Churchill and Lord Reith weren’t so different after all
Lord Reith has come up a lot in this centenary year for the BBC. The first director-general is usually treated more as an idea than a person, his legacy boiled down to a three-word mantra: inform, educate, entertain.
But Drama on 3: Churchill versus Reith (Radio 3, Sunday) took us back to 1926 to reveal the man. “Mr Reith is a very prickly, devoutly religious, terribly ambitious, 36-year-old, six-foot-six Scot with a grim manner and a deep facial scar from the war… but a perfect sweetie when you get to know him.” That was the verdict of his secretary Isobel Shields, the winking omniscient narrator of Mike Harris’s play.
The drama presented the 1926 General Strike as a life-or-death moment for the corporation. As newspaper printers downed tools, a battle over public information broke out. In Harris’s telling, if events had played out differently, the BBC might have been reduced to a government mouthpiece – or simply shut down.
Politicians, casting a worried eye toward Russia, feared a socialist revolution. For the Chancellor, Winston Churchill, it seemed obvious that the national broadcaster should toe the government line, as a bulwark against “barbaric Bolshevism”. Reith disagreed, backed by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, who
supported the BBC’S independence – but seemed ready to withdraw that support if the winds should shift.
I’m sure amateur historians will be sending in letters. (Surely, even at his most flippant, Churchill would never actually have threatened Reith with prison?) But as a drama, it was gripping, clever, and lively.
The action flitted between three camps. Churchill was boisterously editing the Government’s sabrerattling propaganda-sheet, The British Gazette. The unions were putting out their own one-sided bulletin (encouraged by “Red” Ellen Wilkinson MP, likeably played by Helen O’hara). And caught between this Scylla and Charybdis, there was Reith, broadcasting statements from both sides, fretting about impartiality yet dreaming of becoming Viceroy of India – which would mean, of course, keeping the Government buttered up.
Even at 90 minutes, it felt dense – with Harris’s script playfully acknowledging the fact. (After one bit of exposition, the secretary chipped in: “Mr Reith does like his explanations”.) But it took what could have been a dry piece of history and made it feel urgent.
In this telling, Reith didn’t just save the BBC; it saved him. Tom Goodmanhill brought out all the character’s vanity, insecurity and idealism.
Feelings about the BBC can be weirdly tribal. Legitimate criticism can be drowned out by unthinking defences, and by knee-jerk attacks from rivals with a financial interest in its failure – those parts of the press and broadcast media who refuse, on principle, to say a good word about it. But the reality is more complex, more like Goodman-hill’s version of Reith: flawed and idealistic, irritating and admirable, forced into uncomfortable compromises to survive, unique and irreplaceable.
The continued existence of Drama on 3 is a reminder of what the BBC is for; no commercial station would give a full 90 minutes to serious new radio drama in this way. Nor would they broadcast a show as diligently educational as Opera, the Art of Emotions (Radio 3, Sunday).
Radio 3’s late-night broadcasting is usually the station at its best and most esoteric. (Night Tracks has a psychedelic brilliance.) But this was opera for dummies – a welcome thing, says this opera-illiterate dummy – illustrating musical techniques, with each episode themed around a different feeling.
It’s hosted by Nadine Benjamin, “operatic soprano and mind coach”. She’s terrific as a soprano and unbearable as a mind coach. It’s a wonderful thing to have a presenter who can sing a line from an aria to demonstrate a nice technical point, but I cringed at lines such as “I truly believe emotion is a journey that we all feel and take in at different levels.” Still, this was only the first episode; perhaps it needs time to bed in.
If you’re looking for in-depth musical criticism, you can find it in podcasts. Song by Song (songbysongpodcast.com) is a marvellous labour of love. Over eight years and more than 300 episodes, chin-stroking musos Martin Zaltz Austwick and Sam Pay have pored over the songs of Tom Waits one at a time. They’re joined by guests, some die-hard Waitsians, some who’ve barely heard of the gravel-voiced god of songwriters. No detail goes unquestioned; the latest episode features a funny, despairing analysis of
Bone Chain, a track that’s essentially just Waits grunting. With only one album left to cover, the end is in sight.