Talk of the City [antikvár]

SOME BACKGROUND MATERIAL -THE BBC IN THE THIRTIES From Maurice Gorham's Sound and Fury It was . . . the worst period in its history. The Corporation was a bit above itself: it had never been so pompous, self-righteous, and aloof Between 1932, when it went to Broadcasting House, and 1938, when Reith left for Imperial Airways, there were great events that did more than ever to make it conscious of its position as a public institution, and it set itself to behave as it thought a public institution ought to behave . . . Administration had always been a bit of a stumbling block in the BBC, because Reith and Carpendale made it unduly strong: I believe they really thought that everybody who was doing a productive job was necessarily childish and irresponsible and needed controlling by somebody who was concerned only with In and Out trays . . . I always suspected that, as the dons in Z^leika Dobson dreamt of an Oxford unmarred by undergraduates, our BBC executives dreamt of a BBC untroubled by broadcasts . . . Although the BBC was so anxious not to let the names of its staff be known, it had a touching confidence in their superiority to all outside talent. Whenever programme standards were being discussed, it was explained that the various light programmes from outside sources - seaside concerts and so on - could be greatly improved if only there were more BBC staff to go and work on them. I was poorly received when I suggested that the people who ran these shows probably knew quite a bit about public taste and it did not follow that the shows would be improved by anybody else just because he was on the staff of the BBC In programme-planning circles they talked easily about contracts and alternatives, this kind of audience and that kind, successes and failures, good programmes and bad; and it was all based on what the BBC officials themselves thought, plus various odd impressions gathered from correspondence (which is a notoriously unreliable guide), Press comment that nobody in the BBC is supposed to read or at least to take seriously, and