The BBC: A Century on Air

by David Hendy

A poll of men and women listed in Who’s Who once found that the Corporation was regarded as more influential than Parliament or the Church of England. Although not actually a government-run broadcaster, it is a body so clearly aligned with the ‘Nation’ that it often feels to us like an organ of state, as if it were a creative arm of the civil service. It exists by Royal Charter, and the licence fee that funds it is set by ministers in Parliament. If nuclear war begins, the last voice of authority we will hear before Armageddon arrives is a Radio 4 announcer.

For Reith, the most profound revelation of all when he began his new job at the British Broadcasting Company was the complete lack of direction from above. ‘There were’, he explained, ‘no sealed orders to open.’ This simple fact had one profound and immediate consequence, as far as he was concerned. ‘Almost everything depended upon the personality of those to whom, almost by chance, this service had been committed.’56 Their beliefs, their prejudices, their fears, their hopes – the whole crooked timber of their humanity: twisted together, this made up the DNA of the BBC. It was to be an organisation bearing the traces of thinking, feeling, complicated individuals – an organisation shaped in their image. But Cecil Lewis, John Reith and Arthur Burrows were not alone for long. They would soon be joined by dozens, then hundreds, of others – and the BBC would be shaped in the image of these men and women, too.

The next day the reporter from the Times described an experience that sounded more like a Victorian magic lantern display than the birth of a modern new medium. Staring at the ghostly, juddering image, he said he had felt as though he were ‘prying through a keyhole at some swaying, dazzling exhibition of the first film ever made’. The reporter from the Observer was a little more prescient. ‘Like the squeakings of the first phonograph and the flickerings of the first moving-pictures,’ he wrote, ‘the beginnings of Television must not be judged by actual performance; they must rather be regarded as signs and portents of marvels yet to come.’ The only truly damning response to the broadcast came in a letter to Sieveking from his old wartime friend, Hugh Kingsmill Lunn. ‘How sinister it all looks’, Lunn told him. ‘Don’t let the science go too far, I beg you… People will soon be carrying some bloody little gadget which will enable them to pick out any absent friend and see exactly what he or she is doing. Stop it, while there’s yet time, please.’

He framed Dunkirk as a ‘miserable blunder’ that had ended as an ‘epic of gallantry’ and contrasted the soulless efficiency of the German war machine with the plucky British, who had improvised their way to safety with hundreds of small boats sailing into ‘the inferno, to defy bombs, shells, magnetic mines, torpedoes, machine-gun fire’. ‘And our great-grandchildren,’ he concluded, ‘when they learn how we began this War by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.’ Churchill’s response to Dunkirk had been to ask the nation to carry on and make ever greater effort. Priestley’s broadcast recognised the sacrifices already made; it saw reasons for hope, even celebration, describing things not only as they were but as they might be. Above all, it forged allegory from the everyday. That flotilla of little ships symbolised the coming together of ordinary British citizens. It pushed what Priestley called ‘the official and important personages’ into the background and put ‘the people’ – their ‘spirit… sense, courage and endurance’ – centre stage.

It was an audacious approach. Behind the scenes at the BBC, Attenborough had to face down complaints that ‘green slime is not the way to start off a big series’. Yet the gamble paid off, not least because the opening episodes featured images of such startling close-up intimacy that even some of the world’s tiniest creatures kept everyone glued to their sets. In the penultimate episode, viewers witnessed the most extraordinary sequence of all. The idea, Attenborough explained, had been for him to be filmed on a Rwandan mountainside explaining the evolution of the opposable thumb while gorillas moved about some distance away. It did not quite work out as planned: I turned round to talk to the camera to give this thumb-and-forefinger story when I felt a weight lying by my feet and I looked down – and there were two baby gorillas undoing my shoelaces. Well, I couldn’t really talk about the thumb-and-forefinger while that was going on, so I stopped… and then I felt a tap on my shoulder and I turned round and there was a huge female gorilla and she put her hand on me and put her hand on my head and turned round and looked at my face. And this went on for, it seemed to me, an age. And it was paradise – it was such a privileged delight. I couldn’t believe it was possible. And eventually they left, and I crawled back.

After just two episodes of the series the Observer’s television critic Clive James declared himself ‘slack-jawed with wonder and respect’: ‘you practically need a seat-belt, the aesthetic effect is so stunning.’ By the end, he admitted to having been ‘distracted only by envy of my own children, for whom knowledge was being brought alive in a way that never happened for my generation or indeed for any previous generation in all of history’.