The Economist January 29th 2022 Culture 71
ports or pieces of music. On DDay more
than 1,000 acts of railway sabotage were
initiated via the bbc. Things didn’t always
go to plan: as one producer put it, “They
would play the other band...and the wrong
bridge would get blown up in Poland.”
The bbc’s wartime output also reflected
changes at home. As wirelesses spread to
poorer households, the programming be
came more down to earth: “The Kitchen
Front” gave advice on making cheese from
sour milk and cooking bracken fronds. It
was also forced to become more fun. Dur
ing the first winter of the war, up to a third
of Britons tuned in to Nazi broadcasters
such as William Joyce, nicknamed Lord
HawHaw, who played livelier music than
Reith’s austere bbc. The bbc retaliated
with the Forces Programme, which com
bined news with lashings of variety and
music, and less God than in the past. This
winning mixture continued after the war.
The loosening of social attitudes in
wartime was nothing compared with what
was to come. One cultural battlefield was
race. The stationing of 130,000 African
American gis in Britain had obliged the
bbc to make its programming more racial
ly sensitive; but in 1950, following viewers’
complaints, its controller of television
ruled that “love songs between white and
coloured artists must be very scrupulously
considered”. The blackface “Black and
White Minstrel Show” continued until
1978, more than a decade after a petition
had called for it to be axed.
Even bigger battles were waged over
sex. The bbc was to blame for a national
“moral collapse” in the 1960s and 1970s, be
lieved Mary Whitehouse, a legendary
campaigner against “permissiveness” on
television. By then tv aerials—the “devil’s
forks”, as they were known to some—were
sprouting on every rooftop. Reith himself,
now retired, lamented after the launch of
the music show “Top of the Pops” in 1964
that the bbc “follows the crowd in all the
disgusting manifestations of the age”.
When Yoko Ono read a poem about her
miscarriage on the radio in 1968, the chair
man of the bbc’s governors, Charles Hill,
objected on the grounds that she and John
Lennon were not married.
Yet in the same year the bbc was bold
enough to broadcast Harold Pinter’s “Land
scape”, a play deemed too filthy for the
atres. Earlier it had launched “That Was the
Week That Was”, part of a national boom in
satire that included Private Eyemagazine
and the “Beyond the Fringe” stage show. A
sense of antiauthoritarian impertinence
became so ingrained at the corporation
that the Sunday Telegraphnoted the rise of
an “antiEstablishment establishment”, an
echo of today’s rightwing complaints
about the liberal elite.
Broadcasting also reflected, and en
abled, an erosion of class divisions. In 1937
ordinary subjects could listen to the coro
nation of George VI, thanks to 58 bbc mi
crophones in and around Westminster Ab
bey. Sixteen years later, bbc cameras were
let in to film the coronation of Elizabeth II.
Palace officials enforced a boundary of 30
feet (nine metres), but hadn’t reckoned on
zoom lenses, which the bbc swapped in
after the rehearsals. In 1997 Princess Di
ana’s funeral was a test of the bbc’s nascent
website, which experimented with audio
and video clips for the occasion.
Mr Hendy, a professor at the University
of Sussex, combines a historian’s sense of
sweep with the eye for colour of the tvpro
ducer he once was. His is an authorised
account, meaning the bbcgave him ar
chive access but had no editorial control. It
is heavy on the bbc’s first halfcentury,
which makes up threequarters of the
book; the internet appears 500 pages in.
Perhapsforthisreasonitisunpersua
siveonhowthecorporationshoulddeal
with Hollywood’s streaming services,
which already outperform the public
broadcaster among young audiences. Mr
Hendy thinks the bbc should get bigger
(implying a higher cost to the public). Net
flix, though, spends more than five times
as much on content as the bbc. How much
more should young viewers be compelled
to pay for an entertainment offering they
have mostly rejected?
Still, in its 100 years the bbc has shown
a knack for survival. Winston Churchill
and Thatcher both tried to nobble it, and
failed. Continental broadcasters and pi
rateradio stations wooed audiences but
were beaten back. Commercial television
stations outperformed the bbc at first,
before it developed more popular pro
gramming. The age of YouTube presents a
challenge to a broadcaster that aims to in
form and educate, as well as entertain. But
this balancing act, too, is not new. “The bbc
mustlead,notfollow,itslisteners,” wrote
Reith,“butit mustnotleadatsogreat a dis
tanceastoshakeoffpursuit.” n
Clothingandtextiles
Finely spun yarns
T
hestateofa person’slinenswasonce
a proxy for the state of their soul. A
guide to manners of 1740 advised readers
that if their clothes were clean “and espe
cially if your linen is white...you will feel
your best, even in poverty.” By the early
1780s, simple cleanliness was not enough
for some. Fashionable Parisians sent their
dirty laundry across the Atlantic to Haiti
(then the French colony of SaintDomin
gue), to be bleached in the equatorial sun
with a touch of indigo.
The result had “a fineness and an azure
whiteness entirely different from the linen
of France” and “drew everyone’s eyes”. Still,
linens used next to the skin, especially in
the bedchamber, could not escape the taint
of the illicit. Alleged fornicators and adul
terers in the American colonies had to do
penance by standing in churches or mar
ketplaces while wearing only bed sheets.
A clothes maven finds out where they come from
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing. By
Sofi Thanhauser. Pantheon; 400 pages; $30.
Allen Lane; £20
The end of the Silk Road