This New Noise (21 page)

Andrew O’Hagan, the novelist, essayist and playwright told me he felt a quiet despair at the commissioning process even for BBC radio – which operates as a structured, staged, submission process taking several months from idea to green light. ‘The relationship between the “talent”
and the broadcaster has become deranged. The pitching process has the effect of killing the thing you love; and because of that the BBC is falling out of touch with a whole generation of writers,’ he said. He compared the process with that on magazines such as the
New Yorker
, where editors are strongly empowered curators, forging relationships with writers, constantly questing outwards for new ideas; or indeed the commissioning process in British theatre. ‘A clever commissioner should be trusted to make the programmes they want to make,’ he said.

Bound up with the complaint of byzantine process and bureaucracy was a continued sense of disenfranchisement between the BBC’s worker class – including many of its news reporters – and its executives. ‘I think the over-remuneration of people [under former director general Mark Thompson] was a huge mistake,’ foreign correspondent Jeremy Bowen told me when we met between his trips to Syria in the spring of 2014. ‘It’s caused massive damage to the BBC. It’s caused it internally, because the vast majority of people who work at the BBC do not get brilliantly paid. But the massive salaries given to top management angered people on the shop floor, exaggerated the “them and us” feeling that there was a chauffeur-driven top of the corporation with enormous salaries and massive bonuses. And that caused a lot of resentment and still does. I resented it personally.’

Such problems were hampering the articulation of the case to be made about the particular and precious qualities of the BBC, and indeed the whole of the public-service broadcasting system in the UK – a protective and
protected arena in the public realm, a space where the intangible collective experience was prized for its own sake and in which there was a different value system in play than that of the vast, and growing, American conglomerates. Dennis Potter, in his 1993 MacTaggart lecture, said, remembering his childhood relationship with the BBC:

I began to think of the BBC as if it were a church: supported by high ideals, feeding our inner lives, sustained by the goodwill of the faithful, and, sometimes – like all large institutions – infuriating in its internal workings. ‘Sustained by the goodwill of the faithful’ is the most important part of that: the licence fee is remarkably well tolerated because the British public still recognises the BBC as one of the greatest institutions of Britain, something that almost defines Britishness both at home and abroad, a national broadcaster that is still the envy of the world, an institution that, for all its problems and
peccadilloes, is part of us, the shining, hypnotic screen into which we look and see ourselves, the collector of our memories and the gleaner of our experience. It is a survivor from another age – it is hard for me not to betray myself and write a better age – when the notion of a technological advancement being harnessed for the democratic benefit of the commonweal was not a fanciful one, when calling the BBC
templum artium,
a temple of the arts, was not faintly embarrassing. As Michael Grade put it: ‘You wouldn’t invent a hereditary monarchy today; you wouldn’t invent the House of Lords; you wouldn’t invent the BBC in a dynamic market. You either believe in it or you don’t. You can’t intellectually – in a modern sense with a modern mindset – justify it. But it is part of what makes this country different from anywhere else in the world. And you either believe in the BBC or you don’t: the BBC is essentially an idea.’

Without the BBC we would be poorer in spirit. We would know less about the world: our cultural, musical, political lives would be diminished, our curiosity neither so piqued nor so sated. It threads itself through all our lives. The BBC, in my view, was unquestionably worth fighting for, worth preserving and worth championing. It was worth defending despite all its myriad flaws, flaws that the BBC ought to be better at acknowledging and solving, flaws that its audience and critics ought to be able to discuss subtly, without bullying and hysteria. The BBC needs constantly to reinvent itself; like a church, it must earn, and cannot wholly take for granted, the patience of the faithful. Those who love it expect much from it: we expect
more from it. We cheer it on, but we urge it to do better. We still believe. We do not wish to see it stumble. We do not wish to hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

Much of the research for this book was gleaned through interviews with BBC employees past and present and those who know the organisation well. When directly quoted, subjects are named except in the rare cases when individuals chose to speak off the record.

As I was finishing the project, too late to be of use to me, an important resource was made available by the BBC: a searchable archive of
Radio Times
listings at
http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk
.

BBC copyright material reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.

The key reading matter here is
The Birth of Broadcasting
(1961) the first volume of Asa Briggs’s
The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom.
Reith’s autobiography
Into the Wind
(1949) sketches out his early life, and his
Broadcast
Over Britain
(1924) is a key statement of early BBC ideology. Ian McIntyre’s
The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith
(1993) reveals much of the darker side of the first director general.
The Reith Diaries
(1979), edited by Charles Stuart, are a heavily compressed volume of the man’s vast daily output. The Crawford Parliamentary
Report of 1925 gives a crucial account of political thinking on the BBC.

Malcolm Muggeridge’s interviews with Reith, filmed for BBC2 in 1967, are held in the BBC archive. They give a vivid sense of the former DG’s looming presence and unquiet mind.

Eric Maschwitz’s often hilarious account of the BBC’s Savoy Hill years is in his memoir
No Chip on My Shoulder
(1957). The recollections of Matheson by Lionel Fielden come from his rather whimsical memoir
The Natural Bent
(1960). He also wrote an account of her for her obituary volume
Hilda Matheson
(no editor credited) – a slim book with a small print run published by the Hogarth Press, fairly hard to track down but readable in the London School of Economics library. From this volume come the memories of her mother, her Oxford tutor Lettice Fisher and Nancy Astor as well as those of H. G. Wells and Ethyl Smyth. Richard Lambert’s book
Ariel and All His Quality
(1940) contains a sympathetic sketch of Matheson.

Her own words come from three main sources. First, her delightful, earnest and wise 1933 book
Broadcasting
, which she wrote after leaving the BBC. Second, the many bureaucratic traces (memos and letters) that she left, now held by the Corporation’s Written Archives Centre. Third and most vivid is her copious correspondence with Vita Sackville-West. Her letters are now held by the Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Yale. Extracts are reproduced by kind permission of the Vita Sackville-West estate.

The most important secondary sources on Matheson are
Stoker
(1999), a biography by Michael Carney; and Kate Murphy’s PhD thesis, ‘“On an Equal Footing with Men?”: Women and Work at the BBC, 1923–1939’ (2011). The last is available online.

Eric Maschwitz’s
No Chip on My Shoulder
(1957) is again useful for its lively evocation of the Savoy Hill years. Arthur Burrows’s
The Story of Broadcasting
and Cecil Lewis’s
Broadcasting From Within
(both 1924) were written more or less on the spot. The Grierson film is available via the British Film Institute DVD box set
Addressing the Nation: The GPO Film Unit Collection, Volume
1 or else in libraries through screenonline.org.

The main sources on Edward Clark are his voluminous and often startling personal file in the BBC Written Archives Centre, and Jenny Doctor’s scholarly work
The BBC and Ultra-modern Music, 1922–1936
(1999). Elisabeth Lutyens’s autobiography
A Goldfish Bowl
(1972) includes a sketch of her husband (though she fails to mention his son or first marriage) and the biography of Lutyens by M. and S. Harries,
A Pilgrim Soul
(1989), has further details. I am grateful to Dr Doctor for giving me a long and generous interview about Clark in particular and musical conditions in the early BBC in general.

It was my brother Rupert Higgins who first mentioned Ludwig Koch’s autobiography
Memoirs of a Birdman
(1955) to me. From his description it was a short leap to realising that Penelope Fitzgerald had based her character Dr Vogel (‘Dr Bird’) on him in her elegant BBC novel
Human Voices
(1980). Koch left a fascinating trail in the BBC Written Archives Centre (mostly vigorously conducted disputes about fees and time expended on projects), and a number of his programmes, as well as interviews with him, can be heard in the National Sound Archives at the British Library. There is a 2009 Radio 4 documentary about his work,
Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature
, available on the BBC website.

Lew Grade’s autobiography
Still Dancing
(1988) conveys how the Winogradsky brothers rose from being impoverished East Enders to giants of show business. His nephew Michael Grade’s autobiography
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
(1989) is also useful.

The point about the alternative comedians of the early 1980s being sought out by the BBC’s head of light entertainment for BBC2 is made in Louis Barfe’s
Turned Out Nice Again
(2009).

For the paragraphs on
The Great War
, I drew on an interview with and a paper by Taylor Wilding. The paper was given at the Science Museum in April 2014 as part of ‘BBC2: Origin, Influence, Audiences – a 50th Anniversary Conference’. There is a selection of interviews extracted from the programmes (‘The Great War Interviews’) available on BBC iPlayer and episodes can be seen on YouTube.

Work by Adam Curtis can be seen at bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis.

Texts for all the previous MacTaggart lectures, including Dennis Potter’s, are available at the Guardian Edinburgh Television Festival website:
http://www.geitf.co.uk/GEITF/mactaggart-hall-of-fame
.

Matheson’s recollection at the end of the chapter is found in
Broadcasting
(1933).

The first port of call on Grace Wyndham Goldie is her own book on politics and broadcasting,
Facing the Nation
(1977), which also includes memories of working at Alexandra Palace. Her key early writings on the power of television are ‘Viewing Television’ in the
Listener
of 16 June 1937 and a chapter entitled ‘Television’, in
Made for Millions
(1947). Her criticism can be read ad libitum in 1930s editions of the
Listener
– assuming you aren’t sidetracked by fiction reviews by E. M. Forster, stories by Elizabeth Bowen and other myriad delights.

For her detailed memories and well-articulated views on broadcasting there are also three long interviews conducted with her as part of the BBC’s oral-history holdings, covering her entire life and career as a critic, a civil servant, in BBC radio and finally in television. They were conducted by Tony Trebble, Huw Wheldon and Frank Gillard in 1977. My thanks to Robert Seatter and his colleagues in the BBC history department for making transcripts
available. Material is reproduced by kind permission of the Grace Wyndham Goldie Trust. Unless otherwise stated, quotations from Wyndham Goldie in this chapter derive from these interviews.

The BBC Written Archives hold plentiful material on Wyndham Goldie, including a well-stocked file on the televising of the 1950 general election that encompasses memos, scripts and set layouts. Material was also gleaned from the WAC file on
Tonight
. Dr David Butler’s aptitude for television is described in
Facing the Nation
; the man himself very kindly shared his memories of the night of the 1950 election with me in person. John Grist is the author of a biography,
Grace Wyndham Goldie
(2006), which draws on his own memories of working for her as well as archive material and her correspondence with her husband Frank (the last not consulted directly by me).

Goldie crops up in the autobiographies of those who worked for her, including Alasdair Milne’s
DG
(1988), David Attenborough’s
Life on Air
(2003) and Woodrow Wyatt’s
Confessions of an Optimist
(1985). Antony Jay’s memories of
Tonight
come from an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme
The Reunion
first broadcast on 2 May 2010, and available on the BBC website.

Former directors general like to write their memoirs. Of most use in this chapter were Reith’s
Into the Wind
(1949), Birt’s
The Harder Path
(2002), and Hugh Carleton Greene’s
The Third Floor Front
(1969). The last is not so much a
memoir as a collection of speeches and writings. Birt’s outgoing lecture as DG, ‘The Prize and the Price’, given under the auspices of the
New Statesman
at Banqueting House in Whitehall on 6 July 1999, is a fascinating and revealing document. Hugh Carleton Greene’s
Desert Island Discs
can be heard on the BBC website. Balancing Birt’s account of his own tenure is a fascinating anthropological study of the BBC conducted over the period when his reforms were being enacted: Georgina Born’s
Uncertain Vision
(2004). A highly entertaining view, clearly sourced from journalists working under the new regime, is Chris Horrie’s and Steve Clarke’s
Fuzzy Monsters
(1994).

Alasdair Milne’s own account of his director-generalship,
DG
(1988), gives his version of the
Real Lives
scandal. My colleague Lisa O’Carroll is the author of a fascinating article, ‘The Truth Behind
Real Lives
’, published on the
Guardian
website on 12 December 2005. The piece contains links to relevant documents including the minutes of governors’ meetings and the home secretary’s and chairman’s correspondence. A clear narrative of the events at
Newsnight
in 2012 is given by Vin Ray in
Is the BBC in Crisis?
(2013), edited by John Mair et al.

Anne Perkins’s book
A Very British Strike
(2006) gives a vivid day-by-day account of the General Strike. Reith’s
own part in it is told in his diaries – though they were not written by the day, but after the strike had ended. The third volume of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, edited by A. O. Bell (1982), gives the view from Bloomsbury. Hilda Matheson’s
Broadcasting
(1933) and Richard Lambert’s
Ariel and All His Quality
(1940) contain assessments of the BBC’s role. Marcia Williams’s assessment of Harold Wilson’s views on the BBC is in her
Inside Number 10
(1972).

Paul Dacre’s 2007 Cudlipp lecture, which makes for striking reading, can be found in full on the
Guardian
website. Peter Eckersley’s
The Power Behind the Microphone
(1941) is by turns revealing, angry and fascinating. The biography
Prospero’s
Wireless
(1998), by his son Myles Eckersley, is also intriguing. The BBC Written Archives Centre is also a source of much material on this extraordinary man. Martin Le Jeune’s
To Inform, Educate and Entertain?
(2009) gives a useful account of objections to the BBC from a free-market perspective.
Beyond the Charter
(2004) by David Elstein et al. is also a useful critical document.

Jon Day’s essay ‘Time and the City’ inspired some of the ideas of the opening paragraphs of the chapter. The letter from the listener in Malaysia is quoted by Dr Emma Robertson in her essay ‘“I Get a Real Kick out of Big Ben”: BBC Versions of Britishness on the Empire and General
Overseas Service, 1932–1948’ (2008). Hilda Matheson’s thoughts on ‘standard English’ are in
Broadcasting
(1933). Linda Colley’s
Acts of Union and Disunion
(2014), based on a series of essays for BBC radio, is a useful and highly readable primer on the historical forces at work on ideas of Britishness. The second volume of Asa Briggs’s
The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom
,
The Golden Age of Wireless
(1965), explains the beginnings of overseas broadcasting and the pressures on regional broadcasting. Alban Webb’s book
London Calling
(2014) has much of interest to say about the purpose and significance of overseas broadcasting after the war. Excerpts from Olive Shapley’s remarkable memoir, including an account of her back-street abortion, are published in Caroline Mitchell’s
Women and Radio
(2000). Eckersley’s trenchant views on regional broadcasting are found in
The Power Behind the Microphone
(1941). No archive recording of Auden’s
On Hadrian’s Wall
exists but the playscript can be found in the first volume of his collected works, edited by Edward Mendelson (1988). Details about the birth of Radio Stoke were gleaned from an article on the BBC website, ‘History of Radio Stoke’.

The sense of the unknown, the sense of adventure in the early days of the BBC is conveyed in many accounts – Reith’s
Into The Wind
(1949) and
Broadcast Over Britain
(1924), Eric Maschwitz’s
No Chip on My Shoulder
(1957), Arthur Burrows’s
The Story of Broadcasting
(1924), Hilda
Matheson’s
Broadcasting
(1933), Cecil Lewis’s
Broadcasting From Within
(1924) and Richard Lambert’s
Ariel and All His Quality
(1940). Peter Eckersley’s vision of a multichannel future is in
The Power Behind the Microphone
(1941).