ABSTRACT

The technology of broadcasting was introduced as a marginal element in very complex social structures. It is indeed difficult to realise how marginal it then seemed, as we look back from a period in which broadcasting policies have become a central issue of politics. The key factor in the earlier period, as has already been emphasised, was that the directing impulse came from the manufacturers of broadcasting apparatus, and especially of receivers. Yet because of the general importance of radio telephony there was always another kind of pressure, from political authorities: questions of the security and integrity of the nation-state were implicitly and at times explicitly raised, but were complicated by the fact that the political authorities were thinking primarily of radio telephony while the manufacturers were looking forward to broadcasting. In Britain all transmitters and receivers had to be licensed by the Post Office, under an Act dating from 1904. When the Marconi company began broadcasting in 1920, there were complaints that this use for entertainment of what was primarily a commercial and transport-control medium was frivolous and dangerous, and there was even a temporary ban, under pressure from radio-telephonic interests and the Armed Forces. There were then complicated negotiations between the competing manufacturers, the Post Office and the Armed

Services Committee; and in 1922 a consortium of manufacturers, who would provide programmes under terms agreed with the Post Office and the Government, was formed as the British Broadcasting Company. The keys to this agreement were the granting of monopoly to the Company and the decision to finance broadcasting by the sale of licences for receivers. In the period 1925-1926, through continuous controversy and negotiation, what had been essentially a public utility company was becoming a true public broadcasting corporation: the BBC which received its charter in 1926. Granted the elements of monopoly and of guaranteed finance from the sale of licences, it acquired as a by-product of regulation the necessary continuity and resources to become a producer rather than merely a transmitter of broadcasting. This qualitative change in the character of the institution was never clearly foreseen, at least by a majority of those involved in the negotiations, and its potential would not have been realised if the definition of broadcasting as a public service-which at the time meant very different things-had not been specialised, by its early controllers, to a positive programming policy. The specific elements in the British solution can be seen as threefold:

(i) the early development of Britain as an industrial society, with an extended communications network over a relatively small geographical area, had already to an important extent ‘nationalised’ its culture; it had, for example, led to a predominantly national press.