at home, and a live “Zoo Concert” from Regent’s Park in London, featuring jackasses, a hyena and a walrus. Eight years later, when experimental television transmissions began, animals were being given top billing almost as frequently as the singers, dancers and musical hall artistes. Parrots, hornbills, toucans, a boa constrictor, a Capuchin monkey and even an alligator were among those hauled before the cameras to do a quick turn. There was, as one eyewitness of these pioneering years recalled, a considerable degree of chaos behind the scenes. There was sometimes a touch of subterfuge, too. One favourite among viewers, a juggling act in which a “goldfish” in a bowl was balanced precariously on the top of a billiard cue, actually involved the use of a cut-up carrot. When television returned after the war, two of the most familiar faces on British screens were those of Armand and Michaela Denis, who would be seen setting off on safari at regular intervals. Their approach was sentimental and anthropomorphic, with one BBC insider dismissing it as “husband and-wife-venturing-into-the-deepest-darkest-Africa stuff”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/07/GettyImages-3438823cmykwebready-ca1ac30.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Husband and wife team Michaela and Armand Denis in Uganda in 1952. Their televised safaris during the 1950s and 60s were often highly sentimental in tone (Photo by Thurston Hopkins/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Husband and wife team Michaela and Armand Denis in Uganda in 1952. Their televised safaris during the 1950s and 60s were often highly sentimental in tone (Photo by Thurston Hopkins/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Read more | Maria Sibylla Merian: the artist who challenged the natural world Even Zoo Quest, launched in 1954 and featuring a young David Attenborough and a London Zoo curator bringing a variety of snakes, birds and lizards from the undergrowth of New Guinea or Madagascar back to the studio to accompany an informative talk, still had the faint air of a Victorian animal-capturing expedition about it. By 1973, when Attenborough was emerging from almost a decade toiling away in the upper reaches of BBC management and eager to return to the frontline of programme-making, it felt as if a more challenging approach was needed. Two recent TV series, 1969’s Civilisation, presented by Kenneth Clark, and 1973’s The Ascent of Man, presented by Jacob Bronowski, had shown what could be achieved when lengthy slices of airtime were committed to the detailed exploration of a chosen subject by a leading expert in the field. More significantly, perhaps, there had been a revolution in the BBC’s own technical capabilities and zoological knowledge in the two decades since Zoo Quest had first aired. The Natural History Unit, which had started rather modestly back in the 1950s inside the BBC’s West Region based in Bristol, had been growing steadily in size, expertise and reputation. It meant that as he began setting out his plans for a grand series about evolution, Attenborough knew he would be able to draw on a large network of scientifically literate producers, researchers, sound recordists and film-makers. The promise of an unprecedented £1-million budget to meet above-the-line costs, as well as extra money from the American company Warner Brothers, soon helped seal the deal. In focus: how woodpeckers helped create the Natural History Unit It was thanks largely to the producer and amateur bird-watcher, Desmond Hawkins, and a young studio manager, Tony Soper, that the BBC’s West Region in Bristol built for itself an enviable reputation in the postwar period for specialising in natural history radio. But it was one of their most valued contacts in the bird-watching world who helped them launch into television. In 1954, Peter Scott, who ran a wildfowl sanctuary in Slimbridge, near Gloucester, attended the International Ornithological Congress in Switzerland. On his return, he went straight to Hawkins: “You’ve got to see this film.” While at the Congress he had seen 13 minutes of footage of woodpeckers recorded by the German naturalist Heinz Sielmann. What struck Scott as remarkable about Sielmann’s film was his stunning use of close-ups, and the infrared technology that had allowed him to film inside a tree trunk. The German was quickly signed up by the Bristol team, and his film screened on BBC Television. The next morning, there were so many phone calls from excited viewers that the BBC’s switch board became jammed. The extraordinary public response to the woodpecker film provided the nudge that BBC managers in London needed to invest extra resources in Bristol. The Natural History Unit was soon established. Its first big TV series was Look, which began in 1955 and ran for over a decade. It was introduced by Peter Scott, and featured short films promising a “fly’s eye” view of toads, foxes and other native species. Expertly recorded film footage remained in short supply, but over time a pool of camera operators and sound recordists was trained up. In 1957, Faraway Look was launched, showcasing filmed reports from abroad. Two years later, to coincide with the centenary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Scott and Soper hitched a ride to the Galapagos Islands, and returned with enough footage to fill seven half-hour episodes. Their pioneering location reports offered a tantalising foretaste of how television would tell the story of evolution through Life on Earth two decades later. Over the years of its creation, the scale of the production effort for Life on Earth had to keep pace with the scale of its presenter’s ambition. Since Attenborough wanted the story of evolution to drive the whole shape of the series, and for his argument to be illustrated not by an endless sequence of fossils in museums but by shots of living creatures out in the world, crews had to be dispatched to all points of the compass. Attenborough’s determination to talk about opposable thumbs led him and a production team to that mountainside in Rwanda; his reference to a coelacanth, a rare type of fish, required another crew to scour the ocean depths for the first, fleeting images of one of the most elusive creatures on Earth. Several sequences that demanded extra lighting or sustained close-ups were captured by an independent production company, Oxford Scientific Films, working with specially constructed studio sets. In the process, new lenses, new filmstock and new filming equipment all had to be developed. The pursuit of excellence The whole, fiendishly complicated process was coordinated by a trio of senior producers at the Natural History Unit: Chris Parsons, John Sparks and Richard Brock. And it was the Natural History Unit that ensured that Attenborough’s narration reflected the most up-to-date knowledge. Its researchers consulted more than 500 scientists and visited 183 different institutions around the world – the kind of ongoing dialogue that reassured the scientific community that the BBC would never set out to vulgarise or misrepresent their findings in this or any future series. The high production values of Life on Earth were visible to all, and undoubtedly helped secure major international co-production deals for the BBC in the years ahead. As one BBC insider put it, it demonstrated the “idea of excellence being an end in itself”. The series also established David Attenborough’s personal reputation as the human embodiment of public service values – what one of his colleagues, Huw Wheldon, would have referred to as the BBC’s mission to “make the good popular, and the popular good”. Above all, Life on Earth showed the virtues of deep, sustained institutional knowledge – and the kind of magical, life-enhancing TV that could be made when different parts of a well-resourced broadcasting machine came together and clicked sublimely into place. David Hendy is emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The BBC: A People’s History (Profile, 2022) This article was first published in the July 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine