“It’s still the BBC’s job to convey beauty, meaning and knowledge”
When work takes me to BBC Broadcasting House in London, sitting in the reassuring surroundings of the art deco foyer, I often find myself reflecting on the history of public service broadcasting. There, above the lifts, is what one might call the BBC’s foundation stone:
“This Temple is dedicated to the Arts and Muses by the first Governors of Broadcasting in the year 1931, Sir John Reith being director-general. It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness.”
In our sceptical age, such idealism may sound a bit quaint. But coming after the First World War, it was not mere rhetoric. The date tells the story. Founded in 1922, with its unsteady first steps in the General Strike, the BBC was essentially shaped in the Depression.
By 1931, Britain’s imperial mission had become deeply problematised. At home there was widespread hardship and unemployment. The loss of half of Britain’s world market in a few years had dealt a devastating blow to manufacturing and trading cities. But ecumenical ideas were in the air: “Nation shall speak peace unto Nation” would be the BBC’s motto. Society was changing fast (women, after all, had only just got the vote!) It was the time to think about using new technology to further cultural – and moral – progress.
The creation of the BBC was one of many social projects of the time, including the Central Library in my home town, Manchester. The library was a consciously pioneering educational project “for all classes in the community” and Reith thought like that too.
It was then that the future role of public service broadcasting was defined. The key figure was not Reith but Hilda Matheson, the BBC’s first director of talks, who formulated the idea of ‘difficult’ and important subjects of public interest being discussed on the airwaves. This shaped the content of public service broadcasting from the 1950s onwards, when TV became a mass medium, broadcasting the sciences, arts and humanities as part of ‘quality cultural programming’. The ‘golden age’ of public service television, which shaped my generation of viewers, came out of that – from The Great War and Seven Up (1964) through to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), Bronowski’s Ascent of Man (1973) and Life on Earth (1979).
We’ve had massive changes since then, of course: the invention of the world wide web, the growth of electronic and digital media, the coming of the multi-channel universe and the birth of catch-up TV, have altered terrestrial broadcasting forever, not least in the way we all watch television. During that time there have also been many changes in content, style, accent and ethnic and gender mix. But, in my experience, Reith’s educational and egalitarian agenda still guides the BBC.
And now the BBC finds itself under attack. There’s even talk of the end of the old licence fee, and of partial privatisation. As always though, a sense of history gives us a little perspective. Back in the eighties, misplaced and short-sighted antipathy cut back the World Service’s potentially pre-eminent influence across the world as a British brand, and also passed up on the opportunity for a BBC World TV channel that would have taken CNN to the cleaners and exerted a huge influence in spreading British culture and ideas. Despite this, today the BBC is still one of the great British brand names abroad. It tells us who we are, and it tells other people too – and isn’t that a definition of soft power?
And that’s because of the BBC’s founding ethos, developed in the 1920s. The idea, some say, is anachronistic now. But it works because it is so simple. Reith was a funny old buttoned-up Scots Calvinist, but his desire to “inform, educate and entertain” translates into any language and culture.
The goal, we all agree, is still to convey “things of beauty, meaning and knowledge”, as it says on the foundation stone. So let’s try to take the long view: shortsightedness, after all, was not a fault we associate with Reith and Matheson.