Are we still in love?

This is a book to warm the hearts of supporters of the BBC. It is an engagingly written journey through the organisation’s century of existence, and it captures all the reasons why public broadcasting is as essential now as it ever was. But Professor Hendy also illustrates, sometimes unintentionally, why the BBC has a fight on its hands to stay afloat for another 100 years.

Hendy is at his best summoning up the people and capturing the atmosphere of different times. It is individuals who made the BBC, most obviously its first leader John Reith. Fortunately for this country and for the wider world, Reith had a vision of what broadcasting could add to the public realm, and it was by no means certain that Reithian values would have existed without Reith.

The start of broadcasting offered a clean sheet: nobody had done it before in this country, and the pioneers were making it up as they went along. One of the other founders of the British Broadcasting Company (as it was in 1922) was Cecil Lewis, who was less keen on the “inform” or “educate” part of what became the BBC’s mission. “I didn’t really care what was happening in Abyssinia,” he said. “What I was up to, that was interesting, and that means drama…a new artist or a big show or a big concert…We were an entertainment medium.”

This was reinforced when television arrived – a medium about which Reith was deeply suspicious. Hendy’s account of the opening night of TV broadcasts from Alexandra Palace might explain why. The acts included a tuxedo-clad male trio from the Cole Porter show Anything Goes!, a pair of Chilean dancers, and Pogo the pantomime horse. Sport has also always been a driver of the BBC’s offering, hosting many of the first outside broadcasts – whereas at the start of television there was no customised news service, and the only offering was British Movietone News.

And yet clashes with the government about the content of broadcasts go back to the BBC’s inception. Hendy vividly tells the story of the General Strike of 1926, when the prime minister Stanley Baldwin did one of his key broadcasts to the nation from Reith’s own home. I would not recommend that the current director-general Tim Davie offer the same facility to Rishi Sunak. Under intense pressure from the government, Reith denied a right of reply to the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald and even turned down a proposed conciliatory broadcast from the archbishop of Canterbury. Winston Churchill, then chancellor of the Exchequer, does not emerge well from this tale since he advocated the BBC taking an unabashedly propagandistic line against the strikers. As Reith later said, “there was I, in the invidious position of having to arbitrate between the prime minister of the country and the archbishop of Canterbury because I was so frightened of what Churchill would make of it”. Complete state control was the threat.

The BBC emerged rather better from the Second World War. Despite the horrific circumstances – a war for national survival against the Nazis – and suffocating relationships with the Ministry of Information, the managers of the time realised that to be credible, the BBC also needed to respond to the interests of the people of Britain. They wanted more than ever the entertainment and comedy that brought communities together in those dark days, and also the most credible news service that was compatible with national security. The introduction of Radio Newsreel, with its modern sensibility about breaking news and eyewitness accounts, set a pattern for the free reporting that was then possible in peacetime.

The battles with governments didn’t stop, of course. It has usually been Conservative administrations that have found the BBC ideologically distasteful, and the book chastises them for trying to clip the corporation’s wings. But if they set out to destroy the BBC – Hendy claims Margaret Thatcher saw the BBC as an “enemy” – they made a poor job of it. Through all the crises and government reports and inquiries of the 20th century, the BBC normally emerged unscathed and often slightly bigger than before. Hendy rather lets Labour governments off the hook by saying they were sometimes “disappointed” by the BBC, partly because of “its apparent failure to compensate for the right-wing partisanship of the British press”. This does not explain the way the Blair government attacked the BBC over the reporting of the origins of the Iraq war and set up the appalling Hutton inquiry, or some of Harold Wilson’s bullying in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the bigger question underlying the later stages of the book is why the BBC is so vulnerable as it enters its second century. It’s partly the volume of competition, of course. Hendy is possibly too kind about the BBC’s self-inflicted scandals and also about its creativity: Strictly Come Dancing puts in heavy-duty work as a repeated example of something that’s distinctive and with mass appeal, as it does indeed in the BBC1 schedules. But this is the BBC which is also reviving ancient commercial formats such as Gladiators, and whose daytime schedule is full of quizzes, property and antiques shows just like all the other channels.

More serious, however, is the public expectation of the breadth of voice that the BBC is uniquely well-placed to capture. In his earlier chapters, Hendy welcomes the broadcasts from the communities of the UK that started being possible in the 1930s – sharing the experiences of working people in an unprecedented way – and he rightly praises the explosion of creativity in the 1960s with new voices that reinvigorated drama and comedy. Homelessness, racism and teenage pregnancy became part of the national conversation. But he stumbles over Brexit, where he approvingly cites a view that the debate was about reason (Remain) versus emotion (Leave) and says that the arguments in favour of Brexit were as erroneous as those of climate change deniers. This reflects the corporation’s own failure to understand or report sufficiently on the tide of support for Brexit or to recognise that the politicians advocating it should be taken seriously – and that there is a political case for not being in the EU even if the economic arguments for leave didn’t stack up. In other words, even for Remainers such as Hendy (and me) you can’t just be in favour of hearing from the grassroots when you happen to agree with them.

This matters because Hendy ends his final chapter thus: “When its political enemies are circling with such murderous intent, the crucial question we should ask ourselves is surely this: will the people – all the people – return the favour and stand on the side of the BBC?” Well, that depends whether people think the BBC is on their side – and the population includes Red Wall Conservatives in Bishop Auckland and independence supporters in Dunfermline as well as the swathes of the metropolitan and university-educated who fill so many roles at the BBC. That is, I know, the concern of Tim Davie, and he deserves recognition for advocating the kind of universality that would preserve the strengths of the BBC articulated so well throughout this book.