Strix
The Man in the Wheelbarrow
IWOULD not describe the BBC as a popular institution. We take its virtues and achievements very much for granted, but lose no opportunity of fuming over its pecca- dilloes and mocking its idiosyncrasies. 'The wireless,' we snarl, as the heavens open, 'said it was going to be fine."Oh, but they're always wrong,' says our companion. We really know perfectly well that the BBC's responsibility as a weather- prophet is limited to transmitting forecasts prepared by the Meteorological Office, and that these are by no means always or even generally incorrect. In this case the BBC is the victim of those superstitious impulses which in the dark ages made it the most natural thing in the world for the bearer of bad news to be put to death as soon as he had delivered it.
It never seems to occur to us that the BBC is, among other things, an extraordinarily efficient organisation. Punctuality is a rather dull virtue, but when—as very frequently happens— the railways or the postal services or the airlines fail to achieve it, we register a fatalistic irritation; but the BBC, which on 365 days in the year broadcasts all the items in its various services (of which the two main domestic ones are on the air continuously for about sixteen hours a day) at the precise times advertised, gets no thanks at all for being punctual.
These and other thoughts entered my mind as I read the BBC Handbook, 1956. In a foreword Sir Ian Jacob claims that `the student of broadcasting will again find in these pages all the information he requires about the BBC.' I cannot claim to be a student of broadcasting, nor do I know anyone who is; but I certainly learnt from the Handbook a great many things about the BBC which I had not known before and should never have found out merely by listening to the wireless in my car.
I know now where Bailey is, and that the pips in the Green- wich time signal do not come, as I had unthinkingly supposed, from Greenwich, but from Abinger in Surrey, where the Royal Observatory 'time station' is situate. Out of the 414 police messages for witnesses of accidents which were broadcast during 1954, the (to me) surprisingly high proportion of 180 were successful. An hour of television (average cost, £2,188) is about four and a half times as expensive as an hour of sound broadcasting (£483 an hour), and the former figure is certain to increase. Nearly one-third of the adult population hear at least one of the religious broadcasts on a Sunday, and most of these listeners are believed not to be regular churchgoers.
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The style of the Handbook is, as befits an international work of reference, subdued and colourless. An unctuous note is struck occasionally, as when the Home Service's aims are defined as 'helping towards an informed democracy and the good life'; but perhaps it is only in my own twisted mind that those last three words conjure up a gruesome picture of tired, triumphant planners dunking their rusks in the imaginary coffee which Mrs. Dale so regularly prepares.
The common touch breaks through the demi-official facade only once in nearly 300 pages, like a child making a demure and fleeting appearance at the serious dinner table. One contributor has very sensibly been allowed to pay a tribute to those members of a staff numbering thirteen and a half thousand who work permanently behind the scenes — 'the librarians, the architects and designers, the sub-editors, the translators, the telephonists, the electricians, the filing clerks, not to forget those working in the canteens . . . the many who never come near a microphone but whose favourite aunts continue to wish them "I hope you'll be an announcer one day." ' Future editions of the handbook would be none the worse for less occasional sorties towards the shallow end.
But that would be to add, however negligibly, to the risks which the Corporation daily and hourly runs. These, though not directly referred to in the report, are endemic in all 'live' broadcasting. It is, basically, to the fact that the microphone is entirely surrounded by thin ice that Mr. Gilbert Harding owes most of his popularity; and piquancy is added to this fact by the listeners' subconscious knowledge that, if Mr. Harding fell through the ice, he would take the Corporation with him. Every time anybody comes to the microphone, or appears before the television cameras, the BBC places itself in a position comparable to that of the man who used to allow Blondin to push him in a wheelbarrow across the tightrope stretched over Niagara Falls.
The 1956 Handbook includes echoes of an occasion in 1954 when the Corporation put its own great monolithic foot through the thin ice. In 1947 the Governors of the BBC broadened the policy which had up till then governed religious broad- casting, criticism of which had come (says the Handbook) `from anti-Christian organisations, representatives of religious minorities, Christian and non-Christian believers in liberal values,* and from some 'churchmen who believed that it was not in the best interests of Christianity that it should seem to require a protected status.'
All this, in due course, led up to two talks, by a Mrs. Knight, advocating that children should be brought up without religious belief, which (the Handbook points out) 'came within the terms of this [broadened] policy.' The Talks Department,' it immediately adds, 'has continually under review the ques- tion of methods of broadcasting the best contemporary thinking on matters of fundamental belief.' Elsewhere we learn that 'the vehemence of the newspaper attacks from some [sic] quarters raised a university lecturer from Aberdeen into a nationally known figure for a brief period' and that the episode 'provoked more letters to the BBC than ever before for a single programme or series.' Whether this storm in our enormous communal teacup testifies to unsuspected depths of religious conviction it is not for me to say. But children were involved, and I do not think that the BBC will again lightly contravene the old tradition that you ought to let the dog see the rabbit.
But when you think of our extraordinary nation, and the great incompatible hodge-podge of convictions and prejudices, fads and tabus, likes and dislikes, with which—to say nothing of religious, political, social and dietetic susceptibilities—our minds are stuffed, it does seem to me remarkable how the BBC manages to keep on terms with its British listeners, be- sides broadcasting (with the help of relay stations where necessary) to the whole of the rest of the world and giving English lessons in thirty-five languages. It is impossible that there exists a single individual who enjoys all the BBC's pro- grammes; the Corporation can at best offer each of us only a curate's egg. But however much we criticise the parts we dislike, and however apt we are to give all the credit for the parts we do like to the Goons, or Sir Mortimer Wheeler, or Mr. Pickles, or whoever it may be, rather than to the BBC, there is no denying that it is a remarkable egg.
* The use of this cliché is not recommended to the student of broad- casting or of anything else. Words which can mean anything mean nothing.
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