The Conservatives’ birthday gift to the BBC, which is 100 this year, turns out to be culture secretary Nadine Dorries’s promise to abolish the licence fee, the funding mechanism that has allowed it to flourish as an independent institution beloved, trusted and envied across the world. Reading David Hendy’s The BBC: A People’s History in light of this latest attack on the corporation is a sobering experience. The author himself clearly feels the clouds gathering, and at times cannot banish an elegiac tone from his prose.
Hendy’s stated aim is a kind of history from below: a counterpoint to Asa Briggs’s magisterial five-volume account of British broadcasting history to 1974, which occasionally gave the impression that the story of radio and TV consisted largely in calm, besuited bigwigs gliding through boardrooms and Whitehall, setting policies and initiating parliamentary committees. Hendy, rather, wants to give a place to the people who actually did the work: what historian Raphael Samuel called “radio’s penny-a-liners, the freelance playwrights and scriptwriters, scraping a living in the republic of letters, the foreign correspondents, the old soaks at Bush House, gathered from the four corners of the world”.
