BBC

This page looks at public sector broadcasting in the UK.   

     studies

Asa Briggs' five volume The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (London, Oxford Uni Press 61-86) is an establishment history on the model of the worthy, irreplaceable but often stupefying official war histories that have disappeared into the remoter stacks of university libraries. 

Colin McCabe's The BBC & Public Service Broadcasting (Manchester, Manchester Uni Press 86) is more independent, as is Paddy Scannell's A Social History of British Broadcasting: Vol 1, 1922-39 (Oxford, Blackwell 91).

John Reith - master of the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC) and Imperial Airways, High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland, self-lacerating calvinist in love with power, pomp and engineer Charlie Bower - was the subject of biographies by the acidulous Andrew Boyle in Only the Wind Will Listen (London, Hutchinson 72) and the gentler Ian McIntyre in The Expense of Glory (London, HarperCollins 93).  

Boyle was responsible for Poor Dear Brendan (London, Hutchinson 74) on 'bounder', supposed Churchill love-child and Financial Times publisher Brendan Bracken, more perceptively analysed in the spritzy Eminent Churchillians by Andrew Roberts. The Reith Diaries (London, Collins 75) edited by Charles Stuart are a long howl of pain over - rightly, we think - disappointed ambition. Hugh Greene, brother of the nasty novelist, provided an anaemic account of his term at the BBC's helm in The Third Floor Front: A View of Broadcasting in the 60s (London, Bodley Head 69). 

Lucy Shankleman's Inside the BBC & CNN: Managing Media Organisations (London, Routledge 00) is a study of corporate cultures, all very upbeat. There's a different tempo in Jennifer Doctor's The BBC & UltraModern Music, 1922-36 (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 99); essential reading if you're into musicology, otherwise not.

Tom Hickman's celebratory What Did You Do In The War, Auntie? The BBC At War 1939-45 (London, BBC 96) should be read in conjunction with Sian Nicholas' The Echo Of War: Home Front Propaganda & The Wartime BBC (New York, St Martins 96) and Gary Rawnsley's Radio Diplomacy & Propaganda: The BBC & VOA in International Politics 1956-64 (New York, St Martins 96).

     Chronology

A chronology of the BBC is here.



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