London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War

"Yes, Webb’s book really focuses on the period between the end of World War II and 1956, when the dual shocks of the Hungarian Uprising and the Suez Crisis took place. I’d recommend it as a good read if you are interested in the high politics of British broadcasting, but as you read it, I’d urge you continually to pinch yourself. The book reveals the uninterrogated or unspoken assumptions that underpinned the working relationship between the BBC and the government. At the time, people accepted it as perfectly natural that there should be an extremely close link between civil servants and broadcasters: they inhabited a common world of shared assumptions and beliefs and everyday cooperation. I think if you read some histories of the BBC, particularly official histories, you can come away with a heroic interpretation of the BBC, nobly standing up for its independence against attempts by civil servants to tell it what to do. Sometimes, for example during the Suez Crisis, they did indeed resist. But on a day-to-day basis, for most of the time, the BBC worked very closely with the government in the field of international broadcasting. And people didn’t question that. As you read Webb’s book, you can slip into thinking that all this was perfectly natural and fine. However, it would be helpful to think more critically about what it means that the British national broadcaster was working with the government every day on such a close, direct basis of collaboration for so much of its history. The obvious comparator would be the United States and the approach there was somewhat different. On the one hand, the US operated the Voice of America, which since World War II has been clearly state-sponsored, effectively a state-run international broadcaster. But the Americans also established stations like Radio Free Europe, which broadcast across the Iron Curtain from Germany. For the first 20 or so years of its existence, Radio Free Europe was supposedly funded by private donations from American citizens who were concerned about the spread of communism. It was supposedly independent, part of a great private crusade against communism. However, it was then revealed in the late 1960s that the whole operation was funded by the CIA. This was potentially a disaster, compromising the station. However, in many ways, it just confirmed what many people had suspected all along, and Radio Free Europe weathered the storm and continues to operate to this day, with direct funding from the US government. It continued to do its job in probably much the way that the BBC did. I would be surprised if any international broadcaster anywhere in the world has ever been as independent as the BBC claimed it was. One insight into this comes from some of my own earlier research on how the Canadians and Australians set up their own international broadcasting services. They sent people over to Britain after the war to examine how the BBC did it, and they reported back to their governments in glowing terms, saying that the BBC got its money from the British government but was totally independent. Officials in Canada and Australia did not believe a word of it. It’s a centenary volume, and I was aware as I wrote it that there’s going to be a lot of celebration of the BBC in 2022. I wanted to make sure that it was critical and analytical, not just a record of the BBC’s many achievements, but also a discussion of its key failings. I emphasise in the book that we shouldn’t mistake endurance for continuity. Just because the BBC has survived for a hundred years, it doesn’t mean that it is the same thing now as it was a century ago, or even ten or twenty years ago. To overcome the many challenges it has faced, the BBC has been obliged continually to transform itself. So I trace the changing nature of the BBC over time, how it has been organised, what it does, the programmes that it produces. I show how these transformations have been driven by the BBC’s deep-rooted institutional desire, since the 1920s, to expand and to survive. One of the questions I kept asking myself as I was finishing writing the book—and particularly as I was considering the last two decades and the most recent debates about the future of the BBC—was whether the BBC that we think exists, still actually exists anymore. When we think about the BBC, we tend to think about the public Corporation, existing by virtue of a royal charter and funded by the television licence fee. However, in many ways, the public Corporation and the licence fee have become less important as the BBC has progressively commercialized itself and outsourced a lot of things it once did to other companies and to freelancers. In effect, the Corporation now makes news and sports programmes for itself, but commissions much of its other content from commercial companies. Much of what we watch on BBC television and (to a somewhat lesser extent) what we listen to on BBC radio is not made by the BBC. Indeed, recently the Corporation founded a wholly-owned subsidiary called BBC Studios and put almost all of its production facilities into this commercial company. BBC Studios makes programmes for the BBC, but also for a wide range of other providers, including some of the US-based streaming services. This is more than an accountant’s trick: it is, I think, a way of ensuring that something of the BBC survives if and when the licence fee is abolished. What I argue in the book is that this is but the most recent in a series of transformations that have reshaped the BBC again and again across its history. I think we can expect further transformations in the decade ahead, particularly as terrestrial broadcasting becomes a ‘legacy’ medium, and as we move into a post-broadcasting media landscape."