This New Noise (16 page)

The 1930s transmitter at Broadcasting House looms over the spire of All Souls, Langham Place.  

Instinctively, though, he disliked the BBC’s monopoly. He described his old employer in terms that might have its current critics nodding in agreement. The BBC, he wrote, ‘is such a feeble thing compared with what it might be. It is a great bore, dull and hackneyed and pompously self-conscious … issues are dodged which even a commercial press has no fear to expose. The BBC stands, either remote and dictatorial or pawky, oblivious of opportunity, hopeless in its timidity.’ Its excessive (in his view) caution was quite different from the cheerfully demotic tone of the Writtle broadcasts: ‘The BBC has become the careful mouthpiece of conformity (“there is so much to be said on both sides” that the BBC lets neither side say anything), and far from being a patron of the arts it has been merely patronising towards the artists.’ He compared the BBC to
medieval robber barons, ‘perched in their castles above the river gorges’ who ‘had the power to control water-borne commerce or even prevent it. In the same way the “broadcasting authority” stands over the narrows of programme flow and can pass or refuse or select for broadcasting whatever its policy dictates’.

The strength of his views was, no doubt, fuelled by his falling out with Reith, and his subsequent adventures outside the BBC, building stations in Continental Europe to beam offshore commercial radio into the UK. But, seen through Eckersley’s eyes, the BBC looks as odd as would a British Publishing Corporation, producing the bulk of the nation’s books; or, as he suggested, a nationalised cinema industry. The corporation’s defenders could cogently argue that whatever its inherent oddnesses, whatever the historical particularities that operated at its founding, the BBC happens to work; it has sinuously bent to accommodate the times, has proved itself time and again as the greatest cultural organisation our nation has known, has inserted itself into the very DNA of Britishness. But, none the less, Eckersley reminds us that had the delicate mechanisms of history been only minutely adjusted, British broadcasting could have looked very different; that right from the beginning, its shape and constitution were contested, even from within.

But for all the dissenters and evaders and enemies, there is no large-scale organised resistance to the BBC, no truly popular uprising against it – to the bafflement, one senses, of some on the right. John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who at the time of writing had chaired the Culture
Select Committee for a decade, holding free-market-inflected views on the BBC, was, in another life, Thatcher’s political secretary. When we met at Portcullis House, he reminisced about another, unhappier adventure with a poll tax. ‘I was in Downing Street as they rampaged up and down Whitehall throwing petrol bombs and attacking policemen when they were rioting against the poll tax. And it had a means-tested element, you know. You only paid 20 per cent if you were on a very low income.’ He added, seeming mildly incredulous that no petrol bombs are thrown in protest against the BBC’s funding regime: ‘The licence fee – it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got two halfpennies to rub together, you still pay £145.50.’ Most of us do so uncomplainingly, even gladly. For now.

Time was once a rough and ready thing to be marked by the movements of the sun and the vagaries of the church clock. But as the nineteenth century matured, the electrical telegraph and alarm clock became the new, efficient keepers of time, regulating the railways and awakening commuters. From 1922 these technologies were joined by a yet more powerful force: the BBC. The Greenwich time signal – the ‘pips' – was devised by Reith and the then astronomer royal, Frank Watson Dyson, and first broadcast on 5 February 1924. With the soaring of wireless sales through the 1920s and 1930s, the populace became synchronised to itself as never before. Time, no longer a casual, ambling thing, fell into regimented step. As the BBC's transmitters – those pencil-sharp towers of modernist promise – gradually cast their skein of radio signals across the UK, so the land itself was transformed into a kind of timepiece.

A decade after its birth, in 1932, the BBC started to broadcast on shortwave to the empire. (The service was introduced by Reith in a manner utterly out of joint with our own era's taste for hyperbole: ‘Don't expect too much in the early days. The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good.') The sound of Big Ben striking was one of the most popular features enjoyed by British subjects overseas during the 1930s, hooking the empire's dispersed peoples into a single time frame: you might have
been in the outback, but Greenwich Mean Time was what mattered. An early edition of the journal
World Radio
included a letter from a listener in Malaysia who had reset the domestic clock to GMT better to catch the BBC schedule.

The BBC thus bound nationhood and time together. It also changed the nature of space – for it banished distance. ‘The crofter in the north of Scotland' and ‘the agricultural labourer in the west of England' could together hear ‘the king speak on some great national occasion', wrote Reith in
Broadcast Over Britain.
This sense of proximity resulted, too, in a certain ironing out of regional difference in speech. In the early debates about the BBC there was plenty written on the kind of voices suitable for broadcasting: there emerged a blandly middle-class ‘standard English'. Even now, though the more genteel kinds of Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and West Indian accents are heard on Radio 4, one does not very often hear an announcer or presenter with a deep West Country burr, or a roundly Liverpool or Birmingham accent. Hilda Matheson wrote that it was an undeniable fact ‘that standard English … is associated with education and good breeding, while to be without it is a definite handicap to any ambitious boy or girl'. Standard English was not just about comprehensibility, then, but also aspiration – but the sometimes rather strangulated refinement of the BBC voice could irritate. A letter to the
Daily Mail
in 1929 complained, ‘Sir, a person like myself, who appreciates to the full all that the British Broadcasting Corporation has done and is doing for listeners, becomes irritated beyond endurance when
announcers say “Australiar”, “dramar”, “Indiar”, “insigniar” “idear” etc as they very frequently do. Being a Scot, I do not like “warh”, “Empiah, “paht” and suchlike sounds, but I
do
detest that final “r”. Stop it please. A Scot.'

There are still times when we together cleave to the BBC as a nation bound in one time frame to communal experience. During the summer of 2012, millions of us cheered for Team GB at the Olympics, via the BBC. We come together for the best of Saturday-night entertainment, for the most hotly awaited drama, for significant political or royal moments (20 million tuned into the BBC's coverage of the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge). The BBC remains a crucial carrier of British identity: it binds us recognisably to ourselves. If nationhood consists of sets of intangibles, of common reference points and belief systems, the BBC threads us together through shared experience and memory. In a phrase that would have baffled Reith, it is perhaps also the greatest British export brand, instantly associated with the UK and admired throughout the world. Within Britain, when so many national industries and services (the National Coal Board, British Steel, British Rail, Royal Mail) have been privatised and broken up, it stands alongside the NHS and our great national museums as one of a dwindling number of institutions held in common in a civic space for the benefit of all. Director general Tony Hall put it this way: the BBC conducts ‘a sense of what British creativity is and how Britain expresses itself to itself … We are part of what makes Britain Britain, and all the eddies and currents that make up Britain flow right through the BBC.'

But just as this ninety-year age of broadcast simultaneity is passing, or at least significantly changing its nature, in the face of the proliferation of broadcasters and the rise of the catch-up service, ideas of Britain and Britishness are coming under strain too. There are two great changes afoot to the manner in which the BBC is bound to ideas of Britishness. One has already taken place almost unremarked and undebated by the general public; the second relates to the loosening of the very ties that bind the UK together as a single entity. The first is that from 1 April 2014 the Foreign Office ceased to fund the World Service – the radio, television and online news and cultural service that the BBC provides to audiences overseas. For decades it had been an expression, albeit an editorially independent one, of British ‘soft power' in often sensitive territories. Now the £245 million bill is borne by licence-fee payers. For many, the change, negotiated by former director general Mark Thompson in the face of the threat that the government should cease to meet the bill for television licences for the over-seventy-fives, seemed nothing more than an apparent administrative nicety, a way of dodging an even heavier financial burden. In fact, it raised important questions about the nature and purpose of broadcasting to overseas audiences.

The second is the debate about Scotland's nationhood, which the referendum on 18 September 2014 settled in practical terms, but hardly stilled for the long term. And, while an important event in itself, the debate also served as the most obvious example of a long-term trend in Britain (echoed by similar moves on mainland Europe):
the reassertion of national and regional identities in a post-imperial age.

In its white paper on independence, it had been the Scottish National Party's policy that in the event of a ‘yes' vote, BBC Scotland should be severed from the rump of the corporation and a Scottish Broadcasting Service established. Many in Scotland had been sceptical about the notion – skeletal and short on detail as it was. But even among those who believed in retaining the union were many who argued that the BBC should examine afresh how successfully it related to the constituent parts of the UK – and whether a suppler, less monolithic notion of the corporation ought to be embraced in the face of changing notions of Britishness.

In most parts of the world – with the exception of certain countries, including China, where its shortwave transmissions are jammed and its website restricted – you will not be far from the BBC (nor, these days, from other global broadcasters such as Russia Today, Al Jazeera, CNN and China's CCTV). There is the BBC website. There are the formats, programmes and channels (such as BBC Earth, BBC Lifestyle, CBeebies) that are sold around the globe by Worldwide, the BBC's commercial arm.
Strictly Come Dancing,
or
Dancing with the Stars
as it is known elsewhere, was in late 2014 the most popular format, running in 50 overseas versions. The most exported programme in its original form was
Top Gear
, followed by
Doctor Who
and
Sherlock
(a roll call that gives pause for thought about the particular view of Britishness BBC Television offered). The BBC World News channel was
available in 200 countries. And the World Service broadcast radio in 28 languages and free-to-air TV in 9 languages.

The World Service – until 1965 known in turn as the External Services and General Overseas Service – is the offspring of two distinct streams in the early BBC: its English-language Empire Service, and the slightly later foreign-language services that began in 1938. The Empire Service was an address to the white ruling class, a way of bringing to scattered listeners the sounds of home – and the imaginative tools inwardly to reconstruct its physical landscapes, too. A poem published in the
World Radio
journal of 1932 put it this way:

Or as George V rather dramatically put it in an Empire Service Christmas address, it was ‘for men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea that only voices out of the air can reach them'. Despite the good intentions and efforts of some BBC executives, the traffic of sound was mostly one way – from Britain and, specifically, London, to the dominions.

Foreign-language broadcasts were a direct response to the rise of shortwave transmissions from Germany and
Italy, the fascist regimes there having quickly identified the power of the wireless as a propaganda tool. On the Italian side, Mussolini was broadcasting into the Middle East – a region thick with British interests – from Bari. In 1935, when Reith spoke to the Ullswater Parliamentary Committee, there was generalised disbelief that the German government should be subsidising propaganda broadcasting to the tune of £3 million. He told the committee, ‘The sort of thing they do which would lend colour to such a figure is the turning out of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the middle of the night to play to parts of the British Empire.' Lord Ullswater replied, ‘You mean they keep them sitting up?' Reith drily affirmed that this was indeed the case. The British government needed to catch up.

As war loomed, the BBC's Arabic Service was established, then Portuguese and Spanish services for Latin America, then, by the time of the Munich crisis, German, Italian and French. The purpose of these broadcasts was quite different from that of the Empire Service. According to the historian Alban Webb, for the first time the BBC was ‘not making the assumption that listeners have the same view as it. It was talking to people with different, and sometimes opposing, views. It was trying to manage the perception of Britain through radio.'

The BBC was transformed by the war, in all kinds of ways: its staff doubled and its news operation ascended to new levels as listeners demanded the kind of here-and-now, on-the-ground relationship with events that could be only partially satisfied by newspapers. It also fought its
own battles of the airwaves: by 1943 it was, with government funding, broadcasting in 45 languages.

Charles Rolo, a British-born, American-domiciled journalist who would go on to become literary editor of the
Atlantic
, wrote a slim volume called
Radio War
(1943). Radio, he wrote, ‘has been streamlined from a crude propaganda bludgeon into the most powerful single instrument of political warfare the world has ever known. More flexible in use and infinitely stronger in emotional impact than the printed world, as a weapon of war waged psychologically radio has no equal.'

In the psychological warfare conducted by the BBC, its great weapon was the truth – which is neither as simple nor as pious as it sounds. Truth became a formidable force, skilfully deployed, difficult to combat by the enemy. Truth – of course not a monolithic thing, but elastic and flexible, capable of being moulded through selection and tone and language – was the great weapon. According to Webb, ‘The truth can be self-flagellation, government-bashing, and admitting failure. But admitting failure gives you more strength, and that is what Goebbels didn't get, and that's what the BBC learns in the war. And the BBC also learns that if you keep doing that, so if there's a consistency in the way you report failure and problems, then you end up with even more credibility.' By the time decisive Allied victories such as El Alamein and Stalingrad finally came, the BBC had built up enough trust for its accounts of them to be believed.

A wartime propaganda sheet proclaimed: ‘Men, women and even children risk imprisonment and death to hear
broadcasts from London. They are the inhabitants of the occupied countries of Europe. They do so because they have learned that the British broadcasts tell them the truth …
FROM LONDON COMES THE VOICE OF BRITAIN
…
THE VOICE OF FREEDOM
.' Tangye Lean, brother of the filmmaker David, who was director of External Services during the war, wrote in his book
Voices in the Darkness
(1943) of a letter published in 1942 by Goebbels, supposedly having been sent to him from a frontline soldier. The letter analysed ‘the motives inspiring the BBC's apparent preference for the truth'. What Britain counted on was ‘the slogan already spread abroad before the war, and unfortunately one which had become a fixed conception about the decency and “fair play” of the English'. The notorious truthfulness of the BBC had morphed almost into a national characteristic – or at least a piece of useful national mythology. The ‘truth' notion played into a centuries-long rhetoric of British exceptionalism: British liberty, British fair play, British imperial virtues.

In her novel
Human Voices
, Penelope Fitzgerald put it like this: ‘Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that the truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective.' The BBC, she wrote, was ‘scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe'. Fitzgerald was too sly a novelist to write without ambiguity. Human voices are just that: human, and therefore fallible. She compared the truthfulness of the BBC to that of the Delphic Oracle – notorious for locking the
truth inside slanted speech, for tricking the unwary with riddles.