The BBC: A People’s History review – will we ever stop fighting over the Beeb?

The BBC: A People’s History by David Hendy (Profile Books), £25.

Last year the BBC reached its 100th birthday. Through wars, commercial competition and political power-play, it has been a great survivor. It is an institution central to our national life, second in public loyalty only to the NHS. In 2020, in any given week, over 91 per cent of UK households used one BBC service or another. 

Loyalty and esteem don’t stop at our borders either: globally, 468 million people were watching or listening to BBC programmes, the single most important British “soft power” tool. Nonetheless, all is not well with “Auntie”, as the BBC was once nicknamed.

The digital age poses continuing challenges for the Corporation in the form of Netflix and other streaming companies. Younger people are slipping from the BBC’s grasp. Ofcom figures from 2018 suggest that 16-34-year-olds are using its services 50 per cent less than the national average.

Social media is bringing about increasingly compartmentalised sets of viewers and listeners less inclined to use comprehensive services provided by a public service broadcaster. Commercial competitors on and off-screen are increasingly resentful of what they see as the advantages enjoyed by such a dominant player in the UK market. 

Most notably of all, however, the BBC has alienated Conservative governments in power since 2010 and hasn’t helped its own cause by some disturbing failures of oversight including the Savile scandal and the controversy over the notorious TV interview with Princess Diana. 

The Culture Secretary’s announcement last week of an intention to freeze the level of the annual licence fee and to establish an alternative funding model after 2027, poses a real threat to the survival of the BBC. 

It is far from clear what form an alternative might take. Subscription models are comparatively expensive, especially when the current universal system costs licence payers only 43p per day for access to nine national television channels, fifty-six radio stations, the BBC website, iPlayer and the World Service. 

What is clear is that a rapidly reducing source of assured funding will inevitably shrink the range of services the BBC will be able to provide in future.

The publication of David Hendy’s The BBC: A People’s History is therefore very timely. Hendy’s book, however, is more than the story of the BBC since its foundation; it is also and quite overtly a piece of advocacy for the retention of the BBC as we currently know it. 

Hidden away in the acknowledgements on page 613 is the disclosure that it is an “authorised” history. Still, the author underlines that whilst he was provided with help in “accessing and navigating” the BBC’s voluminous archives, the Corporation exercised no editorial control over what he has written. Nor, it should be said, is Hendy’s account uncritical of the BBC. It is a richly textured account, fairly told and a pleasure to read.

From the start, the BBC was an organisation with a mission. Its first Director-General, Lord Reith, had a missionary-in-chief intent on bringing “the best of everything into the greatest number of homes”. 

A little over half the book is dedicated to the Corporation’s origins and its growth through the Second World War into the formidable organisation it became; one which sat easily in the corporatist national landscape which took shape in the early post-war years.

Hendy plays out particularly well the sheer technical wizardry required to get the BBC launched in the 1920s and is similarly clear in his analysis of the beginnings of TV after the war and of the innovative qualities and resilience of BBC engineers and computer specialists in the later digital age. 

Alongside the technical history, Hendy tells a human story about the men and women who got the show on the road. There was a massive expansion of BBC domestic and overseas services from the mid-1930s onwards, and this was sustained thereafter.

Despite having to evacuate staff from London to the West Country and deal with bomb damage to its remaining London buildings, by May 1944 the BBC was broadcasting in 46 different languages, had trebled its hours of broadcasting, increased its staff fourfold and quintupled its transmission power.

By 1945 the BBC had become a power in the land in terms of both its domestic and overseas programming output. However “Auntie” had also generated criticism and antipathies which, in one way or another, survived into peacetime. 

Finding ways to reconcile its editorial and operational independence with its obligations as a nationally-funded organisation at times of national crisis, particularly during war and conflict, was a source of continuing tension with governments. 

This was the case especially during the war but to a lesser extent also during the Suez crisis of 1956, the Falklands conflict in 1982 and during and following the Iraq war in 2003. 

A rather different but increasing challenge after 1945 was commercial competition. This had been raised before the war by newspaper owners fearful of losing their customers to the new medium. Still, the advent of TV and the emergence of privately owned broadcasters gave the issue of competition a new and more brittle edge. 

A growing challenge from ITV and later from digital providers pushed the BBC to expand its range of programmes in an effort to reconcile its mission “to inform” with a growing public demand to be entertained.

Hendy shows that a creative mix developed somewhat haphazardly as the BBC evolved to meet the competition, technological, public and increasing political pressures. The sheer size and scope of the Corporation induced envy and resentment. 

The BBC became an unparalleled powerhouse for the arts and cultural life of the nation, protecting it from some of its more radically inclined critics intent on bringing an end to what they saw as its monopolistic character. 

Public inquiries into broadcasting and the role of the BBC followed one upon another from the 1960s onwards. The Corporation responded to each with evolutionary adjustments to its shape and direction of travel; it didn’t just survive it continued to thrive. What changed most acutely was the political context. 

Until the 1980s, nationalised industries and public corporations provided most public services from railways to water supplies and gas and electricity. The Thatcher government was intent on breaking up such monopoly organisations and privatising them.

The BBC was not in fact a monopoly provider and faced strong competition from independent television and radio companies, but the new government saw it as part of a post-war corporatist consensus that it wanted to disrupt. 

Furthermore, unlike the public utilities, the BBC was enormously influential in terms of public opinion. Hendy recalls the words of the new-style Thatcherite MP, Norman Tebbit, who said of the BBC that it was “insufferably smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of that third-rate decade, the Sixties.” 

The BBC found itself caught up in a period of radical economic, industrial and cultural change. To Thatcher and her supporters it had become an independent barony resistant to change and competition and with political attitudes of its own which were damaging to the Thatcherite “project”.

The Thatcher government’s commitment to public competition and individual choice found ready support among newspaper owners and private broadcasting entities intent on their own commercial agendas. 

Fundamentally the renewed challenges to the BBC set by the Cameron and successor governments have been a continuing ripple effect from the Thatcher years. In a real sense, the BBC is unfinished political business. 

Arguments first voiced about the licence fee forty years ago are still in play. In truth, they have always been less about the licence fee and much more about contesting or diluting the perceived concentration of influence and power enjoyed by the Corporation.

If anything the – far from cheap – monthly subscriptions charged by the streaming providers and satellite TV companies have tended to emphasise the seeming good value of what the annual licence fee provides.

There is a cultural and political battle underway in Britain today, and the BBC is at the centre of that battlefield. In his final few chapters, Hendy makes the case for enabling the BBC and its wide range of universally provided services to continue.

Whether we entirely agree with Hendy or not, a great deal is clearly at stake.