Page 100 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Britain: the BBC and the loss of the
disciplined audience

John Reith, who started his career as the BBC’s Managing Director in 1922, had a clear
view of the task of broadcasting, which he could develop under the rather felicitous
circumstances of deliberate disregard of the real world of actual audiences. He saw the
BBC as a ship of which he was the chief pilot—a nautical metaphor which suggested a
mission of leading and directing the audience in the modern world (Kumar 1977).
Echoing the legacy of cultural theorist Matthew Arnold (1963[1867]), he developed a
highly commanding philosophy about the BBC’s responsibility towards the audience: ‘As
we conceive it, our responsibility is to carry into the greatest possible number of homes
everything that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour, or
achievement’ (quoted in Briggs 1985:55).
Reith’s discourse securely articulated the values, standards and beliefs of the British
upper middle-class, especially that part educated at Oxford and Cambridge. Emanating
from it was a preference for radio programmes featuring classical music, plays, poetry,
talks and discussions. More popular programmes such as comedy, popular music, and
variety were also included, but in a manner, context, and style that revealed an upper
middle-class approach and orientation. For example, the BBC had an active musical
policy in the hope to ‘raise’ the musical taste of its listeners because Britain was
considered a backward musical nation. Entertainment, then, was not so much rejected as
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it was defined educationally. In an attempt to oppose the ‘Americanization’ of popular
culture which already started to concern British cultural critics in the 1920s, the BBC
aimed to develop a sense of discrimination in the audience by giving it the opportunity to
listen to ‘better, healthier music’ than pop music. It was assumed that once people heard
classical music, they would realise its superiority to popular tunes (Frith 1983). One
Labour Party MP referred to the inherent class bias of BBC culture when he suggested in
Parliament in the 1930s that the BBC was ‘run very largely by people who do not know
the working class, do not understand the working class point of view, but are seeking
evidently to mould the working class’ (Briggs 1985:151). But such criticism did not
prevail, nor did it affect BBC policy in most of its inter-war years. On the contrary, in
Reith’s interpretation public service broadcasting was meant to be a form of enlightened
cultural dictatorship, in which a single set of standards and tastes was imposed upon the
entire national audience (Scannell and Cardiff 1982). Any idea of a stratified audience
was rejected, as was any division of the programme output into ‘highbrow’ and
‘lowbrow’. What Reith strived for was the creation of a common national culture: the
BBC’s self-conception was that of a ‘national church’ (Reith’s own words) to whose
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authority all citizens must be subjected.
Such rightminded authoritarianism should not be too easily dismissed as manipulative
or elitist. Rather, these ideas were linked to a well-intentioned stance on broadcasting as a