Whose side was he on?

War hero, polyglot, novelist, pioneering media scholar, educator, Stuart Hood was also, as Tony Garnett put it, “the most influential Marxist working in the senior management of the BBC” and one of the most fascinating, and reticent, figures in British broadcasting’s first century.

The long-overdue essays in Stuart Hood: Twentieth Century Partisan were prompted by two small conferences, one in Glasgow and the other in London in 2019, commemorating Hood’s death eight years earlier. Gathered were broadcasters, political comrades, experts in history and literature, as well as colleagues in media studies (including the present writer). But even the unusual breadth of this gathering was not quite enough to solve the central mystery. Given his politics, how on earth did Hood come to be a senior broadcasting executive? Were the MI5 guys in the cellar of BH, those vetting all “sensitive” appointments, sleeping – or even comatose? Or was Hood actually their man on the 3rd Floor?

An intelligence connection, after all, was credible. Hood had met the BBC’s Sir Hugh Carleton Greene in Germany as the Second World War was ending. Greene had run the BBC German service out of Bush House in the 30s and was now setting up German radio anew in the British Zone. On their return to Britain, Greene, newly promoted as controller of the Bush House overseas services, took Hood into the BBC and its radio journalism culture. Hood’s facility with languages – for example, picking up Russian in Berlin in 1945 – must have played a key role in this appointment. But, equally – given the rapidly heating Cold War – his fraternisation with obviously suspect Reds ought to have given pause. Tipping the balance must have been the central episode of his wartime experience. For his generation, what one did in the war was a prime indicator of worth. It is not for nothing that this collection is appositely subtitled Twentieth Century Partisan.

The son of a Scottish dominie, Hood was born in 1915 and read Italian at Edinburgh University. Commissioned in 1940, he was captured on the Italian front and imprisoned in 1943. The camp comandante, however, believing the end was in sight for the Axis, opened the gates and the British officers made their way to join the advancing Allies south of Rome. But Hood, in full command of Italian, went no further than Tuscany where, utterly voluntarily, he became a partizano leader under the nomme de guerre “Carlino”. The seven months he spent harassing the Fascists and Nazi forces included moments of horror and personal anguish which were never to leave him. They cemented his politics. Hood’s radicalism was seared into his being, but it was disguised by a soft-spoken demeanour and a glittering intelligence. Having “a good war” was a defining factor in all contemporary character evaluations and his record would seem to have got him hired, rendering him institutionally more or less invulnerable. As far as we (and possibly MI5 as well) know, this is what enabled him to become the Corporation’s highest-ranking (known) Marxist thus far.

Greene jumped from Bush to Broadcasting House in 1960 to become DG. A year later, he appointed Hood controller of programmes, television – and what programmes they were: Z Cars, The Wednesday Play, That was the Week that Was. These titles are the battle honours of Greene’s successful campaign to save the Corporation – “Auntie BBC” by this time – from its own stuffiness, and Hood was (as Garnett puts it) Greene’s consigliere. But it wasn’t easy: “I was increasingly [Hood was to write] having to adopt a public posture that was increasingly at variance with my own convictions…I had to make the right noises.” And it could not last. Being (in his own words) “a born escaper”, by 1964 he was gone, barely to figure in the Corporation’s official history. After a stint as an ITV company executive, he slowly crossed the road to the academy, mildly flirting with the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), the most marginalised Trotskyites, and – more seriously – becoming, in the 70s, a professor of film at the Royal College of Art.

This was long before senior media figures regularly retired to be the heads of their Oxbridge alma maters and Hood was by far the most senior media ex-executive to take hood and gown at that time. “Medja studies”, after all, was then a uniform term of abuse, especially in the trade. With a series of interventions, which could not be dismissed as uninformed, he thus became a key figure in establishing the agenda of this project with publications beginning with A Survey of Television (1967). Collectively, his writings were (are) essential to understanding UK media culture as the 20th century closed.

But beyond the cultural – and boardroom – insights of this body of work, there stands a novelist and translator. Throughout the vagaries of his day-job journey as broadcaster and educator, Hood also had a second life as a person of letters. He was a skilled translator from Italian, German, French and Russian and an accomplished, if rather overlooked, novelist – to both of which Stuart Hood: Twentieth Century Partisan pays astute attention. The novels are as European as the translations, in that their intellectualism stands in a European (which includes Scottish) rather than an English tradition. They echo the rich experiences of his war and his working life. They are elegantly infused with his politics and deep learning.

As this collection makes clear, there can be few late 20th century media figures more deserving of a full-scale biography. There is an unpublished PhD on the fiction, but, surely, a media studies student – after all, one of Hood’s legatees – ought to get down to the Caversham archive. We really need a full account of that pivotal revolutionary 60s moment in the BBC’s history, one that acknowledges Stuart Hood’s part in it. Why, we might even find out if he really was some sort of spy.