History of the BBC

The study is a long term structural analysis of public service television in Britain and Norway, focusing particularly on the BBC and NRK in the early stages of competition.
The study has  produced results on two levels: Firstly, it has identified a series of similar processes and alliances in the two countries in connection with the establishment and development of broadcasting systems. Secondly, it has produced detailed results regarding the so-called crisis for public broadcasting in the two countries.
The study has demonstrated that while the privileges of the BBC and the NRK have been undermined, they are still expected to fulfil many of their original obligations, obligations which in turn have become more difficult to fulfil.
These developments have presented the corporation with difficult challenges regarding both their financial bases and their social legitimacy. The corporations have both responded these challenges with a dual strategy: On the one hand they have attempted to improve their financial balances and adapt to market-standards, whereas on the other they have strengthened their commitment to some of the areas which they have seen as crucial to their identity as public broadcasters.

Through the exploration of gender's intersections with age, social class and race/ethnicity, this article introduces an intersectional lens to studies of female workers in the British creative and cultural industries (CCI). It presents intersectional analysis of data gathered in twenty-six qualitative interviews with contemporary British women documentarians who talk about their early career aspirations and perceived barriers to entry to the industry. Intersectionality, introduced to critical theory by African American scholars, holds that multiple axes of oppression mutually constitute different social positions and identities. The intersectional approach discussed in this article produces a nuanced picture of the small group of respondents, foregrounding a complex interplay between gender, race and ethnicity, class and region and thus demonstrating the limitations of the category "woman filmmaker" for researching professional disadvantage. However, rather than seeing their experiences as intersectional, the respondents tend to focus on one most salient social marker. Congruously with a large body of literature on systemic inequalities in British CCI, social class is the single most important factor shaping the beginnings of the respondents' careers. By bridging the gap between intersectionality as a theory and research practice, this article seeks to make a contribution to the broader debate about the employment of intersectional approaches in media studies.

Can creativity be managed? Or are the concepts antithetical; is management creativity's Kryptonite? Almost since Weber's (1912/1968) formulation of the theory of bureaucracy, the idea of management has been criticised as inimical to creative freedom. This chapter addresses the question of whether media creativity can be managed, by reviewing the literature in the field of managing creativity and conducting a case study analysis of an attempt to improve creativity at the BBC. The requirement to manage creativity in practice is arguably a comparatively unique characteristic of media management in both theory and practice. As Lucy Küng (2008a: 9) argued, "the value of media products derives from the knowledge and creative inspiration of those creating the content; the higher the level of novelty and creativity, the greater the potential for competitive advantage". For the field of media management as a discipline this implies that somehow or other media organisations must find ways to manage creativity. First, I examine the challenge media creativity poses to conventional management thinking and practice. The following section reviews the various attempts by academic researchers to describe and explain how this challenge may be confronted in theory and in practice. This section attempts to show how the different approaches to managing creativity reflect differences in their underlying conceptions of what creativity is. Amabile's (1996a) model of creativity is identified as the best available tool for research and practice in managing creativity. Significant modifications are suggested to improve the model, particularly in conceptualising the role of domain skills in creativity. The final section attempts to use this model to evaluate Greg Dyke's attempt to make the BBC 'the most creative organisation in the world'. The results of the analysis suggest a role for a specialised discipline of media management in developing our understanding of how domain skills specific to media organisations can be combined with more generic tools for promoting creativity, to provide a better understanding of how to resolve the inevitable tensions between conventional management practice and media creativity. Further research in this field may develop better conceptualisations of creativity in organisations that could contribute to the broader range of thinking in the fields of creativity and management for media firms.

The article problematises the relationship between the production model and the ‘truth-telling’ filmmaker, and in turn that between the documentarian and the subject. Style is seen as a way in which the tension between the supposedly contradictory formal conceptions of documentary style and relinquished representation of quotidian life can be momentarily reconciled.

Published in: The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, David La Rocca, ed., 2016, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 325-343

Set in a small-town café-hotel during the German occupation of France in World War II, ’Allo ’Allo! is a British sitcom first aired on the BBC almost 40 years ago (beginning in December 1982). An exceptional comedy, language use is at the core of the story. Non-English speaking French characters appear alongside German characters, Italian characters, monolingual British characters, and even British characters with terrible French—all portrayed in English with liberal smatterings of British double entendre, word play, and slapstick. A variety of “tricks” are needed to allow the audience to follow the combination of communication and incomprehension, including the use of accents, direct statements, repetition, and prior knowledge. Differences in both culture and historical understandings are emphasized in the comedy; for example, World War II is seen both with a British view and with an awareness that the French would have seen things otherwise. Exaggerated cultural stereotypes are also important for the story. A very “clean” program in many respects, it is also filled with playful sexual suggestiveness making it a very engaging program with multiple levels of understanding.

This is a brief examination of and introduction to this series in the context of English learning and teaching. With its clever use of accented English to indicate different languages and its funny story lines, ’Allo ’Allo! could be a useful source of English in the EFL classroom or even self-study.

Medieval mystery plays have had a rich and also distinctive life on British television. These performance texts, drawn from the Bible’s story of the universe from just before its Creation to its end on the Day of Judgment, have appealed to television practitioners not only for drama adaptations (from the 1938 presentation of the Chester Abraham and Isaac onwards) and the foundation stone for new dramatic writing (such as the BBC’s 1959 The Hill by Paul Almond) but also as the focus of documentaries on contemporary civic, social and religious traditions within communities. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to British television’s long series of engagements with mystery plays, which stands in contrast to the extensive scholarship about the modes and meanings of mystery plays in live performance during modern times. This essay considers the extent to which dramatic performances of mystery plays produced especially for television may have contributed to an understanding of this performance genre as a mode of expression related to religious, social, and civic traditions and community life in both medieval and modern Britain. This exploration will focus particularly on how the spaces of production (a studio, cathedral, street) and the spaces of performance constructed therein (a landscape or medieval images) evoke particular interpretative frames of reference, some of which are tied strongly to a sense of place—with places, and the communities that inhabit them, being fundamentally important dimensions of performances of mystery plays.

The broadcast of "Craftsmanship," which aired on 29 April 1937, was Woolf's third and final contribution to radio, and the final third of the talk constitutes the only recording of her voice. Though this broadcast is well known, in its print and recorded versions, its context--the motive for the pointedness of Woolf's argument--has been forgotten. Woolf counters the views of previous speakers in the "Words Fail Me" series (A. Lloyd James, Allan Ferguson, and Logan Pearsall Smith). These speakers had trumpeted efforts to confine words to a precise meaning, as in the dictionary or in scientific discourse, while Woolf celebrates words' many and metaphorical meanings. This essay recovers the context of Woolf's broadcast by drawing on *The Listener*.

This article explores how Dylan Thomas’s engagement with radio creates an innovative collaborative radio poetic. Thomas contributed broadcast essays and features to The Third Programme, The Home Service, The Welsh Home Service and The Eastern Service. Most readers are fully alert to Thomas’s important relationship with BBC producers such as Douglas Cleverdon (Under Milk Wood), but there remains little theoretical or literary analysis of his features for radio. Through archival memos from the BBC’s Literary Output Committee (held at BBC’s Written Archives in Caversham), the article initially considers the institutional relationship between poets and radio.  With specific focus on the postwar broadcast feature about post-blitz Swansea ‘Return Journey’ (TX: 15th June 1947), I examine the history and practicalities of collaboration between Thomas and producer PH Burton, as well as the important social commentary it generates. Finally, the discussion proposes ways of thinking about the sound aesthetic created through the collaboration between the poet and broadcast institution. It concludes by highlighting the importance of creating a critical vocabulary to respond to the sonic text.

This article considers the radio programme for kindergarten-aged children that the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) launched during the Second World War and continued to broadcast until 1985. Kindergarten of the Air, thought to be the ‘first of its kind in the world’, was to inspire interest from, and similar programmes throughout, the British empire and beyond. The article examines the imperial and
international broadcasting networks that enabled the exchange of ideas and initiatives within the field of educational broadcasting, and the export of one of Australia’s most successful radio initiatives, while also considering the willingness of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to be influenced by a dominion broadcaster.

The article discusses how the emerging genre of American and British science fiction symbolised and expressed Cold War anxieties after 1949. 
It begins by briefly showing how a popular Western symbolised the Berlin Airlift, then considers how several new Sci Fi novels, including "The Martian Chronicles," "The Day of the Triffids," "I am Legend," and "The Bodysnatchers" each respond more precisely to changing Soviet aggression. 
The chief writers explored are Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, John Wyndham, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, and the television writer Terry Nation.  Connections are drawn between key science fiction novels and public concerns about possible atomic war, espionage fears, future Soviet invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It then suggests a shift in meaning affecting British science fiction from the mid-1950s, with rising fears about the demise of empire, and concerns that European civilisation is waning.  The chief writers discussed in this regard are John Christopher, whose work is linked with the Suez Crisis, & J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World."  Strong links are also established between several British science fiction novels and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies."
9pp.

The publication of the sixth volume of the official history of the BBC, Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC
and the nation 1974‐1987 by Jean Seaton is reviewed. The book is found to contain numerous
errors, mis‐statements of facts and significant omissions rendering the book an unreliable source
for those researching either the history of the BBC or the impact of the BBC on Britain’s political
and cultural life. Seaton’s major errors and omissions are catalogued as an aid to future researchers
and alternative, more reliable, secondary sources identified.
KEYWORDS
BBC, HISTORY, BROADCASTING, TELEVISION, RADIO, BBC LOCAL RADIO, BBC NATURAL HISTORY UNIT, BRITISH
HISTORY, ASA BRIGGS, JEAN SEATON, HUW WHELDON, ALASDAIR MILNE, PLAY FOR TODAY, THE HITCHHIKER’S
GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, GARDENER’S QUESTION TIME, THE MOUSETRAP, HOWARDS’ WAY, THE THORN BIRDS,
LIFE ON EARTH, NEWSNIGHT, PANORAMA, I, CLAUDIUS, BOYS FROM THE BLACKSTUFF, EDGE OF DARKNESS, BLUE
PETER, BAGPUSS, THE WOMBLES, NATIONWIDE, GRANDSTAND, POT BLACK, THE GENERATION GAME, MATCH OF
THE DAY, BLACK AND WHITE MINSTREL SHOW, EASTENDERS, STARSKY AND HUTCH, MARK TULLY, GRAHAME C
GREENE, CHRISTOPHER ANDREW, TIMOTHY GARTON ASH, TOM BOWER, PAT LOUGHREY, DAVID MCKITTRICK,
BRYCE MCCRIRICK, KELVIN MACKENZIE, GILES OAKLEY, NAOMI SARGANT, RONNIE STONHAM, DAVID
ATTENBOROUGH, DERYCK COOKE, DERRICK AMOORE, SALLY DOGANIS, TIM EGGAR, AUSTEN KARK, SARA
NATHAN, STEWART PURVIS, STEWART PARKER, PHILLIP WHITEHEAD, TONY SMITH, ALASDAIR MILNE, AUBREY
SINGER, ANNA HOME, HUMPHREY BURTON MARK DAMAZER, FRANCESCA KIRBY‐GREEN, DONALD GRATTAN,
ALAN YENTOB, BROADCASTING STANDARDS COUNCIL

Recognising his association with Australia over the course of decades, this essay explores how Sir David Attenborough's programmes "remake" Australian nature for global audiences. It examines not only Attenborough himself, but offers equal weight to the human and nonhuman world he brings to audiences. Offering an examination of "blue chip" natural history programming and the two series that bookend Attenborough's work as a presenter "in" and "of" Australia-Quest Under Capricorn (1963) and Life in Cold Blood (2008), it is attuned to historical and contemporary cultures of colonisation and how these are located within the values and practices of blue-chip natural history programming. In Life on Air, the biographical documentary about Sir David Attenborough broadcast in 2002, we are told that he has "seen more things in the world than any other living being" (BBC, 2002). Characterisations of Attenborough's career frequently invoke this kind of hyperbole. A combination of factors contributes to this reputation, including his presence on television screens over the course of six decades and his pivotal role in the rise of BBC natural history programming as a global brand. Attenborough offers a singular study in both longevity and global celebrity. In his study of celebrity and environment, Dan Brockington argues that "people need celebrities to get close to nature on their behalf when they themselves cannot."1 Attenborough's oeuvre has consistently offered access to remote locations or species while asking the viewer to see as he sees and feel as he feels. In this respect he is a cultural intermediary, helping to steer the relationship between public culture and nonhuman nature.

Il Professor J.R.R. Tolkien visitò l’Italia in due occasioni: nel 1955 quando, assieme a sua figlia Priscilla, visitò Venezia e Assisi e nel 1966 con una crociera nel Mediterraneo con sua moglie Edith. In realtà, i primi contatti fra l’autore del Signore degli Anelli e il nostro paese, risalgono a moltissimi anni addietro e più precisamente alla fine degli anni Venti quando comparvero su alcune riviste letterarie italiane le prime citazioni dell’opera che curò assieme a E.V. Gordon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fino a poco tempo fa, però, poco si conosceva di un contatto vocale che vide gli italiani che impararono l’inglese attraverso il celebre metodo Linguaphone, tra gli anni Trenta e Cinquanta, ascoltare la voce del Professor Tolkien.

On Saturday mornings from 1953 until 1982, the BBC broadcast a radio request show for children called Children’s Choice. The playlist was eclectic featuring nursery rhymes, hymns, novelty, comedy and cowboy songs, bawdy Music Hall anthems, classical symphonies and military bands alongside the latest hits by Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Alma Cogan and Max Bygraves. The show attracted audiences of up to 17 million and a host of top-flight presenters such as Derek McCulloch (Uncle Mac), Leslie Crowther, Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart and finally Tony Blackburn. 

In the 1950s, the BBC had specific policies for children’s broadcasting with the aims of educating the masses, and building stronger communities through intergenerational family bonding. Interestingly, these ‘family values’ were often communicated through recordings that had seemingly inappropriate ‘adult’ lyrics and themes.

Through the analysis of a selection of records played on Children’s Choice, and of the BBC’s behind-the-scenes policy documents, I offer musicological and contextual arguments as to how the BBC’s family values, adult nostalgia, and commercial pressures contributed to producing a canon of eclectic recordings from the show that seem to stand in stark contrast to 21st Century marketing-led notions of children’s music.

Through the design and use of a Children’s Music Quotient, I propose a quantitative method of the categorization of recordings for children. The CMQ reveals why many Children’s Choice songs with bawdy and violent adult lyrics were regularly requested on a programme aimed at young children, and how categorising music by the age of the target audience is inherently problematic.

Diana und die Medien: Wie ein Skandal-Interview ihr Leben veränderte.
Die Sensationspresse war für Prinzessin Diana eine permanente, aber weitgehend unsichtbare Bedrohung. So zeigt es der soeben erschienene Kinofilm «Spencer», der das Drama um ihre Person anhand der Weihnachtstage 1991 nacherzählt.
Der Film, in dem Kristen Stewart Diana verkörpert, zeigt an einigen Stellen den Horror, den die Prinzessin mit den Medien erlebte. So wurden beispielsweise die Vorhänge in ihrem Zimmer zugenäht, weil der Hof befürchtet, dass Paparazzi sie unbekleidet am Fenster ablichten könnten.
Die Journalistenmeute war ein stetiger Begleiter Dianas. Viele Medienskandale bleiben im Film jedoch unerwähnt.
Einer davon, der erst kürzlich aufgearbeitet wurde, erzählen wir an dieser Stelle nach. Der Fall zeigt, wie selbst die BBC als öffentlich-rechtlicher Sender und Flaggschiff der seriösen Berichterstattung an den Medienskandalen munter mitwirkte.

This text is a review that I wrote about Kneecap's debut EP release entitled 3CAG. It is an expansion on a piece originally published in Irish by Nós at https://nos.ie/cultur/ceol/ta-comaoin-a-cur-ag-kneecap-ar-eirinn-tri-ghniomhaiochas-soisialta/
My review discusses the attitudes manifested in Kneecap's lyrics to the policing systems and broadcasters both in the U.K. and in the Republic of Ireland. It also outlines some of the band's exploration of the legality and the stigma associated with drug use in Irish society.

In October 1953, American folk-song collector Alan Lomax broadcast his first programme about his collection of Spanish folk music on the BBC’s Third Programme. As part of the project of this dissertation, I have recreated this programme by piecing together the script with the recordings used in it. I will analyse Lomax’s time in Spain (1952-1953) through the lens of the dictatorship’s thawing relations with the West, and its ideological use of folk music. Situating Lomax within the institutional history of the technological fields of the Third Programme’s studios, and the mobile studios of rural Spain, will help to understand his presentation of the recording process within the broadcast. As well as this technological world, Romantic travelogues about Spain and anthropological Mediterraneanism will offer insights into Lomax’s presentation of antiquity within the broadcast. Lomax’s legacy within ethnomusicology, I will argue, is best heard through an engagement with the ways in which he utilised the music that he recorded, mirroring his mixing of fieldwork and production.

Thesis, M.Phil. in European Studies, University of Cambridge (UK), 1995.

Full text available from Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository, DOI:  https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.14329.

The thesis offers a unified synthesis of British radio propaganda against Nazi Germany during the Second World War both in regard to the organisation of the British propaganda apparatus and to its output.

This essay describes my involvement with the 36-part 'Gelora Api Revolusi’ ("Born in Fire")' BBC Indonesia Service radio series broadcast three times a day every Saturday from 20 April 1985 through to 21 December 1985 to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Indonesian independence, I will be forever in Colin Wild’s debt for choosing me to be his co-editor in the preparation of the historic ‘ the series was Colin Wild’s ‘love letter’ to Indonesia, a country and a people with whom he had fallen in love with after his return to London from Bangkok in 1972 to head up the BBC’s Indonesia Service. Our series celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Indonesian independence. Subsequently published by PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama under the title 'Gelora Api Revolusi: Sebuah Antologi Sejarah' (1986), and in English as 'Born in Fire. The Indonesian Struggle for Independence. An Anthology' (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1988), it was a series which had a wide impact as numerous friends who came of age in the 1980s have testified to me over the past decade (2010-20) while I have lived in Indonesia. The following appreciation of Colin Wild was published in Indonesian translation (courtesy of Mas Eka Budianta) in 'London Calling: Pengalaman Bekerja di BBC (ed. Arya Gunawan Usis et al) (Jakarta: Penerbit Kosa Kata Kita, October 2020), pp.361-67.

As a high circulation publication with a well-preserved archive The BBC’s Listener magazine offers a rare opportunity to examine the details of publishing and taste in visual art in the interwar period. This article examines the surprising variety of writers and broadcasters involved with the BBC’s visual arts coverage, the views they held, and the attempts made to analyse and mould ‘popular’ taste that eventually led into the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain.

The BBC’s The British Empire (1972) and Channel Four’s Empire (2003) generated significant negative comment during and after their respective broadcasts. Their topic, the British Empire, was an important reason for this, but other factors, including their approach to production and marketing, public and critical expectations, and contemporary politics were also significant. Despite these similarities, an examination of the critical reactions to each series reveals how public attitudes changed in the thirty years between their broadcast, to British imperialism, public service television, and public discourse.

The BBC television drama anthology The Wednesday Play, broadcast from 1964 to 1970 on the BBC1 channel, was high-profile and often controversial in its time and has since been central to accounts of British television’s ‘golden age.’ This article demonstrates that production technologies and methods were more diverse at that time than is now acknowledged, and that The Wednesday Play dramas drew both approving but also very critical responses from contemporary viewers and professional reviewers. It analyses the ways that the physical spaces of production for different dramas in the series, and the different technologies of shooting and recording that were adopted in these production spaces, are associated with but do not determine aesthetic style. The adoption of single-camera location filming rather than the established production method of multi-camera studio videotaping in some of the dramas in the series has been important to The Wednesday Play’s significance, but each production method was used in different ways. The dramas drew their dramatic forms and aesthetic emphases from both theatre and cinema, as well as connecting with debates about the nature of drama for television. Institutional and regulatory frameworks such as control over staff working away from base, budgetary considerations and union agreements also impacted on decisions about how programmes were made. The article makes use of records from the BBC Written Archives Centre, as well as published scholarship. By placing The Wednesday Play in a range of overlapping historical contexts, its identity can be understood as transitional, differentiated and contested.

The Spanish Service was established in June 1939, two months after the end of the civil war in Spain and shortly before the start of the Second World War. Its implementation was strongly affected by these conflicts in the context of new international relations. Therefore, this study of the Spanish Service during 1939–1945 allows not only a better understanding of the communicational strategies developed by the BBC, but also of the complex Anglo-Spanish relations and the important role played by the Spanish-language broadcasts therein. The study is mainly based on archival documents from the National Archives in London and memoirs.

Hutton report looked into the death of Dr David Kelly, a Welsh scientist and authority on biological warfare and an honourable government civil servant.

“For me, his death, lying in an English field with his wrists slashed, became the most symbolic moment of the whole of the Iraq War.’ - Simon Armitage

“It is no exaggeration to say that between 1990 and his death in 2003, Dr Kelly probably did more to make the world a more secure place than anyone on the planet. Even among the elite group of international weapons inspectors, he was regarded with some awe, as the inspectors' inspector.”
- Norman Baker, The Strange Death of David Kelly. London: Methuen 2007 p. 358

Poems for Lord Hutton,  Ed Todd Swift Nthposition 2003 p.8

This essay discusses the use of the word ‘anarchy’ by the German art historian and philosopher Edgar Wind (1900-1971) in his Art and Anarchy (1963). The book — which resulted from Wind’s homonymous 1960 BBC Reith Lecture — advanced a controversial thesis: contemporary artistic experience had lost its ‘sting,’ that is, its capacity to stir spiritual turmoil and, in this manner, provoke societal transformations. To that end, Wind understood ‘anarchy’ as applied to the arts, in a positive framework. However, despite the titular prominence of the word, Wind rarely uses it in the text or overtly defines it. Except for a few brief mentions in his Nachlass, there is little understanding regarding why Wind chose such a contentious term for the title of his critique on modern art. This paper aims to outline the publishing history of Art and Anarchy, assess the socio-cultural background of Wind’s Reith Lectures, and evaluate the semantic range of ‘anarchy’ vis-à-vis Wind’s theory of art.

This article focuses on how histories of television construct narratives about what the medium is, how it changes, and how it works in relation to other media. The key examples discussed are dramatic adaptations made and screened in Britain. They include early forms of live transmission of performance shot with multiple cameras, usually in a TV studio, with the aim of bringing an intimate and immediate experience to the viewer. This form shares aspects of medial identity with broadcast radio and live television programmes, and with theatre. The article also analyses adaptations of a later period, mainly filmed dramas for television that were broadcast in weekly serialized episodes, and shot on location to offer viewers a rich engagement with a realized fictional world. Here, film production techniques and technologies are adapted for television, alongside the routines of daily and weekly scheduling that characterize television broadcasting. The article identifies and analyses the questions about what is proper to television that arise from the different forms that adaptations took. The analyses show that television has been a mixed form across its history, while often aiming to reject such intermediality and claim its own specificity as a medium. Television adaptation has, paradoxically, operated as the ground to assert and debate what television could and should be, through a process of transforming pre-existing material. The performance of television's role has taken place through the relay, repetition, and remediation that adaptation implies, and also through the repudiation of adaptation.

Eight years after the end of the Second World War, well into the Cold War, Salvador de Madariaga wrote about Arturo Barea: “Ni que decir tiene que la honorabilidad personal y profesional de Barea no están en causa ni para nada entran en las consideraciones que siguen. Considero su elección un grave error por parte de Vds. En este país [Gran Bretaña] está considerado (y poco importa que sea justa o injusta esta consideración para los fines prácticos que se proponen Vds.) como un bevanista, y en último término, un neutralista.”These lines were addressed to the “Comité de Honor” of the journal Ibérica in the context of an “anti-neutralist” campaign led by Republican anti-communists through the Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura, a publication of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Madariaga’s accusation is that Arturo Barea had, over the years following the end of the Second World War, failed to fully embrace the anti-communist cause. Given how Barea’s principal network in the early 1940s had been in the Non Communist Left, this is surprising. But given how Arturo liked to emphasise that he was “anti-capillista” it is less so. The main question, however, has to be whether the implicit accusation of a failure to take a clear political position in the post-war period is tenable. Where did Barea stand in the polarized political spectrum, and where with regard to Republican exile culture? Through a a close reading of a sample of Barea's broadcasts for the BBC Latin American Service, this paper argues that his supposed “neutralism” was more than just an equidistant position between the US and the USSR (which, in the understanding of Madariaga, favoured the Soviet stance by not attacking it aggressively enough). It was in reality a very clear position linked, especially from 1945, with the politics of the British Labour Party’s left wing leading up to the “Third Force” movement of the so-called Bevanists.

As the pace of decolonisation increased in the immediate postwar period, the press and the BBC communicated developments relating to imperial decline to the Britain. However, the average Briton’s opinion about the rapidly declining Empire remains in question. Was there an ‘inability to face, never mind actually mourn, the profound change in circumstances and moods that followed the end of the Empire…’?  Conversely, was the Empire irrelevant, something that never truly impacted upon national identity and therefore could decline without notice – did it ‘…[leave] barely a trace’ on British culture?  Juxtaposing the language used to describe Empire during its ideological height with the language used to define and describe it in the postwar period illustrates that there was a shift in the way it was portrayed in various media.

Between 2007 and 2017 in the United Kingdom, BBC radio services were regulated by the BBC Trust, with the performance of BBC radio stations monitored against the so-called ‘drivers of public value’. Utilizing the Reach, Quality, Impact and Value for Money performance framework (RQIV), periodical reviews of BBC Radio Service Licences were carried out. This article considers two such reviews, of BBC radio stations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and BBC Local Radio services in England. The use of the public value approach in the governance of public service radio in the United Kingdom is assessed. It is argued that the public value approach places a serious focus on audience responses, but that the use of the RQIV framework is problematic when considering the cultural nature of broadcasting. It is suggested that the BBC is increasingly being forced to make decisions for political-economic reasons, rather than for reasons of public value.

In 1929, the BBC Radio broadcast "Miniature Biographies," a quirky series of six installments that was rooted in the experimental hybrids of fact and fiction associated with the New Biography.  Not only did this series include contributions by modern biographers Virginia Woolf and Harold Nicolson, it also featured another member of the Bloomsbury Group, literary critic Desmond MacCarthy, who focused his essay on Dr. John Watson.  MacCarthy was a key figure in developing a writing style that Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts later adopted as "The Game" or "Scholarship."  These expository investigations treat Holmes and Watson as actual people rather than fictional characters.  As a tribute to MacCarthy, I have adopted this style in my paper.  MacCarthy's radio essay "Dr. Watson" demonstrates that modern biography was a vibrant topic within the popular culture of the late 1920s.  This paper also explores connections between Sherlockian authors and modernist publications, revealing an intriguing intersection between modernist writing and the Sherlockian Game.

Far more effectively than any one newspaper, magazine, publishing house, or film studio, broadcasting became "the nation's voice" in countries across the globe.  The project of defining "who we are, who we are not" (in Tony Morrison's words) -- always a task that involves internal as well as external negotiations of identity -- thus became a worldwide endeavor through the timely introduction of broadcasting technology in the second decade of the twentieth century.  Two "global paradigms" emerged: the public service system established by most European countries, and the market-driven system in the United States.  This article focuses on early efforts by the BBC and US commercial networks to construct notions of national identity and a national pubic sphere, in tension and dialogue with each other.

Published in Planet Television.  Eds. Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar.  New York University Press, 2003.

La scrittura violata è la storia del cammino accidentato di un romanzo, Fontamara di Silone, su cui all’inizio furono in pochi a scommettere. Ambientato in un paesino abruzzese inventato ma vero, remotissimo dagli eventi della grande storia, il romanzo parlò un linguaggio universale, perfettamente inteso dai “cafoni” di ogni latitudine: il linguaggio del riscatto sociale. Fu compreso benissimo, perciò, anche dai governi: sia da quelli del fronte antinazista, che lo usarono come arma propagandistica contro il nemico, fingendo di non notarne la carica eversiva, sia da quelli fascisti, efficienti nella compilazione di indici di libri proibiti. Ma si sa, lo spirito soffia dove vuole e il testo siloniano continuò a circolare sotterraneamente anche negli ambienti più ostili, compresa l’Italia mussoliniana, dove venne letto in traduzioni clandestine o ascoltato di nascosto sotto forma di radiodramma dagli altoparlanti di Radio Londra.
Questa singolare opera di un esule, composta da una materia ibrida a metà tra cronaca e politica, letteratura e giornalismo, mal sopportava evidentemente i limiti di una “forma”, adattandosi benissimo al genere o all’idioma che le si richiedeva, di volta in volta, di indossare. Il romanzo rinacque, quindi, come testo teatrale, ballata, radiodramma e, così facendo, andò oltre se stesso, offrendosi al lettore come esempio di quella libertà che nelle sue pagine è inseguita con tanta passione.

THE ONLINE SITE IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR THE MOMENT BUT DO GET IN TOUCH IF I CAN HELP WITH PD INFORMATION OR TO DEVELOP THE ARCHIVE.

I'VE UPLOADED THE REPORT ON THE ARCHIVE HOLDING PREPARED BY IEUAN FRANKLIN.

http://www.philipdonnellan.co.uk/

The aim of this project is to evaluate and advertise the work of Philip Donnellan, an innovative and socially committed documentary filmmaker.

Philip Donnellan worked as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC in Birmingham from the mid 1950s. A pioneer in giving working people and minorities a voice on television, Donnellan was a maverick who challenged the establishment through his work and ruffled feathers. By way of example, the BBC has never transmitted what, nonetheless, is one of his best-known works, 'The Irishmen'. 

He used his position in the BBC as a documentarist in order to portray and to engage with various traditions, cultures and identities in the region. His innovation and the instructive value of his work and ideas lies in how it explored the lines of change, communication and migration that forged the post-war character of the region - in films such as 'The Colony' and the aforementioned 'The Irishmen'. His practice came from a commitment to public service broadcasting and the possibilities of truly regional production.

Throughout the online site is information about Donnellan's life and work, his importance and projects designed to recognise his contribution to TV documentary.

The online site is intended to act as a focal point for those interested in this work and exhibitors interested in organising individual screenings of his work and retrospectives.

It will serve to support the consolidation, exploration and funding of the Philip Donnellan Archive which is deposited at the Birmingham City Archive (http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/archives).

We would like to hear from anyone with an interest in Donnellan, documentary and TV, former colleagues, anyone who owns materials likely to be of value to the Donnellan Archive, researchers, funders, publishers etc.

The website was established out of collaboration between the family of Philip Donnellan, Banner Theatre (http://www.bannertheatre.co.uk) and BCU. It was made possible by the financial support of Screen West Midlands (http://www.screenwm.co.uk).

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Als keiner mehr gegen Hitler führen will, ruft seine Radiostimme zur Rebellion. Charles de Gaulle begründet später Frankreichs Hyper-Präsidentialismus. Marco Althaus über Charles de Gaulles eigenwilligen Führungsanspruch / Key words Schlagwörter: Appell vom 18. Juni,  Frankreich, Freie Franzosen, Führung, Leadership, Grandeur, Prestige, Propaganda, Radio, Rundfunk, Vichy / Organisationen: BBC, Havas / Persons / Personen: Winston Churchill, Stanley Hoffman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Nixon, Philippe Pétain, Maurice Schuman, Andrew Shennan, Richmond Temple, Martin Walker / Publikationen: Le fil de l'épée (Die Schneide des Schwerts)