John Reith and the BBC 1922-1939: Building an Empire of the Air?

Abstract

The habit of government control engendered by the Great War ensured the emergence of a public broadcasting corporation over a set of private initiatives: but, even so, this required the exceptional drive and sense of mission of John Reith. The latter’s character is still credited, by many, with leading the BBC’s quest for the Holy Grail of broadcasting – media impartiality: yet the Earl of Crawford felt, in 1925, that Reith had a “swelled head”. The imprint of the latter on the BBC’s character and aims – balance and neutrality – seems rather to embody another fundamental principle: that of “unified control,” a paternalistic, central authority which determined what the BBC was, and what it was for… This article discusses the nature and impact of such an approach on the organisation, staffing and programming at the BBC from its beginnings to the eve of the Second World War. Ethical, even priggish, definitions of “entertainment” could collide with modernist flights of imagination, and yet the two complemented each other in a superior vision of what could be offered to audiences: both at home and throughout the empire. In respect of the latter in particular, however, was the BBC not already in denial of the gathering pace of international change, and working with an already outmoded view of Britain’s capacity to control it?