What can the origins of the BBC tell us about its future?

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What can the origins of the BBC tell us about its future?

The BBC has just experienced one of the worst crises in its history. It is navigating unprecedented hostility from the press and massive digital transformation. In the first of a series of essays on the corporation's past, present and future, Charlotte Higgins examines the belief of its first director general, John Reith, that the BBC should be the citizen's 'guide, philosopher and friend'. Ninety years on, can that still be its aim?

Charlotte Higgins

The Guardian, Tuesday 15 April 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/apr/15/bbc-origins-future?CMP=fb_gu

The manse on Lynedoch Street, Glasgow, is a handsome double-fronted house with nine steps up to its front door. It clings to the flank of its sandstone church, whose brace of tall, pencil-straight towers are linked by an elegant classical pediment. The manse – which still exhales an air of four-square Victorian respectability – occupies the high ground above the green spaces of Kelvingrove Park, in which, before the first world war, its son John Reith would walk, feeling the winds of destiny brushing his cheek as they blew down from the Campsie Fells – or so he said. Even when a teenager, Reith, a very tall man, had a face with something of the Easter Island carving about it: graven, austere, immense-jawed. In the first world war part of the left side of his face was blown off, leaving a jagged scar. As he aged, the dark bushy eyebrows became more wayward and independently active, the white hair wilder. There is footage of him being interviewed in 1967 by Malcolm Muggeridge. When the terrifying, wolfish smile comes, the face looks as if has been forced open by a hammer and chisel.

The church has now been converted into the premises of an accountancy firm and a business consultancy, which would horrify the intensely religious Reith: in his youth it resounded to sermons given by his father George, a free presbyterian minister whom he worshipped second only to God: “His sense of grace was apostolic; his sense of righteousness prophetic … his eyes would flash; the eloquence of his indignation was devasting.”

The church “was one of the wealthiest, most influential, most liberal in Scotland”. Its congregation ran the social scale from “merchant princes, great industrialists, professors” to a “considerable element of the humble but equally worthy sort”. Reith the younger was to outdo his father: his own congregation would consist of the whole population of Britain.

On 13 October 1922, having had a good war but in need of a job, Reith scanned the situations vacant. One advertisement read: “The British Broadcasting Company (in formation). Applications are invited for the following officers: General Manager, Director of Programmes, Chief Engineer, Secretary. Only applicants having the first class qualifications need apply. Applications to be addressed to Sir William Noble, Chairman of the Broadcasting Committee, Magnet House, Kingsway, WC2.” His interview consisted of “a few superficial questions”, he recalled in his memoir, Into the Wind. He added: “I did not know what broadcasting was.”

 

Reith: said broadcasting had the effect of 'making the nation as one man'. Photo: BBC

He was duly appointed general manager, and for the next few days, still in utter ignorance of the nature of his new job, tried to “bring every casual conversation round to ‘broadcasting’” until an acquaintance enlightened him. On 22 December 1922 he turned up at the offices (deserted, as it was a Saturday). He found “a room about 30 foot by 15, furnished with three long tables and some chairs. A door at one end invited examination; a tiny compartment six foot square; here a table and a chair; also a telephone. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘is the general manager’s office.’” (“Little more than a cupboard,” remembered Peter Eckersley, the first chief engineer.) Including Reith, there were four members of staff.

The BBC today, with its workforce of 21,000 and its income of £5bn, is such an ineluctable part of British national life that it is hard to imagine its birth pangs, comparatively recent as they are. In only its 10th decade, the BBC looms larger in most of our daily lives than properly long-lived British institutions such as the monarchy, the army and the Church. Its magical moving pictures, its sounds and words are not just “content”, but the tissue of our dreams, the warp and weft of our memories, the staging posts of our lives. The BBC is a portal to other worlds and lives, our own time machine; it brings the dead to life. Once a kindly auntie’s voice in the corner of the room, it is now the daemonic voice in our ear, a loving companion from which we need never be parted. It is our playmate, our instructor, our friend. Unlike Google and Amazon, which soothe us by presenting us with the past (their profferings predicated on our web “history”), the BBC brings us ideas of which we have not yet dreamed, in a space free from the hectoring voices of those who would sell us goods. It tells seafarers when the gales will gust over Malin, Hebrides, Bailey. It brings us the news, and tries to tell it truthfully without fear or favour. It keeps company with the lonely; it brings succour to the isolated. Proverbially, when the bombs rain down, the captain of the last nuclear submarine will judge Britain ended when Radio 4 ceases to sound.

 

BBC: a central part of modern British life. Photograph: Simon Kennedy/BBC

The year the BBC was born was also the year Northern Ireland seceded from the Free State; it was the year James Joyce’s Ulysses was published; and its creation was sandwiched between the first general election in which women voted (1918) and universal suffrage (1928). The BBC took its place as an expression of, and a power in, new ideas about nationhood, modernity and democracy. With the coming of the BBC, it became possible for the first time in these islands’ history for a geographically dispersed “general public” to be able to experience the same events simultaneously. Broadcasting knows no scarcity; it cannot run out: “It does not matter how many thousands there may be listening; there is always enough for others,” as Reith put it in his 1924 book Broadcast Over Britain. Nor is it a respecter of persons: “The genius and the fool, the wealthy and the poor listen simultaneously … there is no first and third class.” Broadcasting, said Reith, had the effect of “making the nation as one man”. It was Reith who attached an Arnoldian, culturally unifying ideology to the idea of broadcasting – which it certainly lacked in America, where wireless telephony was already on the go by 1922. There, a cacophony of competing commercial stations grew up, strung between coast and coast. By 1925 there were 5.5m American wireless sets and 346 stations.

Many admirers but few friends

The BBC, despite its scale and ubiquity, has never been more vulnerable than it is now. It is assailed daily by a hostile press, the antipathy amplified by commercial interests as newspapers struggle to compete with the BBC’s online news operation. It is battered and insecure after the Savile and McAlpine crises and the disaster of its 54-day director general, George Entwistle. More aftershocks will come as the Operation Yewtree investigations into allegations against Savile and others continue, and as the Dame Janet Smith enquiry into the culture and practices of the BBC is published. Perhaps as damaging to its public reputation is the vastness of the payoffs to departing executives, recently the subject of savage criticism in parliament. (Deputy director general Mark Byford received £949,000 when he left in 2011; Tony Hall, director general since last April, has now set a cap of £150,000 on severance payments.) The numbers had more to do with the banking world than public service, but they pale into insignificance when compared with the £100m spent on the failed digital media initiative (DMI), the bedevilled technology project that Hall hastened to shelve. With a government whose default setting towards public institutions such as the National Health Service is indifferent-to-hostile, the BBC’s position is politically fragile and, whatever the outcome of the 2015 election, will continue to be so in the run-up to its charter renewal, the deadline for which is 1 January 2017. As George Entwistle himself pointed out in his first public statement of intent, the BBC has “many admirers but few friends”: few willing to step forward and make the cases for the institution as a cultural force for good and a public benefit in the civic realm. Indeed, faith in all our great national institutions seems to be waning just as the ties that bind the nations of the UK together are loosening.

 

Reith with BBC staff including Joseph Gainsford and consulting engineer Peter Eckersley outside No 2 Savoy Hill about 1924. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The BBC now exists in an era of unprecedented media fragmentation. We live in a world of Netflix and YouTube, a world in which anyone can be a broadcaster, a world where the sheer bulk of encroaching global media businesses threatens to overshadow the BBC. The very funding mechanism of the licence fee – a tax on television sets – is beginning to look outmoded and shaky in the world of catch-up, the tablet and the smartphone.

Trying to understand the BBC is like trying to understand a nation state – a state that is a little like Britain. We insist that its citizens ought to be more virtuous versions of ourselves; when they fall short, our rage is terrible. It is a state that has its court, its favoured grandees and aristocrats, its artists and creators, its put-upon working class, its dissidents and rebels, its hangers-on and corrupters and criminals. It is multifarious: it holds within it all aspects of human endeavour from the high-minded to the trivial, from the Proms and Panorama to Jeremy Clarkson and Ja’mie: Private School Girl, with the stated, though not always lived-up-to intent that whatever it does it must do well. Malcolm Muggeridge, in his book The Thirties, described the growth of the BBC in that decade (it had 4,233 employees by July 1939) thus: “The BBC came to pass silently, invisibly; like a coral reef, cells busily multiplying, until it was a vast structure … a society, with its king and lords and commoners, its laws and dossiers and revenue and easily suppressed insurrection …”

Others think of it as like a religion: its foundations are faith and trust, and it will wither away when the congregations cease to believe in it (and pay their tithes to it). Cecil Lewis, the first world war fighter pilot who wrote Sagittarius Rising, was its first organiser of programmes. He thought of it as something of a behemoth as early as 1924, when he wrote a memoir of the BBC’s first year: “We had been appointed guardians and attendants of the most voracious creature ever created by man – a microphone – which clamoured daily to be fed,” he wrote. It was “a most terrible and insatiable monster”.

Anxious and defensive

One morning, while I was waiting outside the director general’s office, among the massed ranks of desks in New Broadcasting House, I bumped into Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director. He greeted me by saying: “Ah, the predator”, the implication being that the behemoth is not invulnerable; it is anxious and defensive, and alert to attack, real or perceived.

I was waiting to see Tony Hall to ask him about the nature of the BBC, as he sees it. The panopticon-like New Broadcasting House, the enlarged central London HQ that opened last year, was designed without offices for individual executives, though Hall insisted on having one – he occupies a former meeting room – and Yentob has improvised one. As Hall greeted me he gestured darkly to where Entwistle’s reign disintegrated, at a desk indistinguishable from those allotted to the junior ranks, in the full glare of open plan.

Inside Hall’s lair was a glass table on which lay his spectacle case and iPad (no computers for ranking BBC execs), surrounded by seats rescued from an old kitchen, and a pair of swivel chairs salvaged from Television Centre. The BBC, said Hall, “is Britain’s voice, both to the world but also to ourselves. If you look, for example, at what is happening in local media, although we’ve been criticised for killing off local newspapers, when I go round local radio stations and regional television stations, and I see what is being done, we are reflecting parts of Britain to itself in a way that others simply do not do. So that is hugely important from the point of democratic debate.”

The BBC is, he said, a kind of mirror through which Britain reflects itself to the world and the world to itself. Or a port: a conduit through which influences depart and arrive. “I love ports because they’re very open, they’re places where different currents and different ideas come together; that’s what makes them so exciting and so inventive … I think the original view of inform, educate, entertain is right, but now through a lens of what we’re doing for Britain and the UK. And in truth, when I started off in the BBC, the counter-arguments about the BBC, which is that you’re huge and you are 40% or more of media revenues in this country – well we’re now 25% and if you look to the Googles and the Amazons and all the non-British firms that control our media usage, the BBC becomes more important, not less.”

 

BBC iPlayer: the corporation's future has become more complex in the digital age. Photograph: /BBC

The frame of reference is changing, and the BBC must be more focused, he says. The cellular expansion described by Muggeridge is at an end: “I think we are at the end of a period of, as it were, unbridled expansion of the BBC. We’re now in a period when we have to define much, much more carefully what it is the BBC offers and what is it the BBC can do, and recognise that we have to spend our money carefully, and around our priorities. That is why arts matters, our music coverage matters – I want those to be things you recognise in the BBC, up there with news. Drama matters. I think we have to be more constrained in terms of our ambition. The problem we’ve got, or the opportunity we’ve got, is that to get what we do to market, to our audiences, is now a darn sight more complex than when Malcolm Muggeridge was talking about us being like another England, and growing.”

At the BBC’s heart are a number of paradoxes. The first and greatest is that it is supported by taxation to do things that the market is deemed unable to supply; and yet it must appeal to the widest possible audience to justify that taxation. The second is that it is both a public-sector organisation and a commercial one: while supported by the licence fee under a royal charter on the one hand, on the other it must raise revenues using its commercial arm, Worldwide, and has long felt it necessary – since the breaking of the BBC’s monopoly in the 1950s – to pay market-appropriate salaries to executives and stars. The collision of those two value systems can be extremely jarring: most obviously the widespread public horror at the level of executive payoffs and the fees paid to its biggest stars. Hall says that the BBC has to change. “The models for this organisation we should look to more are the public sector, the charitable sector, and to companies like John Lewis. The multiples between what someone at the bottom of this organisation and what someone at the top of it are paid really really matter. So my model for this organisation is looking in that direction, not out to, as we have done before, towards PLCs.”

The BBC, Hall suggests, should act as a kind of people’s consumer champion – a public body that can act on behalf of its citizens, without vested interests to protect. In this way, it could regain trust. “In an era when we trust so few things, when trust in public institutions, in MPs, in journalism, has gone down, we need to position ourselves and say: ‘If we do something it is on your behalf, on behalf of our audiences.’” He talks about Radio Sussex badgering utility companies to get people’s power back after the winter floods, and Radio Merseyside’s “A Team” who, “because they’ve got BBC before their name, can get public utilities, for example, to answer questions from people … one of the reasons the BBC is so important is because it can act on behalf of people who don’t have a voice.”

 

Tony Hall: says the BBC must be more focused. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

Impartiality is essential'

That the BBC should have been set up as a company, and then a corporation in the public realm was not inevitable, but the result of a series of incremental decisions at first pragmatic and then solidified into ideology. The government department in charge of mass communication in the 1920s was the Post Office. A scarcity of wavelengths available for civilian use made it seem practicable to corral the fledgling broadcasters, largely emanating from the wireless manufacturers such as Marconi, into one body. The postmaster general, in response to a question in parliament about the future of broadcasting in April 1922, responded that “it would be impossible to have a large number of firms broadcasting. It would result only in a sort of chaos.” Talks between the wireless manufacturers and the Post Office resulted in a scheme whereby the government would licence wireless sets and a new British Broadcasting Company would finance its operations from a share of the licence fee and of royalties from sales of sets. To many, it seemed an eminently sensible arrangement. The Manchester Guardian’s leader of 20 October, 1922, noted that “broadcasting is of all industries the one most clearly marked out for monopoly. It is a choice between monopoly and confusion … the only alternative to granting privileges and monopoly to private firms is that the State should do the work itself.”

 

Watchdog: Tony Hall wants the BBC to be the people's consumer champion. Photograph: BBC

By 1925, when the Crawford parliamentary committee on broadcasting made its recommendations, some of the societal and political implications of the new service were beginning to become apparent. “No company or body constituted on trade lines for the profit, direct or indirect of those composing it can be regarded as adequate in view of the broader considerations now beginning to emerge,” it reported. “We think a public corporation is the most appropriate organisation … its status and duties should correspond with those of a public service.” Reith’s book Broadcast Over Britain had already laid out some of the abiding principles of the corporation-to-be. “It will not be easy to persuade the public of an absolute impartiality but impartiality is essential.” The BBC should be the citizen’s “guide, philosopher and friend”.

What was the BBC like in these early years? The young start-up BBC – first in Magnet House on Kingsway, in the heart of central London, then at Savoy Hill, off the Strand – was often a place of experiment, excitement, improvisation and invention. Richard Lambert, who edited The Listener for a decade from 1929, recalled the atmosphere of the early days. “All kinds of petty discomforts – overcrowded rooms, long hours, arbitrary or tactless treatment – were overlooked in the general sense of adventure, progress, and public service. You felt it a privilege to be ‘in’ at the birth of such a mighty experiment – an experiment not merely in the use of a new invention, broadcasting, but in its use for communal ends, rather than for private profit. Who could tell how far the new service would go?” In 1924 Cecil Lewis was already regretting the passing of a certain pioneering spirit: “The microphone that is tied up with bits of string, the switches that are falling to pieces, and the gadgets that won’t work unless they are coaxed by someone who knows how. When things don’t always work infallibly! When something goes wrong and one has to step into the breach and talk nonsense for half an hour … isn’t it preferable, after all, to the watertight compartments and petty differences that come later in the well-built organisations?”

 

Hilda Matheson: the BBC’s first director of talks. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London

The role of Hilda Matheson

The young BBC attracted employees willing to plunge into an unknown and unconventional new industry: game for adventure. There were plenty of women, often university educated: a marriage bar was introduced in the corporation only in 1932, and even then was regularly circumvented. A memorandum from Reith – quoted by Dr Kate Murphy in her PhD thesis on women at the prewar BBC – laid out an enlightened policy: “The class of women we are now employing … is such that they should rank on the same footing as men.” One of these talented women was Hilda Matheson (above), the BBC’s first director of talks.

Matheson was, like Reith, the child of a manse. She studied at Oxford, and in the first world war worked in counter-espionage in Rome. Photographs from the 1920s show a slim, neatly dressed woman, with an elegant bob. Harold Nicolson’s diary entry of 11 April 1932 planned a novel that would contain a government minister “of the type of Hilda Matheson”. In the resulting book, Public Faces, he described his character Jane Campbell as “a woman of tact, gaiety, and determination … a confident woman. She regarded it as quite natural that a person of her attainments … should … have reached so garish a position”. Reith met Matheson when she was working as private secretary to Nancy Astor: extremely well-connected, she was, as Reith saw, a great potential asset, and he recruited her in 1926.

 

Vita Sackville-West: invited by Matheson to give talks for the BBC. Photograph: BBC/Corbis

In the words of Murphy, “the section she inherited was bland, timid and amateurish; she created a department that was vibrant, challenging and professional”. Lambert remembered her as “earnest, intelligent, quick, sympathetic and idealistic”. He went on: “Hilda Matheson was not typical of the BBC and its ways; her liberalism was a minority influence, seeking in vain to permeate an organisation orientated by its chief in another direction.” How different was Reith’s disciplinarian number two Admiral Carpendale, who, especially when the BBC moved to its liner-like premises of Broadcasting House in the early 1930s, behaved as if he was still in command of a battleship, calling the floors “decks” and referring to the “captain’s state room”. “His manner and outlook smacked of the quarterdeck,” wrote Lambert.

Matheson pioneered much of what we would now understand as factual, religious, arts, current affairs, political and news programmes (the latter then circumscribed by an agreement with newspaper proprietors to broadcast only bulletins supplied by news agencies and after 6pm). A ban on “controversial” broadcasting was lifted in March 1928, enabling her to broaden the scope of spoken-word programming and enter more radical territory. She began The Week In Westminster; its role, as Dr Murphy points out, was to educate newly enfranchised women about parliament, and it was presented by female MPs. Despite anxiety from Carpendale, she organised the first live broadcast debate between the leaders of the three main political parties.

She, like her colleagues, was making up broadcasting as she went along. What was a “programme”? The models for BBC broadcasts were the public lecture, the political speech, the theatre and the variety hall. One of Matheson’s many achievements was to realise that the microphone demanded an entirely different manner from the podium. “It was useless to address the microphone as if it were a public meeting, or even to read it essays or leading articles,” she wrote. “The person sitting at the other end expected the speaker to address him personally, simply, almost familiarly.” She rehearsed, coaxed and harried speakers until they found a mode of speech that worked.

Matheson invited figures such as Rebecca West, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and Vita Sackville-West to give talks. A letter from the last to her husband, Harold Nicolson, gives a sense of the sheer oddness of broadcasting. (Not to mention the intense novelty of hearing them – Reith recalled demonstrating his wireless to the Archbishop of Canterbury and his wife, who expressed bafflement that it had not been necessary to open the window to allow the signal through.) “You are taken into a studio, which is a large and luxuriously appointed room, and there is a desk, heavily padded, and over it hangs a little white box, suspended from two wires from the ceiling,” wrote Sackville-West. “There are lots of menacing notices about ‘DON’T COUGH – you will deafen millions of people’, ‘DON’T RUSTLE YOUR PAPERS’, and ‘Don’t turn to the announcer and say was that all right? when you have finished’ … one has never talked to so few people, or so many; it’s very queer. And then you cease, and there is an awful grim silence as though you had been a complete failure … and then you hear the announcer saying ‘London calling. Weather and News bulletin’, and you creep away.”

After one such talk on 10 December 1928 Sackville-West went to Matheson’s Kensington flat, and the following day Matheson did not go into work. The two women were falling into an intensely passionate love affair. That month, Matheson wrote to Sackville-West: “Darling, I love you more than I can ever tell you … it’s the most completely comprehensive sweep I ever dreamed of, all of me, in every sort of different way.”

Matheson was entering bolder and more adventurous territory, and, according to Michael Carney’s biography of her, was also increasingly falling foul of Reith, who noted in his diary for 6 March 1930 that he was “developing a great dislike of Miss Matheson and her works”. She developed a series of talks with Nicolson on modern literature. This became a battleground. Reith loathed the moderns. The real sticking point was whether Nicolson would be allowed to mention the banned texts Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A very BBC fudge was agreed: there was to be no mention of the texts by name but Nicolson was allowed to say that the BBC had forbidden him to mention them. Matheson, battle-weary – feeling undermined and sidelined by Reith – resigned. Lambert later paid her tribute: “It was Hilda Matheson, toiling single-mindedly night and day, who ‘made’ the talks department a live, energetic and humane department of the corporation.” She had “provided listeners with an informed criticism of books, films, plays, music and farming, opened up the field of debates and discussions, improved and expanded the news, and sought even to train the politicians to make better use of broadcasting”.

 

David Attenborough: said BBC TV was 'radio-derived, and that meant it was interested in ideas'. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Matheson later became the Observer’s wireless critic; and she wrote a little book called Broadcasting. Reading it now, it brings alive the sense of novelty, unfamiliarity and even threat associated with the pioneering technology of wireless telephony. She attempted to describe broadcasting: “A harnessing of elemental forces, a capturing of sounds and voices all over the world to which hitherto we have been deaf”, and how it was done: “The process of starting a set of vibrations in what is conveniently termed the ether, and of amplifying them.” She empathised with the anxieties attendant on a new era of modernity and mechanisation: “How can we escape from this new noise that is adding to the distractions of an already complex world?” She was describing the kind of fears that seem familiar now: that the march of technology would drive out simple human interaction. “What is called progress seems often to bring a surfeit of new experiences, facts, machines, noises, producing a feeling of helplessness, almost of despair. In so far as the broadcasting adds to the general welter, it may fill us with foreboding,” she admitted.

Largely uncelebrated, Matheson, who died in 1940 aged 52, is one of the great ancestor-figures of the BBC. Her influence is obvious on the Radio 4 of even today; but a line of inheritance connects her to television, too: employed in her department was the geneticist Mary Adams, who went on to be director of talks for the young television service. Adams’s deputy was Grace Wyndham Goldie, who pioneered television news and current affairs; and one of her young recruits, in 1952, was David Attenborough, who would later become controller of the infant BBC2. This genealogy through radio, argues Attenborough, has given British television many of its strengths – unlike American TV “which was Hollywood-derived, BBC television wasn’t that at all; it was radio-derived, and that meant it was interested in ideas”, he said.

Broadcasting, Matheson wrote, “is in its infancy; it is comparable to the rudest scratchings on the cave-man’s dark walls, to the guttural sounds which served the first homo sapiens for speech.” The legacy of Matheson ought also to be her energy, her optimism – and her unswerving belief in the public and civic value of “this new noise”. In her obituary for her former lover in the Spectator Sackville-West called Matheson, “in the noblest sense a servant of the state”.