Thakur
Banned
- Joined
- 30 Aug 2013
- Messages
- 14,856
- Reaction score
- 8,575
In the early years of the 1930s, the
sculptor Eric Gill was commissioned to
carve an imageof a sower for the entrance
hall of Broadcasting House. “Broadcast” is
the old word for scattering seed: you cast it
far and wide and good things grow. As a
preacher stands in the pulpit and hopes
that the congregation will be improved by
the word of God, so John Reith the
minister’s son cast the seeds of virtue into
Britain. The BBC was to “inform, educate
and entertain”: Reith carefully placed the
words in that order. The Latin inscription
in the hallway of Old Broadcasting House,
through which workers still hurry to their
offices at Radios 3 and 4, translates like
this: “This temple of the arts and muses is
dedicated to Almighty God by the first
Governors in the year of our Lord 1931,
John Reith being director-general. And they
pray that good seed sown may bring forth
good harvest, and that all things foul or
hostile to peace may be banished thence,
and that the people inclining their ear to
whatsoever things are lovely and honest,
whatsoever things are of good report, may
tread the path of virtue and wisdom.”
But what lovely things are to be scattered?
Those you desire already, or those the
corporation thinks will improve you? Reith
was conservative and traditionalist in his
own taste, but from its earliest days the
BBC was a culturally polyglot organisation,
a clash of aesthetic tones. Hilda Matheson,
the first BBC director of talks in the 1920s,
veered culturally towards modernism: she
broadcast James Joyce reading from work-
in-progress – not at all to the taste of Reith.
“It would be idle to pretend everybody
liked them or understood [the readings],”
she acknowledged in her book,
Broadcasting (1933). “Difficult, obscure,
experimental literature … is unlikely to
make a wide appeal.” And yet it had been
important to broadcast them. She wrote to
her lover, Vita Sackville-West, of her out-
of-jointness with Reith’s cultural
prejudices. “He tends to regard as
controversial and partisan, and therefore
inadmissable, a talk about which any of
his business magnates complain or
disagree, eg [poet, critic and modern-art
patron] Osbert Sitwell, because his views
on art were objectionable and because all
modern art is objectionable [in Reith’s
view].”
‘Reith’s head is made entirely of bone’
Harold Nicolson, Sackville-West’s husband,
confided to his diary similar complaints
about Reith. They had been discussing a
series of talks on modern literature he was
to give, commissioned by Matheson. “The
man’s head is made entirely of bone …
[He] tries to induce me to modify my talks
in such a way as to induce the illiterate
members of the population to read Milton
instead of going on bicycle excursions. I tell
him that as my talk series centres upon
literature of the last 10 years it would be a
little difficult to say anything about
Milton.”
From the earliest days of the BBC, the
balance between the popular and the niche
has been fiercely contested. “To have
exploited so great a scientific invention for
the purpose and pursuit of ‘entertainment’
alone would have been a prostitution of its
powers and an insult to the character and
intelligence of the people,” wrote Reith in
his 1924 book Broadcast Over Britain.
Some listeners took a different view. In the
first issue of the Radio Times, 28 September
1923, a reader’s letter ran: “Frankly, it
seems to me that the BBC are mainly
catering for the ‘listeners’ who … pretend
to appreciate only and understand only
highbrow music and educational and ‘sob’
stuff. Surely, like a theatre manager, they
must put up programmes which will appeal
to the majority and must remember that it
is the latter who provide the main bulk of
their income.” Similar debates persist
today. Why does the BBC bother with niche
culture, to be enjoyed only by a few, some
ask. Others wonder why it promulgates
mass culture which, they argue, the
market could provide.
Arguably, though, it is precisely the noisy
jumble of cultures within the BBC that has
been one of its strongest and most exciting
characteristics. In 1935, the pioneering
documentary maker John Grierson made a
film for the GPO called BBC: The Voice of
Britain. The two musical stars of the film
were Adrian Boult, the great conductor of
the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the toe-
tappingly brilliant Henry Hall, band leader
of the BBC Dance Orchestra. Between them
they represented the extreme edges of
rarefied and populist culture then
projected by the BBC. There is a similar
bifurcation in drama: while the film shows
the delightfully homemade sound effects
being created for a broadcast of Macbeth,
the lighter end of theatre is represented by
Eric Maschwitz, the debonair head of
variety, seen urging a producer to make
sure a music-hall act’s jokes are cleaned
up (“It won’t get by for a moment, old
boy”).
Anarchic environs of Savoy Hill
Maschwitz eventually followed the siren
call of Hollywood, but back in 1926 he was
at the BBC’s headquarters at Savoy Hill,
which “had at one time been a slightly
risque block of flats where I had attended
my first theatrical party in 1917”. Savoy
Hill was pretty dingy (“I remember killing
a rat in one of the corridors – by the
simple method of flattening it with a
volume of Who’s Who,” he recalled in his
memoir). But it was exciting, and it was
full of talented, adventurous young people.
Reith’s personal discomfort with
Maschwitz’s brand of entertainment was
evident: he would turn up to rehearsals “at
which he loomed over the awe-struck
performers like an anxious pike in a tank
filled with tropical fish”. Maschwitz
remembered how anarchic it was. Reith,
“his dour handsome face scarred like that
of a villain in a melodrama”, was “a
strange shepherd for such a mixed,
bohemian flock … he had under his aegis a
bevy of ex-soldiers, ex-actors, ex-
adventurers which … even a Dartmoor
prison governor might have had difficulty
in controlling”.
It was an intensely inventive time. Art
forms were being transformed to suit the
new medium. Under Val Gielgud, brother
of John, radio drama was developing as a
form. It was “finding wings; like the
cinema before it, it was on its way to
escaping from the limitations of theatre”,
recalled Maschwitz. Rather wonderfully,
makers of the earliest radio drama written
specially for the medium, Richard Hughes’
A Comedy of Danger (1924), were so
anxious about the visual limitations of the
medium that it was set in the pitch-
blackness of a coal mine. Arthur Burrows,
the BBC’s first director of programmes,
remembered: “I think all who heard this
first attempt at building up a really
dramatic situation entirely by sound effects
will admit that it was very thrilling, and
opened up a wide range of possibilities.”
BBC radio is now the biggest single
commissioner of plays in the world,
according to the director general, Tony
Hall; an artery in the great body of British
theatre. The BBC informs, educates and entertains – but in what order? | Charlotte Higgins | Media | The Guardian
sculptor Eric Gill was commissioned to
carve an imageof a sower for the entrance
hall of Broadcasting House. “Broadcast” is
the old word for scattering seed: you cast it
far and wide and good things grow. As a
preacher stands in the pulpit and hopes
that the congregation will be improved by
the word of God, so John Reith the
minister’s son cast the seeds of virtue into
Britain. The BBC was to “inform, educate
and entertain”: Reith carefully placed the
words in that order. The Latin inscription
in the hallway of Old Broadcasting House,
through which workers still hurry to their
offices at Radios 3 and 4, translates like
this: “This temple of the arts and muses is
dedicated to Almighty God by the first
Governors in the year of our Lord 1931,
John Reith being director-general. And they
pray that good seed sown may bring forth
good harvest, and that all things foul or
hostile to peace may be banished thence,
and that the people inclining their ear to
whatsoever things are lovely and honest,
whatsoever things are of good report, may
tread the path of virtue and wisdom.”
But what lovely things are to be scattered?
Those you desire already, or those the
corporation thinks will improve you? Reith
was conservative and traditionalist in his
own taste, but from its earliest days the
BBC was a culturally polyglot organisation,
a clash of aesthetic tones. Hilda Matheson,
the first BBC director of talks in the 1920s,
veered culturally towards modernism: she
broadcast James Joyce reading from work-
in-progress – not at all to the taste of Reith.
“It would be idle to pretend everybody
liked them or understood [the readings],”
she acknowledged in her book,
Broadcasting (1933). “Difficult, obscure,
experimental literature … is unlikely to
make a wide appeal.” And yet it had been
important to broadcast them. She wrote to
her lover, Vita Sackville-West, of her out-
of-jointness with Reith’s cultural
prejudices. “He tends to regard as
controversial and partisan, and therefore
inadmissable, a talk about which any of
his business magnates complain or
disagree, eg [poet, critic and modern-art
patron] Osbert Sitwell, because his views
on art were objectionable and because all
modern art is objectionable [in Reith’s
view].”
‘Reith’s head is made entirely of bone’
Harold Nicolson, Sackville-West’s husband,
confided to his diary similar complaints
about Reith. They had been discussing a
series of talks on modern literature he was
to give, commissioned by Matheson. “The
man’s head is made entirely of bone …
[He] tries to induce me to modify my talks
in such a way as to induce the illiterate
members of the population to read Milton
instead of going on bicycle excursions. I tell
him that as my talk series centres upon
literature of the last 10 years it would be a
little difficult to say anything about
Milton.”
From the earliest days of the BBC, the
balance between the popular and the niche
has been fiercely contested. “To have
exploited so great a scientific invention for
the purpose and pursuit of ‘entertainment’
alone would have been a prostitution of its
powers and an insult to the character and
intelligence of the people,” wrote Reith in
his 1924 book Broadcast Over Britain.
Some listeners took a different view. In the
first issue of the Radio Times, 28 September
1923, a reader’s letter ran: “Frankly, it
seems to me that the BBC are mainly
catering for the ‘listeners’ who … pretend
to appreciate only and understand only
highbrow music and educational and ‘sob’
stuff. Surely, like a theatre manager, they
must put up programmes which will appeal
to the majority and must remember that it
is the latter who provide the main bulk of
their income.” Similar debates persist
today. Why does the BBC bother with niche
culture, to be enjoyed only by a few, some
ask. Others wonder why it promulgates
mass culture which, they argue, the
market could provide.
Arguably, though, it is precisely the noisy
jumble of cultures within the BBC that has
been one of its strongest and most exciting
characteristics. In 1935, the pioneering
documentary maker John Grierson made a
film for the GPO called BBC: The Voice of
Britain. The two musical stars of the film
were Adrian Boult, the great conductor of
the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the toe-
tappingly brilliant Henry Hall, band leader
of the BBC Dance Orchestra. Between them
they represented the extreme edges of
rarefied and populist culture then
projected by the BBC. There is a similar
bifurcation in drama: while the film shows
the delightfully homemade sound effects
being created for a broadcast of Macbeth,
the lighter end of theatre is represented by
Eric Maschwitz, the debonair head of
variety, seen urging a producer to make
sure a music-hall act’s jokes are cleaned
up (“It won’t get by for a moment, old
boy”).
Anarchic environs of Savoy Hill
Maschwitz eventually followed the siren
call of Hollywood, but back in 1926 he was
at the BBC’s headquarters at Savoy Hill,
which “had at one time been a slightly
risque block of flats where I had attended
my first theatrical party in 1917”. Savoy
Hill was pretty dingy (“I remember killing
a rat in one of the corridors – by the
simple method of flattening it with a
volume of Who’s Who,” he recalled in his
memoir). But it was exciting, and it was
full of talented, adventurous young people.
Reith’s personal discomfort with
Maschwitz’s brand of entertainment was
evident: he would turn up to rehearsals “at
which he loomed over the awe-struck
performers like an anxious pike in a tank
filled with tropical fish”. Maschwitz
remembered how anarchic it was. Reith,
“his dour handsome face scarred like that
of a villain in a melodrama”, was “a
strange shepherd for such a mixed,
bohemian flock … he had under his aegis a
bevy of ex-soldiers, ex-actors, ex-
adventurers which … even a Dartmoor
prison governor might have had difficulty
in controlling”.
It was an intensely inventive time. Art
forms were being transformed to suit the
new medium. Under Val Gielgud, brother
of John, radio drama was developing as a
form. It was “finding wings; like the
cinema before it, it was on its way to
escaping from the limitations of theatre”,
recalled Maschwitz. Rather wonderfully,
makers of the earliest radio drama written
specially for the medium, Richard Hughes’
A Comedy of Danger (1924), were so
anxious about the visual limitations of the
medium that it was set in the pitch-
blackness of a coal mine. Arthur Burrows,
the BBC’s first director of programmes,
remembered: “I think all who heard this
first attempt at building up a really
dramatic situation entirely by sound effects
will admit that it was very thrilling, and
opened up a wide range of possibilities.”
BBC radio is now the biggest single
commissioner of plays in the world,
according to the director general, Tony
Hall; an artery in the great body of British
theatre. The BBC informs, educates and entertains – but in what order? | Charlotte Higgins | Media | The Guardian
