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overview
This page looks at the British Broadcasting Corporation,
public sector broadcasting in the UK.
It covers -
introduction
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the United
Kingdom's public sector broadcaster, operating on a not-for-profit
basis.
It is active in radio and television broadcasting and
associated audio-video and 'new media' production. It
has a small print publishing arm, is responsible for orchestras
and has expanded into retail merchandising. It has been
lauded as a domestic and global representation of British
'national identity' (albeit for most of its history that
identity was strongly weighted towards particular classes
in Southern England at the expense of the North, Wales,
Scotland or Ulster) and as a model for non-commercial
broadcasting in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other
former UK colonies.
Like other public sector broadcasters it has struggled
over the past thirty years with uncertainties about its
mission, questions about its legitimacy and difficulties
with management in an era when expectations about performance
are higher than available resources.
The Corporation is formally an independent public sector
(and state funded) body under the control of a board of
Governors. The Governors have typically been members of
what Noel Annan characterised as "the great and good",
appointed by the Queen on the Prime Minister's nomination
for a term of four years (formerly five years).
The major source of funding is licence fees on receivers,
along with government subventions for overseas broadcasting
activity and revenue from marketing of BBC audio, video
and other output to partners such as the US PBS
and Australia's ABC.
evolution
The
BBC traces its origins to the British Broadcasting Company,
a commercial entity established in 1922 by a UK electrotechnical
industry consortium that included Marconi, Metropolitan
Vickers, GEC, British Thomson Houston, Western Electric
and the Radio Communication Company.
Establishment
reflected pressure from those manufacturers to sell (and
maintain) receivers and transmitters, rather than to generate
significant revenue from the new medium. It also reflected
the desire of the Post Office, the government agency responsible
for telecommunications regulation, to establish a coherent
broadcasting landscape after an outbreak of 'experimental'
stations under the auspices of major commercial interests.
The
new company was to develop a national network of radio
transmitters as the basis for a UK-wide broadcasting service.
Initial stations were located in London, Manchester and
Birmingham (ie the main population centres in England).
Debate about its operation, objectives and funding saw
it replaced by the Corporation in 1927, under the leadership
of Director-General John Reith (1889-1971), who boasted
that the organisation "has never attempted to give
the public what it wants. It gives it what it ought to
have". Reith departed in 1938, subsequently serving
as CEO of British Imperial Airways and British Overseas
Airways Corporation and in the wartime Cabinet.
It
has been fashionable to characterise much of the organisation's
history as grappling with his vision of public sector
broadcasting. However, the persistence of that vision
suggests that it is attributable to a consensus among
key sectors of English society rather than merely the
force of Reith's personality.
Reith's
vision had five elements -
- service
to the whole nation (including reinforcement of a strong
national identity)
- a
consequent protection from commercial and narrowly political
pressures
- unified
control by ostensibly apolitical guardians, underpinned
by the organisation's monopoly on broadcasting
- 'high
programme standards', identified and administered by
a cultural elite
- embodiment
of particular cultural values (eg an emphasis on the
pastoral in a nation of city-dwellers, the diction of
early announcers on BBC radio, avoidance of 'unseemly'
violence and sexual content in overt contrast to US
commercial broadcasters up to the 1960s)
Under Reith it quickly became a bastion of the 'Establishment',
embracing The Listener and other publications,
the BBC Orchestra (established 1930) and an Empire (later
Overseas) Service.
Its
Home Service (initially the National Programme) and World
Service (inaugurated as the Empire Service in 1932 and
later rebadged as the General Overseas Service) networks
were supplemented from the late 1940s by the Light Programme
and the Third Programme. Contemporary music broadcasting
on BBC Radio 1 was launched in 1967 (in response to commercial
pirate radio stations), with the networks being renamed
at that time. BBC Radio 5 (later renamed BBC Radio Five
Live) was launched in 1990.
BBC television service commenced in 1936 following experimental
transmissions from 1932 onwards. Receivers at that time
cost the equivalent of a small car, in an era of considerable
unemployment. Transmissions ceased in 1939 and resumed
in 1946. The BBC Television Service was renamed BBC ONE
in 1964, with the launch of BBC TWO (offering more niche
programming).
The
organisation faced competition from 1955, with introduction
of commercial television in that year (the Independent
Television Network (ITN)) followed by introduction of
independent radio in 1973 after abandonment of the radio
receiver licencing fee.
In June 2005 the BBC announced a contract to sell BBC
Broadcast (its channel management and creative services
arm) to an investment group led by Australia's Macquarie
Bank for £166 million. BBC Broadcast provided promotion,
playout and publication services for the BBC across multiple
platforms that included television and mobile phones.
It was renamed Creative Broadcast Services.
A chronology of the BBC is here.
structure
An indication of the BBC networks is here.
studies
Asa Briggs' five volume The History of Broadcasting
in the United Kingdom (London: Oxford Uni Press 1961-86)
is an establishment history on the model of the worthy,
irreplaceable but often stupefying official war histories
that have disappeared into the remoter stacks of university
libraries.
Colin McCabe's The BBC & Public Service Broadcasting
(Manchester, Manchester Uni Press 1986) is more independent,
as is Paddy Scannell's A Social History of British
Broadcasting: Vol 1, 1922-39 (Oxford: Blackwell 1991)
and William McDowell's The History of BBC Broadcasting
in Scotland, 1923-1983 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni Press
1991). For Northern Ireland see Rex Cathcart's The
Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland 1924-1984
(Belfast: Blackstaff 1984). Andrew Crisell's An Introductory
History of British Broadcasting (London: Routledge
2002), David Elstein's 2001 lecture
The Changing Role of Public Sector Broadcasting
and comment
Neither history nor mystery but reality and Sean
Street's Crossing the Ether: British Public Service
Radio and Commercial Competition, 1922-1945 (Eastleigh:
John Libbey 2006) offer other insights.
John Reith - master of the British Broadcasting Commission
and Imperial Airways, High Commissioner to the Church
of Scotland, self-lacerating calvinist in love with power,
pomp and engineer Charlie Bower - was the subject of biographies
by the acidulous Andrew Boyle in Only the Wind Will
Listen (London: Hutchinson 1972) and the gentler Ian
McIntyre in The Expense of Glory (London: HarperCollins
1993).
Boyle was responsible for Poor Dear Brendan (London:
Hutchinson 1974) on 'bounder', supposed Churchill love-child
and Financial Times publisher Brendan Bracken,
more perceptively analysed in the spritzy Eminent Churchillians
by Andrew Roberts. The Reith Diaries (London: Collins
1975) edited by Charles Stuart are a long howl of pain
over - rightly, we think - disappointed ambition. His
vision is encapsulated in Broadcast Over Britain
(London: Hodder & Stoughton 1924), a contrast to the
2005 Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a
Digital World (PDF)
Hugh Greene, brother of the nasty novelist, provided an
anaemic account of his term at the BBC's helm in The
Third Floor Front: A View of Broadcasting in the 60s
(London: Bodley Head 1969), in contrast to Marmaduke Hussey's
Chance Governs All (London: Macmillan 2001) and
Citizen Greg: The Extraordinary Story of Greg Dyke
and How He Captured the BBC (New York: Simon & Schuster
2000) by Chris Horrie & Steve Clarke. Michael Leapman's
Last Days of the Beeb (London: Coronet 1987) complements
Alasdair Milne's DG: Memoirs of a British Broadcaster
(London: Hodder 1988). Humphrey Carpenter's The Envy
of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and
Radio 3, 1946-96 (London: Phoenix 1997) is serviceable.
For Radio 4 see David Hendy's Life on Air: A History
of Radio Four (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2007) and
Simon Elmes' And Now on Radio 4 (New York: Random
House 2007).
Michael Tracey's Decline and Fall of Public Service
Broadcasting (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1998) and
Eva Etzioni-Halevy's National Broadcasting Under Siege:
A Comparative Study of Australia, Britain, Israel &
West Germany (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1987) consider
public sector broadcasting in the UK, Japan, Germany and
other countries. Lucy Shankleman's Inside the BBC &
CNN: Managing Media Organisations (London: Routledge
2000) is a study of corporate cultures, all very upbeat.
There is a different tempo in Jennifer Doctor's The
BBC & UltraModern Music, 1922-36 (Cambridge: Cambridge
Uni Press 1999) - essential reading if you're into musicology,
otherwise not - and in Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke
and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Vintage 2005)
by Georgina Born or Can We Trust the BBC? (London:
Continuum 2007) by Robin Aitken.
Tom Hickman's celebratory What Did You Do In The War,
Auntie? The BBC At War 1939-45 (London: BBC 1996)
should be read in conjunction with Sian Nicholas' The
Echo Of War: Home Front Propaganda & The Wartime BBC
(New York: St Martins 1996) and Gary Rawnsley's Radio
Diplomacy & Propaganda: The BBC & VOA in International
Politics 1956-64 (New York: St Martins 1996). The
latter is complemented by Jackie Harrison's lucid Terrestrial
TV News in Britain: The Culture of Production (Manchester:
Manchester Uni Press 2000)
other state networks
There are separate profiles on
ABC and SBS - Australia
TVNZ & RNZ - New Zealand
CBC - Canada
MCS - Singapore
NHK - Japan
PBS - USA
the licence fee
In contrast to Australia, where the ABC is funded through
a grant by the national government and sales from products,
the BBC is dependent on the licence fee.
The fee was introduced under the Wireless Telegraphy
Act in 1923, with an annual charge of 10 shillings.
Labourers at that time were earning around £2 12s
per week. By the end of 1923 some 200,000 licences had
been issued, rising to 2.5 million by 1928. A combined
radio and television licence, costing £2, was first
issued in 1946. Revenue collection initially involved
the Post Office. Enforcement arrangements featured official
detector vans cruising suburban streets checking for unlicensed
devices.
Licensing of radios, including car radios, was abandoned
in 1971. In 1990, under the Broadcasting Act 1990,
the BBC was made responsible for licence administration.
In 2004 there were 24.5m licences in force, with estimates
that around 5% of UK sets were unlicensed. The annual
fee for a colour tv licence was £126.50 per household
(half-price for those who are registered as blind), with
a licence for a monochrome receiver costing £42.
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