Hugh Chignell

Myths of Origin

Although very different in their activities and outcomes, both broadcasting and the National Health Service (NHS) were created within a rhetoric of public service and a dedication ‘to the service of humanity in its fullest sense’ so eloquently expressed by John Reith. Both were set up at significant moments in UK history: BBC radio began when the memory of the First World War was still painful; the NHS immediately after the Second. These were moments when the idea of a unified national ‘public’ had a particular potency, when there was a desire to overcome social divisions and inequities. Both services addressed a broad and inclusive ‘public’ with a scope way beyond those who were ‘casting their problems on society’. Both were funded by ‘the public’ at large through a universal payment and were free at the point of use; both reached out to a population seen as sharing certain needs. For John Reith, founder and spiritual father of the BBC, this broad public needed education, information and entertainment, too, even though this was rather reluctantly tagged on (Scannell and Cardiff 1991). For William Beveridge, whose 1942 Report gave birth to the UK’s post-war welfare state, the public needed physical care andmedical attention ‘from the cradle to the grave’ (Thane 1982:246–254; Fraser 1984:214–221).1 Although the historical realities which surrounded the foundation of the two services were complex, both continued to carry with them these powerful myths of origin, and these contributed to the embedded expectations and attitudes of practitioners and users of the services.

BBC RADIO NEWS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS AND THE SUEZ CRISIS

This article challenges some of the received opinion about the failings of BBC coverage of the Suez crisis. Using a novel focus on radio as opposed to television coverage, it aims to show that despite the factual nature of the radio news bulletins, they did succeed in representing some dissent towards the military action as well as provide evidence of the military build-up. Although the flagship radio current affairs programme, ‘At Home and Abroad’, was tentative in its coverage, it did provide a platform for critical voices and raised important concerns about government policy. It is argued that a close reading of news bulletins and the transcripts of ‘At Home and Abroad’ lends support to the more sympathetic and pro-BBC position of the corporations official historian, Asa Briggs, while sounding a note of caution regarding Tony Shaws otherwise exemplary account of Suez and the media. The article also makes the case for the continuing importance of radio in the 1950s despite the growing importance of television.

British radio drama and the avant-garde in the 1950s

The BBC in the 1950s was a conservative and cautious institution. British theatre was at the same time largely commercial and offered a glamourous distraction from wider social and political realities. During the decade, however, new avant-garde approaches to drama emerged, both on the stage and on radio. The avant-garde was particularly vibrant in Paris, where Samuel Beckett was beginning to challenge theatrical orthodoxies. Initially, managers and producers in BBC radio rejected a radio version of Beckett’s, Waiting for Godot and other experimental work was viewed with distaste but eventually Beckett was accepted and commissioned to write All That Fall (1957), a masterpiece of radio drama. Other Beckett broadcasts followed, including more writing for radio, extracts from his novels and radio versions of his stage plays as well as plays by the experimental radio dramatist, Giles Cooper. This article examines the different change agents which enabled an initially reluctant BBC to convert enthusiastically to the avant-garde. A networked group of younger producers, men and women, played a vital role in the acceptance of Beckett as did the striking pragmatism of senior radio managers. A willingness to accept the transnational cultural flow from Paris to London was also an important factor. The attempt to reinvent radio drama using ‘radiophonic’ sound effects (pioneered in Paris) was another factor for change and this was encouraged by growing competition from television drama on the BBC and ITV. The acceptance and eventual championing of avant-garde drama in the late 1950s reveal how the BBC’s commitment to public service broadcasting facilitated a flowering of experimental and avant-garde drama during radio drama’s golden age.

Sam Hanna Bell and the Ideology of Place

There can be few radio programmes that more completely express the idea of place than the features and documentaries of Sam Hanna Bell.1 Working at BBC Northern Ireland from 1945 to 1969 (and then in his retirement until the late 1980s), Bell not only pioneered the craft of radio features making, especially in his use of the words of ‘ordinary people’, but also produced programmes that powerfully evoked a highly specific sense of place and history. In the most troubled and divided part of the United Kingdom, however, any claims about history, place and culture are bound to contain political messages, no matter how unintended, and Bell’s characterisation of ‘Ulster’ carried heavy ideological baggage. His radio output expressed a sense of Ulster as an historical and cultural entity rooted in centuries of history, and a sense of the unchanging geography of Northern Ireland, a view that was inevitably of more comfort to the Protestant majority than the Catholic minority.

‘Quality’ and the Broadcasting White Paper

‘The entire edifice of micro-economic theory is based on the simple proposition that the goal of all economic activity is to maximise consumer welfare,’ wrote the neo-liberal economist, Cento Veljanovski (1983:44), and this was the spirit in which the White Papers on Broadcasting and Health were presented to the public. Working for Patients promised to ‘improve services to patients’ while Broadcasting in the ’90s: competition, choice and quality, stated firmly: ‘The government places the viewer and listener at the centre of broadcasting policy’ (Home Office 1988, para. 1.2).

Griffiths, Peacock and Restructuring Public Service

‘It was like being part of a conquering army,’ proclaimed Edwina Currie. The future Junior Minister of Health (1986–1988), with immaculate make-up and glistening red lips, positively glowed when, 23 years later, she recalled the Conservative election victory of 1983 (Tory, Tory, Tory programme 3 2006).1

Who’s the Casualty? Popular Programmes

‘In 1948 a dream was born: a National Health Service. In 1985 the dream is in tatters.’ This was how Paul Unwin and Jeremy Brock began their proposal to the BBC for a hospital series based in an accident and emergency department. They pitched a document which ‘read like a manifesto’ (Kingsley 1993:4).

The NHS and Third-Term Politics

‘From the rock market to the stock market’ proclaimed the advertisement. ‘Virgin Music is going public. After the big bang how about a little pop!’ And a traditional boss in a three-piece suit begins to rock and roll around his panelled office (1986).

Freedom and the Public

The theme of the 1979 election would be ‘freedom’. In the neo-liberal view, personal freedom was linked to economic freedom and both rejected the fusty ties of a class society. The election campaign set the tone. The Sun newspaper, owned by one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite entrepreneurs, Rupert Murdoch, printed a three-page article urging its huge popular readership to ‘Vote Tory This Time’ with some impressive capitalisation: ‘FREEDOM to run your life as YOU want to run it, or to be shackled by the bureaucrats and the political bully boys. FREEDOM to work with or without a Union card – or be shackled to a dole queue in a declining economy’ (Lamb 1989:154). The Conservatives’ election broadcast claimed: ‘Those who want to work are left feeling guilty.’ Aspirant parents and hard-working businessmen plead ‘guilty’ to the sin of ambition. ‘Do you want better schooling?’ ‘Guilty.’ ‘Did you make a profit?’ ‘Guilty: I’ll try not to do it again.’ ‘You’re sentenced to nationalisation!’ The interests of workers were presented as being in opposition to the interests of trade unions, and the interests of trade unions were characterised as ‘socialism’. ‘It’s a free society versus “socialism”,’ the right-wing Conservative politician and intellectual Enoch Powell had written back in 1965. For him, ‘everyone who goes into a shop and chooses one item instead of another is casting a vote in the economic ballot box’ (quoted by Letwin 1992:74). A debate between planning and competition, which dated back to the 19th century, was being revived (O’Malley 2009).

Your Life in Whose Hands? Restructuring Professionals

The relationship between the medical establishment and programme makers had never been entirely respectful. Undermining arrogant surgeons, giving them a taste of their own medicine, mocking their authority, had entertained the nation through the Carry On and Doctor films. The tradition continued with Richard Wilson’s tactless and hung-over surgeon in Only When I Laugh. Such moments could be seen as a safety-valve, a carnivalesque expression of fears, which served to confirm rather than attack established relationships. However, by the beginning of the 1980s the medical professions were being subjected to more serious challenges.