Carry on broadcasting

By some strange, freakish coincidence, just as the biggest story to hit the BBC in recent years was about to cut through the airwaves on Saturday night, Radio 4 was discussing the question, Who’s Reithian Now? It was as if, by some act of God, Lord Reith, the corporation’s creator, was speaking to us direct from the upper ether (or maybe the lower furnace?) and reminding us of why the BBC was set up as a licence-funded organisation in 1927, and what it is supposed to do in a crisis: carry on broadcasting.

The Archive on 4 programme (produced by Karen Pirie for the independent company Whistledown Productions) replayed clips of Reith himself, proudly boasting that when he was director-general he used to read, and approve, every news bulletin before it went out on air. He also ‘hand-picked’ all his staff, most particularly checking out ‘their hobbies’. Anything suspect might, according to Reith, ‘affect the intellectual content of the programmes’, or lead to programmes that were less than the best. Above all, he was fascinated by the notion that ideas generated in a studio run by engineers could somehow travel into ‘the infinities of ether’, and he understood the power, and the responsibility, this engendered.

Reith, we can be sure, would have withstood, like an ageing warrior, the constant attempts by the government to limit the BBC’s powers. He would also have known how to take his corporation into the digital age. Not because he was a great man (he was riddled with personal flaws) but because he was inspirational, urging those over whom he was boss to work to the best of their abilities in the cause of something that was greater than them: public broadcasting.