Golden Age of the BBC

By ANGUS MAUDE, MP

THEREdays of radio and television, if only a certain nostalgia in reading of the HERE i early because one did not then have to worry very match about the BBC.

Certainly there were people who worried about it but there are always people who will worry about anything. For most of us, there it was, and that was that. It did a job, on the whole rather better than the job was being done anywhere else, and how it did it was a matter of only occa- %lonal and flickering interest. Its internal stresses seldom produced anything like the press coverage now accorded to the annual palace revolutions at Lime Grove.

Those inside the BBC were often fervent crusaders, confident of the ultimate success of their cultural mission. Not all of them were pro- fessionals--though there were enough of these to Make the thing work. Many were amateur dilet- tanti who, as Reith himself once said, had found a Mdtier in the BBC. In the long run, it was. not the programme planners. vitally important as they were, who mattered most. It was the men who created first an organisation, then an institution. Of these, John Reith was, of course, the first and greatest. Managing Director of the old British Broadcasting Company, he became the first Director-General of the new Corpora- tion in 1927 (was it really as long ago as that?); With the move from Savoy Hill to Broadcasting Noose in 1932, the organisation began to grow rapidly and assume the status of an institution under his aegis. The years from 1927 to the outbreak of war euver the span of the second volume of Pro- fessor Asa Briggs's mammoth history" of British broadcasting. To this period of less than thir- teen years Professor Briggs has devoted 663 Painstaking pages. The result is impressive, in many ways valuable, but curiously unsatisfying. Strangely enough, the fact that this book is unsatisfactory to me--and will probably be unsatisfactory to the majority of its readers— can be taken to be the measure of the author's I: THE GOLDEN AGE OE WIRELESS. Volume II Of le"ii HISTORY OF BROADCASTING IN 'THE UNITED .sINGDOIN. By Ma Briggs. (O.U.P., 75s.)

success. Book reviewers are often tempted to use the word 'scholarly' too loosely of books with

a lot of reasonably well-marshalled facts and footnotes, and the conscientious ones stop and think twice when they find the word halfway to the typewriter. Nobody would deny the term to this work. It is as scholarly as all Hell.

By this I do not mean that it is dull, or stodgy, or pedantic. In many ways it is not dull at all. What is so scholarly about it is that the author has set himself a narrowly circumscribed task and carried- it through to the bitter end without yielding in the smallest degree to the inevitable temptations of divergence. The book is exactly what it purports to be—an accurate, detailed and exhSustivc history of British broadcasting be- tween 1927 and 1939. It recounts everything of any importance at all that happened inside the BBC. or outside it with relevance to the BBC. The social, cultural and educational implications are fully recognised and for the most part ade- quately discussed. It will, no doubt, be invaluable to social historians, for it contains the fruits of first-hand research into all the relevant docu- ments, including BBC tiles, unpublished corre- spondence and even Reith's personal diaries.

Yet at the end of it I found that I had been told practically nothing that I really wanted to know. It is not that Professor Briggs is not himself interested in the things I want to know. Clearly he is. Yet he has ruthlessly excluded them from his book. There is plenty of com- ment, but it is tightly circumscribed in its range. Surely it should not be as difficult as this to discover and recognise the seeds of the present in the history of the past? What I want to know is how the BBC became like it is now, and what can be done about it. Perhaps if I were cleverer 1 could manage it with the aid of this mammoth book, but I doubt it. Perhaps, on the other hand, I must wait patiently for the next 650-page ias!al- ment, when I shall discover that all the impor- tant things happened during and after the war. Of course, many of them did, but surely not nearly all?

Nevertheless, the story told here of the period under review is certainly for the most part one of steady improvement. Broadcasting expanded in scope and volume, and programme standards improved. There was plenty of experiment and many great successes. Even in its attitude to- wards the early television experiments of Baird, Zworykin. and Marconi-EMI, the BBC can hardly be accused of undue conservatism. It went ahead as soon as it had a technically viable system, and for a time led the world -until the war closed television down and handed the lead to America.

The Corporation also emerges with a fairly clean sheet from the struggle over programmes of political and social controversy. In the early days such controversy was absolutely banned by the Government, and Reith fought fiercely to end this enforced sterility. Then, as later., the real battle was with the party machines and with the susceptibilities of parliamentarians. Few things recently have made me laugh more than the discovery that in 1934 Mr. Robert Boothby, MP, tabled a Parliamentary Question to ask the Postmaster-General whether he would order the excision from BBC programmes of all comments on foreign affairs. I await the inevitable ex- planations with impatience.

It is tempting to attribute too much of the difference between then and now to the lack of an adequate series of successors to Reith. It is true that Rcith was generally right, and 1 do not believe he would have tolerated for a moment the mixture of smug complacency and dithering ineptitude that has plunged BBC tele- vision into its present confusion. But could he have set his stamp, and imposed his control, on the whole of an organisation as vast and diffuse as the BBC has now become'?

It seems to me that the process of institutional obsolescence may have begun even in Reith's later years as Director-General, although this is implicit rather than explicit in Professor Briggs's narrative. As Reith started to decentralise con- trol after 1933, the number of administrative jobs grew rapidly. When his all-seeing eye was withdrawn in 1938, it seems probable that the scene was already set for Parkinson's Law to begin to operate with vigour. Could it have been avoided? Possibly, but by no means certainly. One thing that seems to emerge from this history is that the BBC's Governors never had any real control or gave any useful guidance; but it may be Reith was uncontrollable and unguidable. At any rate, a tradition of gubernatorial helplessness seems to have grown up---with results that could be disastrous now unless it is broken soon.

Would it have been better if the monopoly had been broken sooner? It is extremely doubtful whether any good would have come of intro- ducing competition from commercial sound radio before the war, and almost certain that some harm would have been done. The real problem seems to be simply that of size. It might have been possible at one time to break the BBC- down into semi-competing corporations, perhaps on a regional basis. I am inclined to think now that a new and quite separate corporation ought to have been set up to deal entirely with tele- vision, taking it right away from the BBC. It

would have made the BBC much less attractive from a career point of view, and prevented some useful cross-fertilisation. but it would have set some limit to institutional size and made con- trol easier and more direct.

Before the war the BBC could employ_ fruit- fully men of something like genius in their fields.

Boult, Sieveking, Maschwitz and others have had too few successors. The thing has grown too big, and administration bulks too large. But I don't know what to do with it. and I doubt if Mr. Wedgwood Benn does either.