This New Noise (18 page)

Radios Normandie and Luxembourg were the ancestors of the buccaneering offshore ‘pirate' stations such as Caroline and London – training grounds of figures such
as Kenny Everett, Dave Lee Travis and John Peel, in the early 1960s providing the musical education of many a young listener for whom the BBC's Light Programme was an irrelevance. In 1967 the pirates were effectively outlawed by the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, and Radio 1 created as a nationalised pop station employing many of the former offshore DJs.

That same year, and as a result of the recommendations of the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting of 1962, BBC local radio was also established. It was intended, wrote Frank Gillard, then the corporation's director of sound broadcasting, as ‘a running serial story of local life in all its aspects … the relationship between local radio station and local paper would not be one of competition' (a claim that has long been disputed, especially in the current era of depletion of the local press). The third local station to start broadcasting, on 14 March 1968, was Radio Stoke. One of the voices first heard was that of John Snagge, who had broadcast for the 1920s relay station 6ST, Radio Stoke's ancestor. He began: ‘This is BBC Radio Stoke-on-Trent. We must apologise to listeners for the break in transmission which occurred at twelve o'clock midnight, on October 30th, 1928. This was due to circumstances beyond our control. Normal transmission has now been resumed.'

Radio Stoke was four years old when I was born, and it broadcast into the neighbourhood where I grew up. I spent a day in the station in the spring of 2014. In the years that separated that visit from my childhood, Stoke had transformed completely: when I was young it was a
landscape of pottery factories and mines, but, though some manufacturing remained, it was much diminished. But Radio Stoke was still there, vying for listeners with the local independent station, Signal. In the 10.10 a.m. news meeting (only one woman present), the stories were of the potential impact of the high-speed rail link HS2; of the possibility of fracking in the county; and of the extraction of methane gas (the last a remnant of the long-gone mining industry). A hugely important, long-running story had concerned the poor care and high mortality rate at Stafford Hospital in the south of the county, which had led to a public inquiry and the dissolution of the trust that ran it. Someone talked about the compulsory purchase of a city-centre pub for development; another of cars parked on pavements, causing problems for disabled people and those with young children.

Later, I spoke to Ajmal Hussain, who presented a show on the station: he told me about trying to present a nuanced picture of the sizeable local Asian community. ‘They just really want an honest view of themselves without the conversation automatically turning to grooming, to forced marriages, to terrorism, which is where it tends to go to,' he said. Terry Goodwin, the station's news editor, spoke to me of the importance of reflecting back to itself ‘a place that it doesn't feel like it's very well loved from the outside. That's the thing that Radio Stoke does: it really cares about the city and it cares about the area, which, let's be honest, a lot of the country doesn't.'

In Scotland, I had found that one did not have to talk to many people about the BBC before hearing a note of exasperation. There was clearly a great deal of passionate love for the BBC – enough for the Scottish National Party's white paper on independence to have felt the need to reassure voters that ‘programmes like
EastEnders, Doctor Who,
and
Strictly Come Dancing
, and channels like CBeebies will still be available in Scotland'. But people both within and beyond the BBC spoke to me – off the record, in the sensitive period running up to the referendum – of decades-long frustration, despite a number of concerted efforts by the BBC to improve, in its news coverage, its feeling for national difference. Scots told me of waking up to headlines on nurses' pay – except in Scotland it was different. Of teachers strikes ‘across the country' – except in Scotland it was different. Of legal matters, of the NHS, of cigarette packaging, of school examination results, of local elections. Except in Scotland it was different. The inverse was also true: serious events in Scotland were, it was felt, under-represented on the national bulletins.

As far back as 1944, a pamphlet, published in the run-up to a charter renewal by the Saltire Society, urged that ‘revenue from Scottish licence fees' should be ‘spent in Scotland', and demanded the development of an ‘enlightened and stimulating Scottish Broadcasting Service … What we have aimed at is best described, perhaps, as a Broadcasting Service with frequent international contacts, initiated from Scotland and designed to meet the needs and wishes of Scottish listeners.' Not a million miles
away from what was being proposed by the Yes campaign in 2014.

A sense of dislocation between Scottish listeners and the BBC was only increased when the nation gained a devolved parliament in 1998. With colleagues, the then head of BBC Scotland, John McCormick, devised the notion of a Scottish six o'clock TV news bulletin. It would run for an hour, replacing the regional bulletin,
Reporting Scotland,
which started at 6.30 p.m. In Queen Margaret Drive, the old Glasgow HQ, it didn't feel like an especially radical move: after all, the nation had its own news bulletins on BBC Radio Scotland. And there would be a fresh news agenda provided by Holyrood. There would be some tweaks to the running order and a consolidation of news concerning Scotland. Viewers had found it irritatingly repetitive, for example, when a Scottish story that had been low down the running order in the British bulletin was the lead five minutes later on
Reporting Scotland.
The notion was to keep the 1 p.m. and 9 p.m. programmes untouched: the 6 p.m. had always been weighted towards domestic news.

The Broadcasting Council for Scotland, which provided audience feedback from the nation to the governors, and the impeccably establishment Norman Drummond, a Church of Scotland minister and the BBC governor for Scotland, were strongly in favour of the idea. The governors as a whole were divided, with the chair, Sir Christopher Bland, keeping his cards close to his chest. The director Sir Richard Eyre, then a governor, was pro. He recalled, ‘[The DG] John Birt's thesis was that the BBC was
a crucial binding agent in making Great Britain great. My view – I'd lived in Scotland for six years – was that it was the opposite. I think it's incredibly divisive and you only have to spend a bit of time in Scotland to realise that the BBC is regarded as English broadcasting and those feelings run very, very deep. I said you could achieve a very clever piece of politics by enfranchising a Scottish news at six.'

Birt was utterly opposed to the Scottish Six. In
The Harder Path,
he described the episode as ‘a bitter battle to prevent the BBC being split apart by the fissiparous forces of devolution'. The Scottish Six risked the unity of the BBC, and in turn of Britain itself. The Six would be the thin end of the wedge:

Talking to a BBC employee who had been connected with the process at the time, it was clear how frustrating this
reasoning had been: Birt, with his perhaps rather literal turn of mind, was convinced that the other bulletins would follow the Six into Scottish oblivion – but, I was told, just because there was a certain logic to his prediction, did not mean that it would actually happen, or that anyone particularly wanted it to happen.

Arguments were spat forth over October and November 1998. There was horror when a document on news strategy was published – with no mention of a potential Scottish Six – before the governors had taken their decision. It looked like a stitch-up, a fait accompli. The splash in the
Daily Record
for 26 November 1998 read: ‘Wanted: for the cold-blooded murder of Scotland's own news programme.' There were mugshots of the BBC executives concerned – including that of Tony Hall, now the director general, then the head of news.

Only later, courtesy of his memoir, did it emerge that Birt had made a direct approach to the prime minister, Tony Blair, to keep the powerful cohort of Scottish Labour MPs on side. A Scottish Six would ‘encourage separatist tendencies', Birt argued. Blair agreed, and asked Peter Mandelson to marshal Labour's forces; later James Purnell, then an adviser at Number 10, who later returned to the BBC as director of strategy and digital, took on the task. A decade and a half later, Birt's appeal to the government still hurt and bewildered those who were involved in the Scottish Six plans – BBC loyalists whose intention was not to threaten the institution but to improve its service for its audience.

Bland, at the time pleading compromise, sounded implacable on the argument when I spoke to him before the
Scottish referendum, in early 2014. ‘The idea that there's a Scottish view of the war in Kosovo or the Afghanistan war is just nonsense,' he said. ‘It would be hugely expensive, totally pointless and just satisfying a foolish wish for a tartan-badged news.' The ideas for an SBS were fanciful, he thought. ‘If there were genuinely to be a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation with a Scottish licence fee and Scottish audience, it would be strapped for cash and talent. The Scots benefit, as do the Welsh and the Northern Irish, as do we all, from a unified and strong organisation because of the importance of scale. You can't afford four separate newsrooms. You just can't.' Birt also entered the fray before the referendum: writing for the
Guardian
, he warned of a Yes vote resulting in a diminished BBC for the rump of the UK and a small, enfeebled Scottish Broadcasting Service. Scottish viewers would end up having to pay to see BBC programmes, whether by subscribing to channels or by the SBS's buying in shows. ‘Whatever is asserted wishfully in the white paper, the BBC will have no alternative but to act in the interests of its licence payers and to seek the best possible commercial terms for the sale of its programmes in Scotland, not least because of the financial impoverishment it will just have suffered. And, of course, there may be commercial broadcasters in a new Scotland willing to pay more for the BBC's most successful programmes than an impecunious SBS,' he wrote. It was all about scale, he argued: a Yes vote would result in Scots being unable to enjoy the possibility, open to them since the 1707–8 Act of Union, of making a ‘massive impact on a big stage'.

Needless to say, that was not the view of those behind the SNP's white paper on the future of Scotland. The SNP's vision was of a Scottish Broadcasting Service built on Scotland's share of the licence fee and a proportionate share of BBC Worldwide profits. Viewers would be better off than they had been hitherto because, according to the SNP's figures, they would have twice the income as the sum currently spent by the BBC in Scotland (£345 million a year as opposed to £175 million). Under a proposed joint venture with the BBC, Scottish audiences would continue to receive BBC channels and services in exchange for programming created in Scotland. The SBS would also create a new TV channel and radio network. The SNP was looking towards Germany, with its federalised, regional broadcasters; and Denmark, with its successful recent stint of international drama hits, with enthusiasm.

This negotiating position hung in the air: there was no sign that the BBC accepted the SNP's figures, or would be willing to embark on a joint venture, or would regard Scottish productions such as
River City
and
Shetland
as a fair ‘swap' for
EastEnders
and
Strictly Come Dancing.
Notions of precisely how a new national broadcaster would be constituted were only lightly sketched in. Independence from government, regulation and governance were unclear: there was no detailed blueprint. Meanwhile, staff at BBC Scotland were nervously awaiting their fates. The white paper stated that the SBS would be ‘initially' founded on the staff and assets of BBC Scotland.

On 18 September the voters decided, by a margin of 55 to 45 per cent, to remain in the Union – and, by extension,
to continue their relationship with the BBC. But, like the UK as a whole, the corporation still had choices to make in the wake of the existential debates that renewed and animated political discourse in Scotland. How the BBC responds in the long term is crucial – not just for the population of Scotland, but for everyone in the UK. Its actions will go beyond narrow questions of broadcasting policy and into the realms of nationhood and identity, of which the BBC is such a profoundly important carrier. In the future, the BBC will have to demonstrate that it can express multiple and interlocking identities through all parts of the UK with suppleness, sensitivity and understanding.

‘There were no sealed orders to open. The commission was of the scantiest nature. Very few knew what broadcasting meant; none knew what it might become.' So John Reith in 1924 recalled the previous eighteen months of his life as the general manager of the brand-new British Broadcasting Company. What Reith did recognise, instinctively and immediately, was the magnitude of his responsibility: ‘There was something big, even colossal, conveyed in the nature of the contract which had been undertaken.' Reith and his ‘bohemian flock' (as head of variety Eric Maschwitz described the band of early colleagues) were out to invent the future. Reith, that monstrous, tyrannical, tortured man, set his furious gaze at the new technological world of wireless telegraphy and saw that it could be, should be, placed in the service of society as a whole. The job was to ‘establish a certain number of broadcasting stations and transmit therefrom, at certain times, programmes composed of whatever a programme can be composed', he wrote, but he knew that was only the most mechanistic and banal way of describing the task and the opportunity. What Reith saw was that he had in his hands an instrument that could inform, educate and entertain not just the privileged – but everyone.

In 1922, only a handful of wireless pioneers actually owned sets (we might think of them as like the Internet
enthusiasts of the early 1990s, eccentric outriders in whose footsteps few realised we were all to follow). Peter Eckersley had yet to stud the landscape with the transmitters that would allow a BBC service to fan out to all parts of the UK. And yet Reith saw that broadcasting could one day have a number of extraordinary qualities. First, that the licence fee – often now characterised as an unpleasant piece of regressive taxation – was in fact a passport to equality. No one would be able to pay more and get a better BBC; there would be no first, second or third class. ‘The same music rings as sweetly in mansion as in cottage … There is nothing in it which is exclusive to those who pay more, or who are considered in one way or another more worthy of attention.' So wrote Reith in
Broadcast Over Britain.

Second, everyone would be able to access the BBC in private. Your tastes, your culture, your enthusiasms, your politics – all of these could be developed without the eye of anyone upon you. If you closed the door, no one, not the busybodies down the road, nor the religious authorities, nor the government could track what you were listening to. (It is no coincidence that, during the Third Reich, communal television viewing in
Fernsehstuben
, public ‘television parlours' was encouraged: private tastes and ideas are dangerous to a certain kind of regime.) ‘An event, be it speech, or music, or play, or ceremony is certainly broadcast for any and all to receive, but it seems to be personal to the individual hearer, and is brought to his very room,' wrote Reith of the simultaneously public and private quality of broadcasting.

Third, Reith was convinced that broadcasting, with this peculiar capability of reaching everyone, should also provide for everyone. Using the privilege brought by the income from the licence fee, it should serve the thinly scattered few as well as the many. ‘With us, “minorities” are very important sections of the community, and a “limited appeal” may still involve many hundreds of thousands,' he wrote.

In the 1920s, the BBC had no past, only a future. It had plenty of difficulties to negotiate – then as now, a hostile and protective press, a government to convince of its ideas, enormous practical and technical hurdles. But compared with the present time, when the BBC is both beloved institution and political and cultural battle ground, an organisation whose every movement is minutely examined and raked over, it was free: a start-up with an inventive young team, idealistic and experimental. Maschwitz recalled the company's first headquarters: ‘Savoy Hill was like a small, excited club whose members came in to work in the early morning and stayed on until Big Ben chimed midnight – for the good reason that there was always something interesting afoot.' The first chapter of
Broadcast Over Britain
is called ‘Uncharted Seas', and that was what there was: a vast and empty ocean of possibility. The first BBC director of programmes, Arthur Burrows, in
The Story of Broadcasting,
also published in 1924, used the same metaphor: ‘What lies ahead in that uncharted sea, the future? Broadcasting today, despite its appeal to the public imagination, is really only in the position of the prehistoric fisherman who put out a few hundred yards from
shore in his frail coracle or dug-out … We may be certain, therefore, that the work of the past few years … is but shallow-water fishing in relation to ocean navigation.' In those early days, it had the rickety sense of possibility and excitement that we might associate with a start-up today. Cecil Lewis was already nostalgic by 1924:

There is a quality of inventiveness, ingenuity and resourcefulness that has run through the BBC. That no engineer, digital or otherwise, now sits on the executive board, would have surprised Peter Eckersley – for him the BBC was as importantly an engineering company as a broadcaster, and he and his successors had the institutional clout to match. He himself foresaw multichannel cable TV (as well as air-conditioning and double-glazing) in 1941. ‘I have a dream about the future. I see the interior
of a living room. The wide windows are formed from double panes of glass, fixed and immovable. The conditioned air is fresh and warm … flush against the wall there is a translucent screen with numbered strips of lettering running across it … These are the titles describing the many different “broadcasting” programmes which can be heard by just pressing the corresponding button,' he wrote.

John Birt had a similar moment of vatic clarity, albeit over a shorter time frame, in his last speech as director general, in 1999. In years to come, he said:

It was a pretty accurate piece of prophecy bearing in mind that he was speaking six years before YouTube was activated in February 2005, and eight years before the release of the iPhone in June 2007 and the launch of iPlayer that December. In fact iPlayer was the product, so BBC folk
memory goes, of a drunken night out in 2003 after a digital worker got into trouble posting an inappropriate photograph of the model Katie Price on the BBC Three website. Requiring a redemptive idea to stave off disgrace, he and colleagues came up with the notion of a video -on-demand service for the channel. Four years and 86 internal meetings later, iPlayer was born. Such is the frequently unheroic nature of invention.

What are the ideas that will sustain the BBC in the years to come? Birt's vision of services customised for individuals is yet to be fully realised – but when we met, Tony Hall, the director general, told me it would be just round the corner. The BBC, as accessed through the web, would soon understand and reflect your innermost desires and delights, and will offer you more and more, across all its genres, based on your past preferences. Importantly, it would do this disinterestedly: it would not try to sell you other services, or pass on details of your private predilections to any third party. It was an intriguing conceptual change, since the BBC has always, hitherto, speculatively dangled offerings at us based not on the past, the history of our preferences, but rather on a sense of the sheer largeness and variety of the world: that was the old trick of the ‘hammock', whereby a skilled scheduler might sneak an unlikely but intriguing programme into the evening's line-up between two hits, and offer viewers something that no algorithm could ever predict.

The BBC would also connect you to others who share those interests, according to Hall, and would build communities of viewers digitally. We were talking in summer
2014, on the day of one of his weekly visits to programme-makers, near the set of
EastEnders
– that oddly unscruffy patch of London lovingly made at the BBC's studios in Elstree, in Hertfordshire. ‘It goes back to the licence-fee payers being our owners. There's a community around
Springwatch
of over 400,000 people and they are knowledgeable, and they care, and they're passionate,' he explained, by way of example. The BBC had had a long history of interactivity with its audiences, from the already hefty postbag of the 1920s and 1930s, to the letters pages of the
Radio Times
, vivid from the start, through to the message boards and blogs of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But, arguably, it had never quite settled on a consistent digital platform to suit its audiences, and some online communities – such as the Radio 3 and
Archers
message boards, whose contributors were often deeply critical of BBC policy – have been closed down by the BBC. In 2014, if you wanted to talk with others about programmes such as
The Great British Bake-off
or
The Archers
, Twitter was already established as the place to do it, along with popular live blogs. But the BBC was now tackling the notion of community with fresh vigour, ready to open a channel for direct, unmediated communication with audiences.

The BBC had traditionally been something of a fortress; you have been either within it or outside. Hall told me he was determined to change that. The corporation must and would become ‘porous', he said. Instead of the portcullis being shut the BBC would, in the future, send its audiences out of the castle precincts and towards the work of other
organisations whose values it shares. ‘We should be a gateway to other people who think like us, to other people who are funded like us, to other people who have the same mission as us,' he said. ‘I hope, for example, that eventually, if you want to know about Shakespeare, we will give you our content, and we will give you content from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Why wouldn't we act as a curator and send you to places that we think have good-quality content?'

The BBC would, he said, share its resources and work with organisations outside, too: ‘If you're paid for by everybody it's your job to be porous. That doesn't mean you lower standards – no, no, no. You are elitist about your standards but you should be porous in terms of the people that you're inviting in to share our space.' But there were already concerns within the cultural world that the BBC's vision of artistic organisations worth working with was narrow, and that working with the BBC was, in the words of one curator, ‘an absolute nightmare … They turn up mob-handed and they want to own everything.' When I put this to Hall he simply nodded. ‘I've said it myself.' When he worked at the Royal Opera House, he used to long for the BBC to ‘make their minds up and take a decision'. So how could that change? ‘I want managers – and this is a change in culture – I want managers to feel valued. I think we've dumped on managers in the BBC and in our culture broadly, and not seen what I think is really important, which is that management is an art, management is about enabling, management is about giving confidence, management is about ensuring people are doing the very
best work of their lives. That's what managers are there to do.'

Hall's BBC, he said, needed to give people ‘the ability to fail'. Part of the idea behind the BBC's proposal, in 2014, to migrate the channel BBC Three online was to allow formats and programmes to loosen up and become more web-friendly: giving chances, for example, for comics to test out short chunks of material in a low-stakes way. What had struck him, he said, about Silicon Valley was ‘the sense that we're going to try ideas – and if they don't work, we'll go somewhere else. I urge people in the BBC to do this: I say, “You will have failures, and if you are going to fail, fail fast, but don't be embarrassed about it.”' He added, ‘We must be the risk capital for the UK. We have got to be the people who have enough confidence to be able to say that we are going to back things that may not work. The national discourse is difficult on failure, but actually, we should be bold enough to say, “That didn't work, but good luck to those people who tried, and now let's move on and try something else.”'

This rhetoric of a porous BBC hinted at a profound change in the corporation's status. Twenty years ago, the BBC stood high and proud, dear for her reputation through the world. Her dominance – notwithstanding, of course, competition with ITV and, later, Channel 4 – was uncontested. But what about a BBC that is operating on the web: a global, commercialised space that is minimally regulated, dominated by the economic models of the west coast of the US, and formally organised so as to enable the circulation and sharing of material in unprecedented ways?