Kate Chisholm

Reithian values

‘It’s a potential social menace of the first magnitude,’ declared John Reith, founding father of the BBC, in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1967. He was horrified by the way that his single broadcasting station, set up in 1922 by a group of techie engineers who were looking for ways to market their newly developed wireless sets, had expanded into a huge corporation with four radio and two television channels. Far too much time, he thought, was already being spent listening to a small Bakelite box. What would he make of our 24/7 access not just to radio and TV but also to the baffling new world of webcasts, podcasts, streaming and downloading? There’s no longer just a radio and TV in every room; some of us are even taking our laptops to bed so that we can drift into sleep while listening to nightmare-inducing replays of David and Ruth’s meltdown on The Archers, or watching John Humphrys reporting from Basra via a Today programme webcast.

Reithian values were put under scrutiny in a special Front Row last Wednesday (Radio Four), hosted by Mark Lawson, to mark the publication of a revelatory book about Reith’s complex, contradictory character by his daughter Marista Leishman. In a richly drawn half-hour portrait, Lawson talked to broadcasting honchos from past and present, as well as to Leishman herself, to discover what those Reithian values really are, and how the BBC’s ‘magnificent’, if hook-nosed first director-general shaped his creation, always insisting that it must be publicly funded by the licence fee and therefore must be universally available and approachable.

Lawson asked Leishman whether she loved her father, to which, of course, there came no reply. In Reithian terms, ‘love’ has no simple one-sentence expression. Perhaps the most revealing anecdote came from Sir Denis Forman (former chairman of Granada TV), who told us that Lord Reith’s taste in the arts was ‘deplorable’, especially ‘his affection for Palm Court music…’ So that’s why those first schedules were dominated by Victor Silvester and his Dancing Strings.

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