Commercials Without Mystique
By PAUL JENNINGS UNLESS something very unexpected happens, 1955 is going to see one of the most sudden and possibly, in the long term, quite fateful changes in our domestic and leisure life that this country of 'slowly broadening prece- dent' has ever known. After long and bitter dispute the 'BBC monopoly,' as its 'opponents never tire of calling it, is to be broken, first of all in the field of television. And broken drama- tically; Mr. Maurice Winnick himself has told us he has an idea for the first week which 'will knock your eye right out.' Are those of us who feel uneasy at the prospect simply afraid of change, can we be accused of an infantile desire to stay Warm in the womb of the BBC: or is this feeling that the BBC has been in some way betrayed a justifiable one?
After all, there is a womblike feeling—partiotnarly for those under forty, who have grown up with the BBC. One of my earliest memories is of being taken into an aunt's drawing room to hear the marvellous tinny voice coming out of the big ,1 horn. 'All the way from London,' I was told—and even then, before the BBC as such existed, there was something mysteri- ously national, inviolate, about 'the wireless'; it was the authen- tic voice of our culture. It was associated with Big Ben, and the King on Christmas Day. To an adolescent discovering the joys of music in a town where no music existed, the BBC provided a preliminary education which made the first actual visit to the Queen's Hall all the more exciting.
It is worth noticing that the advent of commercialism in television when it is by no means embryonic actually reverses the process that took place in sound broadcasting. The BBC, with its unique Charter, was formed on January 1, 1927, to supersede the British Broadcasting Company, an association of radio manufacturer% and it was its Managing Director, Mr. J. C. W. Reith, afterwards Lord Reith, who became the first Director-Gendral, and was the guiding spirit of the BBC in the formative years when the Charter's commission to `inform, educate and entertain' was implemented along the lines we now know so well. In those days of primitive sets the enormous social significance of broadcasting was early recog- nised. There has been, all along, a delicate, typically British balance of power which, while allowing Parliament the ulti- mate control, nevertheless allowed the BBC a truly indepen- dent status: In sound broadcasting that independence was used to the best possible advantage. Apart from its impartiality (and the BBC's bitterest opponents could not point to one real instance of bias or abuse of monopoly) the BBC has taken the broadest possible sociological standpoint. In these days of compulsory but not necessarily effective education there are divisions of cultural sophistication that go as deep as, if not deeper than, political and social divisions (with which they by no means correspond. There are poor WEA students who love Stravinsky and there are people with Jaguars for whom Down You Go ! or even What's My Line ? is a severe intellectual exercise); the BBC structure of Third, Home and Light programmes is a thoroughly responsible approach to the problem of a split culture. In addition, of course, there are the BBC's invaluable overseas programmes: one could fill columns with statistics such as '71 hours per week Danish, 11 Vietnamese, 28 Arabic, 7 Greek, 21 Spanish. . . .' When these commitments are con- sidered it seems that the BBC does not receive finances, at any rate, on a monopolistic scale. For each of the next three years the Exchequer will retain £2• million of the licence fees and the Post Office will keep the surprising figure of £1.6 million `to cover the cost of collecting fees and dealing with interfer- ence.' The BBC, whose ten-year-plan for national coverage with two television programmes was announced in 1953, esti- mates that it will receive £6 million short of the sum required.
Let us now consider the undoubted opposition to the BBC. Clearly it doesn't satisfy everyone, since in spite of the enor- mous appeal of the popular shows that have developed since radio first made people like Mr. Arthur Askey nationally famous, five million people listen to the endless programmes of gramophone records,from Luxembourg. But whereas grum- bling at the BBC has always been a national pastime, a new note of hysteria seems to have been sounded in the television age. Perhaps this is because a man who has spent £80 on his TV set has a possession-neurosis : if it doesn't amuse him all the time he regards the people who don't amuse him as he would regard someone who scratched his shining new car; he actually hates them. On November 6 there was a news item about apan at Shepperton who burnt a TV set on Guy Fawkes Night as a protest against BBC programmes.
This kind of opposition may, of course, be discounted in a serious argument. So may the hard core of that pressure group. concerned with advertising and other interests, who have manoeuvred the Government into commercial TV. Thcir argu- ments can be demolished with a simple cui Bono? But there does have to be considered a quite large group of sincere and reasonable people who object to the BBC either as old-maidish and unadventurous, or simply as a monopoly.
Now it is not such an effective answer to these people as might be supposed to go on about the alternative to the BBC being 'vulgar American commercials.' Besides making it easy to accuse BBC supporters of a holier-than-thou attitude, this ignores the fundamental difference between Britain and America. In America there is a genuine quasi-humanist mystique of commerce: it can engender a sense of wonder and dedication and mission with a sincerity which this country's commerce hasn't had since the early days of the nineteenth century when people wrote Odes to Steam: and I do not say this disparagingly. In two recent New Yorkers there was a fascinating Profile of Mr. 'Pat' Weaver, head of the vast NBC television network. It was a remarkable picture of a restless. inquiring, active mind, thinking at the high altitude of what. characteristically, he calls 'the nosebleed set'—and arriving at conclusions which might in some ways be a statement of BBC policy. Weaver feels that being a 'communicator' is an enor- mous responsibility. 'Television must be the shining centre of the home. It must be the instrument which brings maturity to us, and prepares us for the accelerated progress into tomor- row's good society.' Weaver, who named his son Trajan because he was one of 'the really great figures of all time.' who makes his executives take home Norbert Wiener on cybernetics, or the works of Schweitzer, was an advertising man on the Lucky Strike cigarette account in the cut-throat days of pre-war American radio. Now he won't let the adver- tisers interfere with programmes—he builds the programme, and the advertisers queue for space as they would on the end pages of a popular magazine. ment had never introduced the Bill. If there was someone on the commercial side of the stature of either Mr. Weaver or Lord Reith, one can't help feeling his name would have been proudly trotted out by now. Perhaps Sir Kenneth Clark's great distinction in other fields will enable him to be more than a mere moderator. Let us hope so.
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