The power of the ether became man-
ifest. The more combative members of
Baldwin’s Cabinet, led by Churchill,
wanted the government to take over the
BBC. On the fourth day of the strike,
Reith went to 10 Downing Street to try
and protect the broadcaster. He under-
stood that if it became the voice of the
state it would cease to be trusted, and if
it opposed the state it would not survive.
“Assuming the BBC is for the people,
and that the Government is for the peo-
ple, it follows that the BBC must be for
the Government in this crisis too,” Reith
argued that day. For the rest of the strike,
he brokered a form of editorial auton-
omy, if not independence: refusing Chur-
chill’s more outrageous requests; reject-
ing an address from the Archbishop of
Canterbury, which was considered too
sympathetic to the strikers; and coach-
ing Baldwin through his address to the
population, which was also broadcast
from Reith’s apartment. “I am a man of
peace,” Baldwin reassured Britain, with
a line written by Reith.
When the strike ended, Reith was
delivering the lunchtime news. A few
hours later, he read out messages from
the King and the Prime Minister. “As
for the BBC,” Reith said, “we hope your
confidence in, and goodwill to us, have
not suffered. We have labored under
certain difficulties, the full story of which
may be told one day.” An orchestra
played in the background while Reith
recited verses from “Jerusalem,” by Wil-
liam Blake. Then he read the weather.
T
he BBC will always be stuck in the
complex embrace of the British
state. The corporation operates under a
royal charter, which is updated every ten
years or so, and says it must be “inde-
pendent in all matters.” But everyone
knows that it’s more complicated than
that. The license fee, which provided
seventy-five per cent of the BBC’s in-
come in 2021, is set by the government,
and the broadcaster’s board is open to
political appointees.
Reith, who became the BBC’s first
and longest-serving director general,
was also its philosopher king, establish-
ing the belief system in which such an
institution could exist. The son of a Scot-
tish Presbyterian minister, Reith had
been shot in the face by a sniper during
the First World War. When he inter-
viewed for the job of running the BBC,
he didn’t know what broadcasting was.
But by 1924 he had become convinced
that radio had the effect of “making the
nation as one man.”
The BBC’s mission, Reith decided,
was to “inform, educate and entertain.”
The verb “to broadcast” should hew to
its Biblical and agricultural origins: seeds
of knowledge and culture were to be dis-
persed far and wide, on rocky places and
on fertile soil. “The Sower,” a modern-
ist stone sculpture, by Eric Gill, stands
in the lobby of the BBC’s current head-
quarters, which was built in 1932. Reith
was overtly paternalist, an admirer of
Mussolini. “There was an underlying
belief that the BBC served listeners best
by giving them not what they wanted
but what they needed,” Hendy writes.
In Reithian terms, the first century
of the BBC—nine-tenths of it, any-
way—has been a triumph. For a large,
tax-funded body, heavy on ideals, its
output has often been oddly agile and
human. One night in September, 1928,
the broadcaster devoted all seven stu-
dios in its Savoy Hill headquarters to a
live, modernist sound experiment, “Ka-
leidoscope,” during which more than a
hundred musicians, engineers, and ac-
tors performed “A Rhythm represent-
ing the Life of a Man from Cradle to
Grave.” The Daily Telegraph likened it
to being given “gas in the dentist’s chair.”
On the morning of the coronation of
Queen Elizabeth, in 1953, a camera op-
erator quietly swapped his two-inch
wide-angle lens—which had been agreed
upon with the Palace—for a twelve-
inch zoom, allowing royal closeups for
an audience of 20.4 million British adults.
Many of the BBC’s greatest successes
have occurred for the sake of what the
broadcaster calls “lift.” In 1947, Etienne
Amyot, a pianist and a planner for the
BBC’s Third Programme, brought the
entire Vienna State Opera Company
to London, simply to play European
music at a standard that had not been
heard since the war. Seventeen years
later, Geoffrey Bridson, a left-wing
producer and writer from Manchester,
collaborated with his friend Langston
Hughes to make “The Negro in Amer-
ica,” a loose, nineteen-part season of
plays, conversations, poetry, and docu-
mentary that presented the civil-rights
struggle to British listeners. “The BBC