1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
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4 BBC's Public Service Vs. American Culture
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The first priority for any government was to organize the allocation of frequencies. The method used in practice dictated the shape of the national broadcasting system. From the outset, British broadcasters looked aghast at the American experience and insisted that they would learn from and avoid American mistakes. To prevent the chaos of too many competing stations, the British Post Office proposed that equipment manufacturers should form a consortium, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), to provide reguIar transmissions.
Advertising was prohibited, and the company was to be financed through an annual licence fee on each receiving set - an entireIy different principIe from the American system, in that it charged listeners for what they heard. The BBC' s monopoly over the airwaves meant that it could adopt a very different attitude toward its audience and programming than that produced through commercial competition in the United States. In 1926 it became the British Broadcasting Corporation, "a Public Commission operating in the National Interest".
The BBC was an organization formed by the British establishment in its own self-image, reflecting the values and beliefs of the professional middle class. Under its first and most influential Director General, John (later Lord) Reith, it became almost a domestic diplomatic service, representing "the best of British" to the British themseIves. It fervently rejected American influence: Reith and his class saw the products of American mass culture such as Hollywood movies as childish, vulgar and false - a demonstration of why British broadcasting must avoid "giving the public what it wants".
British and American broadcasting evolved into their different forms, and provided the two prototypes for other countries, because of the different attitudes of their culturally dominant upper middle class to the new consumer culture. In the United States the middle class were firmly in its vanguard, defining themselves around its material precepts.In Britain, however, older modes of class definition, which were critical of the materialism of American culture, still operated.
Reith was the architect of the BBC's notion of public service broadcasting, but in expressing it he acted as a spokesman for the politically powerful, the great and the godly of the nation. When it was established, a dominant version of "national" culture was already firmly in place among the small and cohesive British ruling class, who administered the country through systems of appointment and delegation rather than through centralized state control. The BBC inherited the idea of "public service", defined as the patemalist responsibility of the upper class, as part of the ideological.baggage of the British Empire.
The BBC made available the full heritage of English high culture, previously the preserve of a privileged minority, to every member of the nation, at virtually no cost. This was a great cultural transformation. However, no-one suggested that the lower classes themselves should be permitted access to the airwaves. Sports, popular music and entertainment were certainly broadcast; by 1934, indeed, the BBC was broadcasting more light music, comedy and vaudeville than any other European station, but the manner in which they were presented, like the voices of the announcers, remained indomitably upper-middle-class.
This attitude of uplift was part of Reith's idea of the BBC as a kind of national church. He argued that it should use the "bmte force of monopoly... to instruct and fashion public opinion, to banish ignorance and slavery, to contribute richly and in many ways to the sum total of human wellbeing." Much of the BBC's effort in its early years went towards achieving respectability among the cultural establishment, by avoiding controversial material as well as by educating its audiences and preserving the proprieties of Sunday by broadcasting only church services and serious music.
While the BBC's success in establishing itself as a national institution led other nations - Japan, for example - to imitate its system of govemment control, it was nevertheless accused of failing to provide for large sections of society.
In the 1930's as much as half the radio audience in Britain tuned to European commercial stations, Radio Luxembourg and Radio Normandie, on Sundays. Resistance to the BBC was not simply a matter of content. Radio entered peoples' daily lives in an immediate and intimate manner. In its content and financial organization, commercial radio was part of a larger notion, the promotion of a consumer society - giving America' s businessmen, as one executive said, "a latchkey to nearly every home in the United States".
The BBC and its govemment-nm imitators in other countries had to enter people's homes not as one instrument in a shared culture of consumption, but in the name of a common national culture, which they, almost alone, were creating.
National radio was an agency of cultural centralization at a time when many local communities retained their diversity and a tight-knit resistance to intrusion. The national culture of the BBC reflected the elite culture of southem England; it was inevitable that this culture would meet regional and class-based resistance. Broadcasting would be a powerful instrument in the erosion of the cultural independence and diversity of the regions; not until World War II was there a real need for national unity for the BBC to serve.
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