ABSTRACT

From 1918-79, Britain was governed by what Nicholas Garnham calls a ‘tripartite corporatist consensus’, which established a system of public service broadcasting as ‘one of its institutional forms of political and cultural hegemony’ (Garnham, 1986: 28). The organisation of British broadcasting in the form of a public service

monopoly was the result of deliberations by two government-appointed committees: the Sykes Committee, which reported in 1923 and recommended that, given the potential social and political power of radio broadcasting in the UK, it should remain free of control by the government of the day; and the Crawford Committee, which, reporting in 1926, called for broadcasting to be free of commercial domination. It was believed not only that it was innately desirable for a potent new means of mass communication to be exempted from harsh commercial imperatives, but that wavelength scarcity would tend towards a monopoly structure for the emerging broadcasting industry. That being the case, better that such a monopoly be held in public rather than private hands. The British Broadcasting Corporation, as it was to be called, would be

funded by its audience in the form of a licence fee. It would be available throughout the country and free at the point of reception; it would play the role, consciously articulated, of promoting a sense of Britishness and national community, while educating, informing and entertaining in the manner regarded

as desirable by the establishment of the time. Most importantly, public service broadcasting would enjoy constitutional independence from the politicians, standing aloof from their partisan debates and self-interested policies. Thus broadcasting in Britain was defined from the very outset – in contrast

to the USA, where development followed an uninhibitedly commercial path, or the USSR, where broadcasting was commandeered by the Bolsheviks and put to use as a part of the propaganda apparatus – as something too serious to be left to the marketplace or to the whims and manipulations of politicians. Its entertainment would be ‘worthy’ and enlightening, popularising and upholding the highest standards of British social and cultural life. Its journalism would be put to the service of British democracy, informing audiences about public affairs from a standpoint of political impartiality and balance. For the BBC, unlike the newspapers with their openly declared biases, there was to be no taking of sides. Such a course was ‘consensual’, to repeat Garnham’s phrase, because it

reassured each of the major political parties to know that none of its opponents could hijack the broadcasting system while in office. The existing media proprietors, on the other hand, had no wish to see broadcasting become a competitor for scarce advertising revenue, and so they had little objection to a publicly funded system. And public service broadcasting was an institution of ‘political and cultural hegemony’ insofar as it could be, and was used to disseminate, throughout an increasingly enfranchised British society, values, ideas and information that contributed to its smooth and relatively conflict-free reproduction over decades. The early British broadcasters regarded themselves as key players in the

construction of a national culture – a culture that reflected, as it was bound to do, the unequal class and status structure of British capitalism, within which certain forms and means of expression were preferred over others; certain art forms regarded as legitimate but not others; and certain groups regarded as ideologically suspect, even subversive. The public service principles laid down in the 1920s for the BBC were

extended to commercial broadcasting when Independent Television (ITV) was set up in 1955. Although the ITV companies would operate on a fully commercial basis, deriving their income from the sale of advertising time, the organisation they jointly formed to produce their national and international news, Independent Television News (ITN), was subject to the same constraints in coverage as the BBC’s news and current affairs service. Regional news and network current affairs, which were to be produced by the regional companies themselves, also had to be impartial. Neither advertisers, nor owners of the ITV companies, could exert pressure on ITN’s editorial decision-making processes, although its survival and thus the career prospects of its personnel clearly depended on their ability to produce a service which would be popular with the viewers. As a public service, British broadcasting was only one of a number of

twentieth-century British institutions which embodied such features as ‘universality

of provision’, ‘quality of service’, and the suppression of market forces. Education, health, public libraries and state welfare provision, as they developed after the Second World War, represented the application of similar principles in other key spheres of social life, made possible by the emergence of Labour as a governing party, and the subsequent ‘social democratic consensus’, which straddled the major political parties throughout the 1950s, 1960s and most of the 1970s. The 1980s crisis in the public services, and public service broadcasting in particular, stemmed directly from the ending of this consensus and the coming to power in 1979 of the Conservative Party headed by Margaret Thatcher.