Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting

"Michele Hilmes’s book gets to grips with some of the basic justifications for the existence of the BBC, but in quite an unusual way. Right from the beginning, supporters of the BBC have argued that we need a powerful public broadcaster to act as a bulwark against the flood of imported American culture. The BBC would use its dominant position in the media landscape to produce British content, cater to the interests and requirements of British audiences, and promote British national identity and culture at home and overseas. Of course, the BBC could not keep America off the British airwaves entirely. Its aim was instead carefully to curate the flow of American culture into Britain broadcasting. During World War II, for example, to support the idea of an Anglo-American alliance and to cater to the needs of US servicemen stationed in Britain, there had to be a lot of American programming and many performances by American artists on British radio. But as soon as the war finished—indeed even before it finished—the Director-General was telling schedulers to cut back on American and American-inspired programmes, and to increase content from Britain and its empire and from Europe. This idea about limiting and curating American culture remains central to how the BBC justifies its continued existence today. A key part of the BBC’s pitch is the claim that only a big, publicly-funded national broadcaster can provide enough original British content to counterbalance Netflix, Amazon, and the other global streaming giants, which are bringing to British screens huge amounts of American culture. Hilmes looks at the debates and arguments about these issues from the 1930s to the 1960s and, more subtly, at the interplay between British and American broadcasting. She shows that while the BBC was seeking to limit the influx of American culture, it was also carefully watching what the Americans were doing and learning from US broadcasters. The big American networks were doing exactly the same thing: claiming that they were about free enterprise and giving American audiences the entertainment that they wanted by avoiding the paternalistic approach of the publicly-funded BBC, while at the same time monitoring and selectively copying the BBC. Hilmes traces this transatlantic interplay and finishes up by looking at the close links between the BBC and the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) . Learning from American broadcasting was particularly important from the 1960s onwards, when the BBC really tried to compete with ITV. Commercial television ended the BBC’s monopoly of British broadcasting. The BBC knew it had to entertain viewers if they were to be lured away from commercial television, so it began to employ American techniques, formats, and imported programmes to provide a more attractive offering. The monopoly in radio lasted longer than the one in television – unauthorised pirate radio stations started to make inroads into the BBC’s monopoly in the 1960s. The BBC and the British government cracked down on the pirates, but they knew the game was up. Radio 1 was founded in 1967 to head off further challenges by providing plenty of pop and rock music, aimed at a young audience, and Radio 2, Radio 3, and Radio 4 were created at the same time to serve various other groups of listeners. Legal commercial radio broadcasting started in Britain in 1973. The monopoly in television lasted until 1954. The BBC had started a regular television service towards the end of 1936, but only for viewers in London, and hardly anybody at the time could afford a television set. There were probably only a few thousand viewers, and the BBC decided to shut down the television service during World War II to focus resources on radio. After the war, the American networks threw a lot of resources into the rapid development of television, but the BBC hesitated. It continued to prioritise radio. This was partly because of post-war austerity: it had limited resources, and few families could afford television sets, so it made sense to focus its activities on radio, which almost everyone could access. More generally, many senior BBC executives continued to look down their noses at television as a medium: they thought it was demotic, vulgar, crass and American. They were much more interested in the Third Programme, for example, a new radio service that the BBC had established after the war and which focused on classical music, talks by intellectuals, and high culture (it eventually became Radio 3). For the BBC after the war, the Third Programme seemed a higher priority than the television service. This was a serious mistake. By the early 1950s, as austerity eased, the BBC’s approach to television seemed much too timid. Churchill’s government announced that commercial television would be introduced to give viewers a better service, and also to open up opportunities for advertisers. By 1954, ITV was up and running, and the BBC’s monopoly was over. I think BBC managers were always aware that it was a potential vulnerability. The monopoly always had to be defended and justified. Even after the end of the monopoly, they knew that they faced criticism due to the powerful position that the BBC occupied in the British media landscape, subsidised by the licence fee. The debates we are having today about this are nothing new: right from the 1920s onwards, critics of the BBC argued that it was a source of unfair competition, distorting the market mechanism and denying opportunities to would-be commercial broadcasters. Initially, the BBC tried to justify its monopoly by arguing that it provided a universal service to everyone. Commercial broadcasters, it claimed, would just have focused on the most profitable areas of the country, the big cities, leaving everyone else without radio. The BBC thus prioritised setting up a national network of transmitters, so that everybody in the country would be able to pick up its service. It did this really successfully. Later in the 1920s, it also tried to justify its monopoly by claiming that it was providing programmes of the highest possible standard, including plenty of classical music, opera, and talks by leading academics and public figures, mostly taken from London. This approach was much less successful: many listeners resented a boring diet of high culture, and some also disliked the imposition of London perspectives and attitudes. They wanted radio to reflect and serve the places they lived in. During the early 1930s, the BBC faced an early form of attack from pirate radio stations, operating in continental Europe and including stations like Radio Luxembourg. Many British listeners started to turn to these stations, particularly on Sundays, when the BBC provided a notoriously sombre schedule of programmes. On Sundays, the BBC did not start broadcasting until the afternoon and even then offered only religious music, religious services, and sombre talks. Radio Luxembourg meanwhile played dance music and other programmes in English, all sponsored by the British companies who weren’t allowed to advertise on radio because the BBC was non-commercial and had a monopoly. Advertising agencies in London took contracts from British advertisers, recorded programmes in England—including some of the most famous British stars of the day—and then shipped them over to Luxembourg to be broadcast back to Britain. In the end, the BBC had to start providing more entertaining programming to win listeners back, because it knew that if it did not, it would eventually lose its monopoly."