On a spring day, two distinguished drama critics and broadcasters, James
Agate of The Sunday Times and his protégé Alan “Jock” Dent of the Manchester Guardian, were out in the West End. Agate wrote in his diary: “Of a six-footfour figure whom we saw striding along Regent Street this afternoon, Jock said: ‘Dante without the poetry; Irving without the mystery;
Mephistopheles without the fun.’ It was Sir John Reith.” The first Director-
General of the BBC looked austere and formidable not just because of his
unusually towering height (Agate’s estimate may have been as much as three
inches short of the true measure) but because of the penetrating, severe and
censorious gaze which expressed his dour, inflexible personality and selfrighteous puritanism.

Reith was not a broadcaster (there was no such creature when he became,
initially, managing director of the British Broadcasting Company in 1922) or
a journalist or a performer: he was a manager with a training in mechanical
engineering. And, according to a biography published last year by his
daughter, his personal and political attitudes were repulsive. Yet it was this
egotistical autocrat who was able clearly and definitively to state the
objectives and purposes of public service broadcasting: to educate, inform
and entertain.

As Dent’s description demonstrates, Reith might well be accused of
having a limited and joyless idea of the entertainment element in the BBC’s
task. He also had a secretive and partial view of what information it should
provide: he was willing, for example, to suppress news of the looming crisis
over Edward VIII’s marriage, as were the overwhelming majority of
newspaper editors and proprietors. But in the realm of education he acted
with determination, no doubt inspired by the curtailment of his own
academic ambitions – his father sent him on an apprenticeship when Reith
himself longed to go to university. The foundations laid by Reith meant, for
listeners and viewers in the era that followed, exposure to great music by the
BBC’s own orchestras, talks by leading academics, and plays both from the
classical repertory and new commissions, as well as programmes made
especially for schools and, later, the Open University.

At the point when Agate and Dent encountered him, that day in April
1939, Reith had already been out of office at the BBC for nine months and the
BBC itself was about to be recruited to the war effort as a vital weapon of
propaganda. When peace arrived, the whole of Britain had learned to rely on
the BBC to satisfy a growing need for knowledge, news and pleasure. It served
the nation well, still basing its work on Reith’s attitude, summarised in his
reported remark that “the BBC has never attempted to give the public what
it wants. It gives the public what it ought to have”, a stance nowadays
stigmatised as elitist, but at least one aiming for high quality.

As the BBC drifted away from Reithian principles, it came under the
leadership of a succession of directors-general less concerned with the
nature of programmes than with numbers, either in matters of accounting or
the size of audiences. Their motivations seemed to be based on commercial
competitiveness rather than quality, with the inevitable end result that, now,
whole days can go by without the BBC offering a reason for an adult to switch
to one of its television channels.

Current Director-General Mark Thompson and the BBC Trust may have
had little room for manoeuvre after a licence-fee settlement that was less than
expected, other than, as detailed in his “Delivering Creative Future” speech,
large-scale staff cuts, property sales and – crucially for BBC journalism – the
integration of the news division. Yet, despite the title, the emphasis of the
speech was managerial rather than creative, and one of its main thrusts was
towards the multiple uses of programmes through on-demand access by way
of new media, such as iPods and the internet. There will be less of what
Thompson called “middling” output, and instead what he calls “the best”.
That seems likely to mean programmes that are award-winning and saleable
– there’s no doubt about the BBC’s money-making power in the global
market – rather than individualistic and interesting.

More of the detail of what is wanted will emerge as BBC Vision
executives tour the country to give their autumn commissioning briefings.
Behind the turmoil at the BBC is the unspoken menace of potential
privatisation: there must be some managers who have an ambition, without
admitting the fact to themselves or each other, to take the BBC brand into
the stock market. Now, before it is too late, is the time to insist that the BBC
is a public service corporation with a duty to to enrich the minds and lives of
the nation.

How should the BBC put its house in order? Comments welcomed.