The BBC: The Myth Of A Public Service

by Tom Mills

(Verso, £16.99)

Reviewed by Brian Morton

RADIO “is ultimately a persuasive art. [It] can help to make the modern state work”. The 1933 dateline will lead the ultra-wary to suppose that this is one of those booby-trap quotes which sound OK at first but turn out to have been uttered by Adolf Hitler. Not in this case, and nor is the voice that of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s great admirer Sir John Reith, the BBC’s founding figure. The speaker is actually the cultured Hilda Matheson, the corporation’s founding Head of Talks. The views are, though, a version of Reith’s own philosophy, which was not so much fascist as liberal-nationalist, and which thought of broadcasting as a way of uniting the loneliest but-and-ben with the great events and rituals of state.

So far, so reasonable. But in 1933, the BBC and Reith had already come close to being commandeered as the mouthpiece of government. At the time of the General Strike, the BBC was still negotiating reconstitution as a public corporation. The licence arrangement gave government a free hand to commandeer the broadcaster “if and whenever in the opinion of the Postmaster-General an emergency shall have arisen”. The precise construction put on “emergency” would in the years ahead wobble wide enough to include anything from Suez to the 1984 miners’ strike to the “war on terror”, though the commandeering would be subtle and stealthier. There was a more immediate crisis to be confronted before the 1930s were out. As soon as the British establishment realised that Hitler wasn’t such a good chap after all, telecommunications became a vital arm of national propaganda.

Tom Mills argues that, far from being an autonomous public servant, the BBC has always answered to the interests of the government in power. Margaret Thatcher’s apparent conviction that Broadcasting House was simply the W1 postal address of the Comintern (Communist International) had its comic aspects, certainly for anyone who worked there. In reality, Thatcher loathed what she thought of as the BBC’s privileged, uncompetitive status, and chose to mistake its social-democratic ethos for something altogether pinker. She, or rather her ideological handlers, like Sir Keith Joseph, set out to crush that consensus and replace it with what became the current neo-liberal model.

The most obvious and egregious symptom of that change has been the BBC’s current obsession with business and money. A programme title like Wake Up To Money might have been music to the ears of industry’s captains – who can now count on their half-yearly profits being touted pre-breakfast – but leaves a metallic taste for pretty much everyone else. Another apparent oddity of the BBC is that an organisation which has been focus-grouped up the wazoo should ignore the public’s overwhelming indifference to the minutiae of business and international finance. That the public, pace Thatcher, should always have regarded the Beeb as an essentially conservative organisation has much to do with the poshness of its favoured presenters (no longer RP, but Estuary, which amounts to the same thing now), to the insiderish perspective brought to the democratic process (knowing chat about party colleagues falling out rather than real political analysis), and to a supposedly admired style of aggressive interviewing (Paxman being the prime offender), which is little more than an extension of Oxbridge Union yobbishness.

Mills, a founder of the New Left Project, rightly categorises the BBC as an authoritarian, top-down, diary-driven organisation, where the murmured wishes of a director-general have an odd habit of appearing on air a day or week or month later. He points to the corporation’s ongoing closeness to the security services; that goes back as far as the thoughtful Hilda Matheson, who had been an MI5 officer, and never really stopped, and comes up to date with privileged briefings for the likes of “security correspondent” Frank Gardner, a former soldier and son of diplomats.

The BBC remains a deeply contradictory organisation: publicly licensed but driven by the perverse “business” model of Producer Choice, which, of course, was anything but business-like in any meaningful sense; autonomous, but not really; committed to objectivity, but only a particular angle of objectivity; more obsessively secret in its undertakings than some of the obscurer departments of Whitehall. There was a time, during its social-democratic period when, as Mills allows, a close relationship with the establishment could still be squared with public service and, though Mills doesn’t make this explicit, a balancing of centre and periphery in a manner which has been lost to the suzerainty of “Nations and Regions”. The BBC’s current world-view is a sorry mix of Foggy Bottom (where the US Department of State hangs out) and “soggy bottom”. Its news services behave as if labour relations and trade union issues belong to some flat-earth past and as if the tactical hypocrisies and treacheries of government ministers and the blandly examined balance sheets of large companies are more important to the audience than real political or cultural analysis. The one thing audience groups put below business on their focus group forms was celebrity chatter; the BBC managed to reduce the most important American presidential election in 50 years to just that.

Mills sums up a tough, sometimes relentless book in a few lines: “The central problem with the BBC throughout its history has been the extent to which powerful interests have been able to influence its institutional culture and its output”. Whatever the corporation’s fate and future, that should be the first point addressed.