The BBC: A People’s History by David Hendy

Author:David Hendy [Hendy, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2021-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

For Reed it was a personal tragedy. But he wondered if the affair also marked the end of an era of innocence in British television.

The medium had grown into early adulthood under the aegis of the BBC. And it had done so largely because, for over a decade, programmes had been ‘made-in-the-making’, as Wheldon put it. An idea would emerge and no one could be sure it worked until it had been broadcast. Afterwards, it would be criticised internally – roughed up, perhaps by Cecil McGivern or Grace Wyndham Goldie over a glass of whisky. The reactions of the public and the newspaper critics would be debated. It might be changed in the light of everything. Then, finally, another edition would be broadcast, beginning the whole process again. In other words, making television, like making radio, had been an evolutionary process in which success was built on a tolerance of failure.

The arrival of commercial competition had not entirely crushed this working culture. Indeed, given the legal requirement placed on ITV to educate and inform its audiences, as well as entertain them, there were plenty of observers who reckoned that the old monopoly was simply evolving into a new, and equally cosy, public service duopoly. Even so, market forces were beginning to percolate through the ecosystem. And Richard Hoggart was surely right to warn in 1957 of a future in which their distorting effect could weaken any lingering belief in cultural ‘uplift’. There was, he warned, but the shortest of steps between providing what the public wanted and over-providing what the public wanted. There would be a struggle, he warned, ‘to ignore the myriad voices of the trivial and synthetic sirens’.69

In BBC Television itself, a profound generational shift was also well underway: a rush of new people, new ideas, new programmes. But as Owen Reed knew only too well, there were losses, too. One of the Corporation’s most experienced figures, Harman Grisewood, referred with sadness to the inexorable rise of ‘Good Television’, in which ‘what was attractive on the screen should have a place there regardless of other considerations’.70 The leading lights of BBC Television were now brimming with confidence, ruthless in defending their craft, keen not just to take on the commercial opposition but to challenge the BBC’s ancient traditions. Television had well and truly ceased to be a cottage industry. Whether its new, tough-minded professionalism would help it adhere to Reithian principles of public service in the turbulent decade to come was far less certain.

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