Broadcasting
Fare better BBC
Hans Keller
My valediction to the BBC is not what some of my ex-bosses expect — an aggressive, 'rebellious', personal, indeed idiosyncratic list of complaints and accusations. The autobiographical aspect of my farewell is confined to observations whose impersonal implications are obvious to the naked eye — the eye, that is, denuded of organizational spectacles; and there are, thank God, one or two such eyes in the BBC itself, even upstairs. The centre of gravity of this piece is radio philosophy.
My first decade at the BBC was paradise, while my second would have been hell if I hadn't been I; as it was, it was that lonely type of paradise which makes you discover that in its most paradisical regions, paradise is always lonely, thus offering you insights which you cannot attain in committee. Needless to add, I wasn't alone in My loneliness — which, together with its fruits, was shared by all those few capable of recognising mankind's original twin sins, to wit, stupidity and cowardice. With everincreasing speed, they move in a vicious circle that prevents those thus afflicted from noticing anything amiss. Instead, it facilitates the surrender of personality to 'the BBC' which, strictly speaking, doesn't exist: there are only people who do or do not project their consciences, if any, on to the collective phantom which pays them in terms of both salaries and moral tranquillisers.
The first decade was bliss not only musically, through my elementally artistic collaboration with William Glock which outbalanced our differences, some of them equally elemental. But even extramusically, the people in charge in the Sixties proved capable of accommodating, indeed desirously provoking, individual thought — with the result that I would often find myself in the role of a consultant to everybody from what was then called the Director of Sound Broadcasting downwards (now Managing Director, Radio) — on matters extra-musical which, nevertheless, were close to my heart and mind. There was no personal friction between me and the establishment, and nobody could have foreseen that in the Seventies, Keller's status would be, at best, that of a weirdie, and at its (admittedly civilised) worst, that of an intermittently lovable Corporation witch. 'Hans is a necessary part of BBC demonology' was the amiable verdict of a successor to the Director of Sound Broadcasting who had considered me a necessary part of BBC thought, even managerial thought.
The turning point was 'Broadcasting in the Seventies' and the so-called staff rebellion against this document, a public protest which I initiated. In other words, if our management's picture of my personality which emerged in the early Seventies, was realistic, I must have undergone a sudden change of personality at the turn of the decade such as has never been known in the history of mankind. Alternatively, there may have been an abrupt change of corporate personality such as is well-known in the history of collectivity. Suffice it to say that I deem it extremely likely that if I had been unknown, the BBC would now have tried its best to get rid of me. As a matter of fact, I was ordered to delete, or else subject to radical editing, the preface (`Thinkers of the World, Disunite!') of my book 1975 (1984 minus 9), the manuscript of which I had dutifully submitted for approval. Slightly less dutifully, the preface was printed untouched.
Here, then, is a case for all to judge: can any reader who has seen my book think of the remotest justification for such an instruction — which, after all, he has been paying his licence fee for? Not a playful question, this: what is at stake is, simply, the freedom of thought. Readers may remember that I raised the issue impersonally in these pages last year, in an Open • Letter to the Director-General, which he left unanswered — though all I had written about was, not broadcasting, heaven beware, but the prohibition imposed on staff members to write about broadcasting (a prohibition which the Annan Committee, under my influence, has condemned). It would appear that at this stage in the history of broadcasting, the BBC's radio philosophy is determined by fear — where previously, adventure was an indispensable requirement, so much so that if at a senior level, you were not able to evince wellsubstantiated disloyalty to any features in accepted policy, you were not really a loyal staff member: in the Sixties, I was most valued for my disagreement's, most of which I was able to realise.
The Third Programme, whatever was wrong with (i.e. snobbish about) it, was adventure and, with its Continent4 successors, earned the BBC a reputation in the world on which it is still living, the earnings becoming gradually immoral. At the time of the Third Programme, it was considered downright indecent to talk about audience figures at a meeting, whereas our present Radio 3, notwithstanding its new Controller who is capable of independent thought. fears every listener that isn't listening. There are signs, however, that the philosophy of generic broadcasting expounded in 'Broadcasting in the Seventies' (Radio 3 for serious music, Radio 4 for speech etc), which was the first dramatic product of this fear, is dying an indecently discreet death, discretion — read: self-protective secrecy — being the BBC's most vicious virtue.
You will fare well in proportion as you realise how ill you are faring. That one has to satisfy audience demands goes without saying — but culturally, the most essential demands are the future's, which the BBC is in a position to make present: the Third Programme here shines as factual proof. On the cultural (i.e. Radio 3 and Radio 4) level, there is something wrong with every programme which, instead of provoking thought, fully satisfies — as thought-killing background. It needs courage to desist from alleviating, druglike, what T.S. Eliot called 'the growing terror of nothing to think about' and, instead, to provoke thoughts unforeseen, unsuspected by the potential thinker — thoughts which inevitably produce equally unforeseen demands. Without Third Programmes, ours and Europe's, the 20th-century classics would still be oddminds-out. But before an odd mind becomes a classic, your most outstanding programme might well have to be content with 49,999 listeners, which is an audience too small to be recorded — and, therefore, from a thoughtless, anxiety-ridden, 'professional' point of view, virtually identical with nil. The BBC rightly prides itself on not being commercial; the trouble is that again and again, it plans as if it were.
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