Character and Issues

     The BBC was an important prototype of a public corporation operating as the mechanism for state broadcasting (often as a monopoly), a model since replicated in many countries. Radio broadcasting emerged in the early 1920s when Britain was still a global imperial power. Radio technology was initially utilized by amateurs as an enthusiastic hobby, and inventors, engineers, and commercial entrepreneurs saw the potential to make money. Government intervention determined the future and development of radio, but other factors shaping the BBC included influences from abroad, individual people, and existing forms of mass media. Government saw radio as a potential tool or even a weapon. The British mass media audience was literate, gaining in disposable income, and lived within a society where political and social pressures sought a more equal distribution of wealth. The notion of "equality" had finally won the vote for women over thirty.

     BBC history has been heavily colored by powerful cultural and political myths. For one thing the British Broadcasting Company began in 1922 as a private entity before it became (in 1927) a public corporation and with a Royal Charter and statutory license agreement. It is wrongly assumed that there was political and social consensus that the one-company private monopoly concept was "the right way forward." It is also wrongly assumed that this regulated one company monopoly was a "civilized" reaction to the capitalist and market driven chaos of American radio in the early r92os and that the planning and introduction of approved radio in Britain was based on the public interest. In fact the trademark centralism of BBC radio, with power vested in London, was only imposed after the BBC became a public corporation. Until 1929 BBC Radio was something of a network of local stations with culturally autonomous production centers and a lively and creative partnership of local broadcasters and loyal listeners.

     One of the remarkable aspects of BBC history is that the 1927 model remained the status quo until 1973, while the structure and constitution of BBC funding has remained remarkably consistent. This stability has laid the ground for the BBC's transformation into a powerful cultural and political force in British society.

The BBC as a public corporation can be described in many ways:

     Funding: While the government decides the cost of the annual listener license, the BBC has maximum independence concerning the spending of the resulting revenue. Initially its sole income was derived from the collection of the license fee, which has become a legally enforceable taxation on any U.K. citizen who wishes to listen to the radio or watch television using a receiver. The separate license for radio was abolished in 1971. The BBC has always operated commercial "hybrid" activities such as selling programs abroad, merchandising products, and publishing in other media such as magazines, cassettes, CDs, the internet, books, videos, DVDs, and satellite television. From the outset the BBC cross:promoted the media linked products such as The Radio Times, The Listener, and other publishing products that carried considerable amounts of advertising.

     Governance: The Chairman and Board of Governors con­stitute the legal personality of the BBC. They are supposed by convention to be chosen by the government not as representatives of sectional political interests but on the basis of their experience and standing. Although political parties in office are supposed to avoid political prejudice in these appointments, it can be argued that this convention has often been undermined. The problem has been to achieve reform of the BBC in line with reforms in the public sector without making the BBC subject at any time to the political policies of the party in power.

     For example, BBC Director-General Alisdair Milne officially resigned in 1987, but in subsequent interviews it became clear he was dismissed on the initiative of a new chairman (Marmaduke Hussey) who had been deliberately selected by the Conservative government to "sort out the BBC." The trigger for the dismissal had been a public controversy over government anger and opposition to BBC programming policy on the Northern Ireland troubles. It can also be argued that he had an inability to see the need for root and branch management reforms to make the BBC more efficient.

Government is allowed to intervene only in BBC decision­ making during a national emergency or if it is clearly shown that the BBC has not abided by the Charter and terms of the license granted by Parliament. The Corporation has complete editorial independence in the production and scheduling of its programs, although its history shows frequent incidents and periods of self-censorship and compromising political influence. These basic descriptors raise any number of issues. For example, why did British radio begin as a monopoly devoid of competition and regulated by the state? Why was Britain behind the U.S. in the development of radio as a business? Despite this, why was radio so successful in building audiences given the lack of listener choice? And whose interests did BBC broadcasting serve-the government, the BBC, or the audience? Finally, how has the development of the BBC matched broader changes and developments in British society?

Origins

     In 1912 the Marconi Company's energetic managing director, Godfrey Isaacs, persuaded the Postmaster General (the minister responsible for posts and telecommunications in the Liberal Government) to present a plan to link the British Empire with a network of 18 radio stations. Marconi was granted the contract. Isaacs pulled off a stroke of commercial opportunism by buying the troubled American United Wireless Company, which held the rights to Lee de Forest's vital triode vacuum tube. However, allegations of government corruption undermined an imaginative and developmental scheme for global expansion of radio by British interests. Meanwhil·e, other countries accelerated both government and private radio development. These included not only the United States but such European countries as France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In response, the British Postmaster General dispatched a senior civil servant, F.J Brown, to the United States to study the American scene and make appropriate recommendations for the best course of licensing and regulating the growth of radio in Britain.

     There is a wide discrepancy between what Brown observed and what he actually reported. He was in the U.S. during the winter of 1921-22. American stations had not yet discovered the potential of radio advertising (the WEAF experiments selling real estate did not air until August 1922). The radio Brown observed was then dominated by educational objectives as the 400 stations on the air were largely run by public, civic, and religious institutions. Their funding depended on donations, selling radio sets, or other funding not including the sale of advertising. Radio was widely perceived as a public democratic medium, not as a commercial free for all. But Brown down­ played this American radio diversity and emphasized the "dangers" of "a large number of firms broadcasting." He concluded it was impossible to have a variety of broadcasting stations in Britain because "it would result only in a sort of chaos, only in a much more aggravated form than that which arises in the United States."

     While it can be argued that the political imperative in Britain in the early 1920s was social and political control, Brown seems to have ignored that American radio was characterized by an explosion of freedom of expression in the arts, entertainment, in education, opinion and even the potential for radio journalism. Thus British civil servants and commissions of enquiry for decades to come also overlooked this reality. The government and the BBC had the advantage that few people then traveled abroad to experience alternative approaches to radio.

     Brown and his Post Office superiors invited proposals from interested parties to develop one or two private stations to provide national broadcasting, although it was made very clear they preferred the idea of only one. Despite a subsequent battle between Marconi and the American-controlled Metropolitan Vickers company (Westinghouse was a major shareholder) a single station company soon emerged out of a coalition of interests and government inspired/cajoled compromises. While it seems bizarre in hindsight, the cultural imperative of British radio broadcasting was set by one civil servant, F.J. Brown, who defined the following statutory brief for the BBC: "to educate, inform, and entertain the British public, but with no news gathering, advertising or controversial content to be originated by the company."

Reith's Influence

     The BBC's first director general, John C.W. Reith, was appointed in 1922 and two years later produced a book, Broadcast Over Britain, which became an influential blueprint for public corporatism. Reith wrote: "in these days, when efforts are being made towards the nationalization of the public services and of certain essential industries of the country, the progress of broadcasting has been cited as the most outstanding example of the potentiality of a combination of private enterprise and of public control." As Asa Briggs later recognized, Reith argued that the BBC should exercise the "brute force of monopoly" which would reinforce the other three fundamentals of broadcasting: public service, a sense of moral obligation, and assured finance. Although Reith and his supporters would never recognize it at the time, what was being proposed for the BBC was a totalitarian institution constructed out of a reform of a socialist concept and serving within a capitalist economy.

     Reith quickly established four objectives in public service broadcasting: information, education, entertainment, and high standards. He wrote in Broadcast Over Britain, "It is occasionally indicated to us that we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need-and not what they want-but few know what they want and very few what they need.... In any case it is better to overestimate the mentality of the public than to under-estimate it." A year later the Craw­ ford Parliamentary Committee was appointed to investigate the future of British broadcasting. If Reith could persuade them to adopt public corporatism as a monopoly, he would have achieved his aims. By maneuvering the broadcasting organization away from private commerce into the public sphere, Reith argued that the BBC would be insulated from the ravages of competitive market economy which would undermine his determination to give the public what he believed would be good for them.

     But could government and Parliament trust the BBC to serve the public interest? The British General Strike of 1926 became the supreme test. In order to win the confidence of the political establishment, Reith ensured the BBC was the voice of the British state. He did so by retaining the dignity of acquiescence autonomy and pretending that it was the voice of the British Constitution. His eye was on the prize of public corporations and not on the right of any other voice of moderation to broadcast its point of view. The next year saw the creation of the British Broadcasting Corporation, answerable ultimately to Parliament but with day-to-day control left to the judgment of a Board of Governors that were supposed to be appointed on the basis of their standing and experience.

     Still, and despite Reith's best efforts, the BBC was continually attacked in Parliament and in newspapers such as the Daily Mail and The Times for disseminating "left-wing propaganda." These papers remain today among the strongest critics of the BBC. It was claimed that "pink Bolshevism" was prevalent in the BBC's interpretation of news, in talks, addresses to school children, and entertainment programs. The pressure of this newspaper criticism generated self-censorship. (For example, a storm over a plan by Filson Young to write a play called Titanic led to the BBC withdrawing the commission in 1932 without the author having put one word to paper.) Accusations of bias were often combined with a threat that the BBC's funding should be remodeled, its Charter reconstituted, and competition introduced to break up the existing monopoly.

     In January 1924 newspapers first reported on the need to crack down on illegal broadcasters. It was clear that the maintenance of the monopoly in radio broadcasting demanded investigative and enforcement machinery. The Radio Society of Great Britain assisted the Post Office by forming a broadcast­ ing "flying squad" which sought to track down the owners of the unlicensed transmitting sets in the North Surrey area who had been "interrupting the official broadcast programs by howling and making other disturbances expressive of disapproval of certain items sent out." This effort was clearly a precursor to the Post Office's radio detector vans, which from 1932 roamed the streets of Britain in search of households that had not paid the required license fee. By October 1932 criminal prosecutions for non-license payments had begun. The hunt for "radio pirates" was undertaken by the Post Office. The threat of detection and prosecution resulted in a record 154,000 wireless licenses being taken out in the first 11 days of that month, with an average of 14,000 a day (compared with September's figure of only 2,800 licenses being issued daily). The new war on "pirates" was planned on the assumption that there had been at least 5 million wireless sets in the country, and the number of unlicensed sets had even been placed as high as 2 million.

     Despite the 1930s Depression, the BBC grew steadily larger in the prewar years. The BBC employed nearly 800 people when it became a Corporation in 1927, and had expanded to almost 5,000 by 1939, one year after Reith left. As occurred with many other industries, World War II accelerated investment and activity in the BBC. By 1945 the staff had grown to 11,500.

Programs

     During the first decade of BBC development, the organization was essentially a middle-class institution with a commitment to education as an agent of social advancement. Supplementing Reith's early call for the on-air use of a standardized "received pronunciation," the BBC began to present regional accents in features, documentary programs and continuity in the 1930s as it began to intersect with the British working class and demonstrate the potential of the developing meritocracy. BBC radio offered a wider canvas for the rhetoric of politics and during election campaigns connected a growing electorate with the body politic. For the 1929 General Election the BBC had begun to broadcast views of party political leaders and reported election results faster than newspapers could.

     The BBC became the voice of cultural and political consensus as well as a location for those voices. This paradox was evident in 1929 when The Radio Times, the BBC's weekly list­ ing magazine, which now lists all radio and TV services avail­ able in the U.K., promoted the racist stereotyping of black Americans using such language as "Hear Dem Darkies Singin" (to promote a program of "minstrel plantation singing") yet at the same time celebrated Paul Robeson with a live broadcast of his singing at a concert in Bournemouth, and published a cri­tique of African-American classical music by the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. A similar ambiguity was evident in the irrelevant identification of alleged and convicted criminals as Jews. Arthur Koestler's brother changed his name to Green and pursued an on-air career at the BBC with all traces of his Jewish heritage expunged.

     Despite silencing far-left political voices during the 1930s, the BBC has tended to adopt a more moderate position during periods of political and cultural paranoia. During the 1920s and 1930s it had to negotiate an ideological struggle between communism and fascism. It took its cue from government policy so that during the Spanish Civil War, General Franco's forces were described as "insurgents" rather than "rebels." In 1927 the BBC censored a commissioned play entitled Machines by Reginald Berkeley because it was deemed politically controversial in its criticism of the social and spiritual impact of capitalism on the individual. During and after World War II, BBC radio would become a rich and lively location for a wide range of artistic and documentary programming that articulated political, cultural, and social dissent. In the later Cold War, left-wing American writers would participate in BBC arts and cultural programming after moving to a more liberal Europe. BBC radio commissioned, produced, and broadcast to large audiences material that was restricted on the stage in terms of language and content.

     The BBC has also responded to the gradual, though slow development of sexual equality through the acceptance of women in various areas of work. In the 1920s and 1930s women began to have a noticeable presence in broadcasting.

     U.S. born Elizabeth Welch had her own radio program in the 1930s and became Britain's first black television presenter at Alexandra Palace in 1936. Joan Littlewood and Olive Shapley participated in the pioneering BBC radio features movement at Manchester in the 1930s. Audrey Russell became the BBC's first roving radio correspondent during World War II. The war accelerated further the participation of women in male dominated arenas of work and professional culture. By the 1950s women were taking leading editorial roles in prestigious radio programs, and two decades later they were being appointed to senior BBC executive positions in BBC radio.

     From 1955, live programs began to abandon their reliance on the scripting of every word. Radio performance began to sound more natural and no longer depended on the acting ability of program participants. The BBC became a location for the origination and dissemination of popular culture through comedy and satire such as The Goon Show and the subversive utterances of disc jockeys such as Kenny Everett. More cost­ effective recording processes introduced in the late 1950s meant that a live production culture with half of all programs providing a live audio theatre gave way to a schedule with 90 percent pre-recorded programming on BBC national networks in 1975.

Changing Networks

     Development of a "General Forces Programme" during World War II, where entertainment was more evident than information and education, helped to set the stage for the creation of "The Light Programme" after the war. The presence of over a million U.S. service personnel, including a substantial number of African Americans, and exposure to the programs of the American Forces Radio Network resulted in American styles of radio presentation and formats being adopted by the BBC. Demand for a greater variety of music and popular entertainment formats was evident in the 1945 inception of "The Light Programme." A year later "The Third Programme" provided a sound stage for highbrow programming, while the "Home Service" continued to offer mainstream news, drama, and cultural programming.

     The changing identity of national regions in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales was maintained by separate services for these areas. Their existence could be regarded as an influential factor in the establishment of a parliament for Scotland, and national assemblies for Northern Ireland and Wales between 1997 and 1999.

     In 1967 the networks were added to and redrawn as BBC Radio1, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4. BBC Radio I was set up to cater to the national youth culture audience for music and Radio 2 tended to serve the evolving demand for popular music for people aged over 40. As the state began to recognize the democratic nature of popular culture and have more confidence in diverse voices participating in the public sphere of media debate, the BBC changed its rules on program preparation and production. In 1994, following the success of a temporary radio news service during the 1991 Gulf War, the BBC recognized the growing demand for more concentrated news and sports programming with the establishment of the national Radio Five Live service making use of vacant BBC AM frequencies.

     By the early 2000s there were five BBC national radio networks, three national BBC stations for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and a network of 39 BBC local radio services in England. By 2003 the BBC had established a portfolio of digital radio services serving more targeted "narrowcast" markets in music, light entertainment, speech, and ethnic minority programming. Two years earlier the BBC had positive public feedback for projected national digital stations that included a service focusing on black music, news, and speech aimed at a young audience (1Xtra), a station focusing on the music that helped shape the generation from the 1970s to the 1990s (6 Music), a new speech-based service mixing old and new comedy, drama, stories, and features and also focusing on storytelling for children (BBC 7), a niche sports service widening the radio coverage of live sport (Five Live Sports Plus), the delivery of the BBC World Service to the domestic audience, and an upgrading of an embryonic Asian Network into a national station focusing on news and sports for British Asians.

Tuning In

     The need for BBC listener research developed out of commercial competition from abroad in the 1930s, which soon professionalized BBC links between programming and audience. The audience research section, led by Robert Silvey after 1936, highlighted the impact of overseas commercial programming from Luxembourg and Normandy in northern France. The dour BBC symphony of religious services, talks, and classical music on Sundays was rapidly abandoned by U.K. listeners who preferred the light band music and bright lights of consumer advertising on the English speaking commercial radio services from the continent targeted at British audiences. The dry biscuit of Holy Communion on the BBC Sabbath offering was a poor second to the Cadburys Chocolate sponsorship on Radio Luxembourg by a ratio of 2:8. Audience research soon contributed to the adoption of more "fixed point" scheduling. The BBC realized its programs needed to follow the social habits of its audience.

     The evolution of domestic radio technology aided this process. By the late 1920s there was a change from using crystal sets that required the use of headphones (and which tended to be home-made and largely used by males) to manufactured tube-powered receivers that enabled housebound women to listen during the day. Later, car radios served the demand for programs that followed commuting habits at breakfast and drive-time. The 1950s development of the portable transistor radio became a fashionable tool of reception by young people and underlined the need for the BBC to respond to their interest in popular musical formats.

Competitive Pressure

  BBC Radio began to lose its monopoly position through the 1950s as audiences tuned to commercial music services from Europe and various offshore pirate stations. This process was hastened after the beginning of independent television in 1956, although domestic commercial local radio began only in 1973, and a commercial national radio service two decades later. The explosion of consumer youth culture and popular rock and roll music meant that radio offered a new platform for retaining a mass audience.

     The BBC more recently came under pressure from changes in the political-economic consensus as government control and direction of the economy gave way to market economics. The BBC was urged to generate some of its own income rather than depend on license fee funding. Staff levels were reduced by almost a third. However, despite the ferocity of political criticism, mainly from the right, and regular Parliamentary enquiries into BBC funding and operations, the BBC's constitution today remains very similar to that of 1927, surely an unprecedented record in the world's public service radio.

     By 2003 most BBC radio services had internet dimensions by way of live audio streaming or lateral levels of text, audio, and video accompaniment that was downloadable on demand. In addition, many established programs on networks such as Radio 4, Radio 3 and BBC Five Live were being archived with a back catalogue available to listeners from the BBC website. BBC Radio's share of total listening was 51.6 percent, an increase of 5.6 percent from 1998. Radio had overtaken television as the most consumed medium in the U.K.

     Radio 3 continued its public service role in supporting the Promenade concerts, World Music, and five orchestras. Radio 4 was the largest commissioner of new writing in the world. Radio 1 was reaching over half of the country's 15 to 24 year olds. BBC radio comedy was feeding the television medium with the successful transfer from sound to vision of series such as Dead Ringers, Alan Partridge, Goodness Gracious Me, and The League of Gentlemen.

     Out of a total license fee income in the year 2001-2002 of nearly £2.6 billion, £302 million was spent on domestic radio services. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office funded the BBC World Service through Grant-in-Aid with £205 million. The number of people being jailed for defaulting on license fee prosecution fines had dropped to 17 compared to 148 in 1998-99. These figures indicate that BBC Radio is at the time of writing the most generously public funded radio organization in the world. The only comparable level of funding was NHK in Japan and the regional German public radio stations.

     In 2003 the U.K. government was seeking to consolidate its regulation of communications under one body known as Ofcom. The BBC had successfully lobbied to resist its absorption into this framework. However, Ofcom will take over the Broadcasting Standards Commission role of adjudicating on complaints about taste, invasion of privacy, and fairness. The BBC has also been under pressure to submit its financial auditing to greater external scrutiny.