is the most—I love it!” Hughes wrote.
In 1993, A. N. Wilson, writing in the
Sunday Telegraph, accused the BBC’s
natural-history unit of staging footage
of a leopard seal attacking a penguin,
arguing that it couldn’t have made sense
for a camera crew to stake out the fro-
zen wastes long enough to capture such
a thing by chance. The BBC threatened
to sue; Wilson apologized. David At-
tenborough, whose first blockbuster se-
ries, “Life on Earth” (1977), involved
research visits to a hundred and eighty-
three scientific institutions, sympathized:
“What organization is it who’s going to
say, ‘We’re going to start investing in this
and there will be no return at all for
three years’? No other broadcasting or-
ganization I know.” After watching the
final episode of “Life on Earth,” Clive
James, the television critic, found him-
self “distracted only by envy for my own
children, for whom knowledge was being
brought alive in a way that never hap-
pened for my generation or indeed for
any previous generation in all of history.”
No one knows how the BBC works.
For “This New Noise: The Extraordi-
nary Birth and Troubled Life of the
BBC” (2015), Charlotte Higgins, the
Guardian’s chief culture writer, spent nine
months reporting inside the corpora-
tion. “It was, in fact, ungraspable in its
entirety,” she concluded. From its early
years, the place was marked by a kind
of bureaucratic insanity. Senior staff had
blue carpets; junior teams had gray. Ad-
ministrators had their own elevators.
For all the control craved by its man-
agers and political masters, the BBC has
always contained enough cracks for spe-
cialized knowledge and beautiful things
to occur. During the Second World War,
E. H. Gombrich, later a celebrated art
historian, worked for the BBC, moni-
toring German civilian radio day after
day from a country estate in Worcester-
shire. On the night of May 1, 1945, the
corporation broke the news to Chur-
chill that Adolf Hitler was dead: Gom-
brich had recognized the adagio from
Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in
E Major, written for the death of Wag-
ner, playing ahead of the official an-
nouncement. “You had to know what
might be said in order to hear what was
said,” Gombrich wrote later, in his book
“Art and Illusion.”
For a long time, the BBC’s domi-
nance of the airwaves made it both a
creative and an inhibiting force. The
news was mostly accurate but stuffy.
Acceptable opinion ranged across a
mainstream defined by the Church of
England and the Houses of Parliament
and not an inch farther. The BBC began
broadcasting television in 1936, and until
1957 it shut down for an hour between
six and seven in the evening—the “tod-
dler’s truce”—so parents could put their
children to bed. At the same time, the
BBC enjoyed exceptional freedoms. In
1964, it launched a second channel, BBC
Two, with no real adversary. (Indepen-
dent TV got its first channel in 1955.)
With a blank schedule, the new chan-
nel’s controller (Attenborough, again)
explored new forms of drama, docu-
mentary, and sport, in color. “It was the
dream job,” Attenborough told Hig-gins. “A paradisiacal job.” British audi-
ences saw green turf and white chalk
lines for the first time at the 1967 Wim-
bledon tennis championships.
Sometimes the contradictions of the
BBC have been bound up in a single
person. In the nineteen-nineties, John
Birt, a technocratic director general, re-
formed the corporation, installing an in-
ternal market, in which divisions bought
and sold services to one another, and en-
gendering a culture of managerialism
later parodied by “W1A,” a BBC satire
about itself. (Sample guff from the show’s
fictional Head of Values: “If ever there
was an opportunity for the BBC to stand
tall and make a big, bold statement about
how much it values the idea of valuing
values, then surely this is it.”) Birt’s leg-
acy remains contested. To his many crit-
ics, he killed creativity with memos and
accountability. In 1993, the BBC’s Delhi
correspondent, Mark Tully, complained
that the corporation was being reduced
to “biscuit making.” At the same time,
Birt was radical, with a feel for the fu-
ture. He strengthened the BBC’s news
division and toured the American dot-
com scene on his summer breaks.
“Birtian” is still something of an in-
sult among BBC staff (“Reithian” is the
highest compliment), but Birt is prob-
ably the reason that the broadcaster
wasn’t completely upended by the dig-
ital era. In its centenary year, the BBC
has reported that it’s on track to reach
a global audience of five hundred mil-
lion people. BBC Online, its news Web
site, has nineteen million readers a week.
The iPlayer, which launched in 2007,
helped inspire streamers everywhere.
The BBC’s reach in the United King-
dom is total and alive. British adults
consume, on average, eighteen hours of
BBC content every week. During the
pandemic, almost eighty per cent of
secondary-school students used BBC
educational material for remote learn-
ing. In 2014, forty-eight households who
thought that the license fee (£145.50 that
year) was too high were offered a refund
of £3.60 and deprived of its services for
nine days. Two-thirds of them asked
to be reconnected. Many didn’t realize
that the news, the weather, the radio,
the films, the voice in the background,
“Strictly Come Dancing,” the music in
the car, the podcasts, the sports results
“At a hundred and thirty-seven, I figured I’d have my life together.” on their phones, the Teletubbies—it was