“Hello CQ, hello CQ. This is Two Emma Toc, Two-ooo Emma Toc. Writtle calling… Well, I think we’re ready to begin now, and the first thing I’ve got to introduce is a record entitled — Why are records always entitled, why aren’t they just called something? So here it is, a record entitled…”

Four years earlier, Captain Peter Eckersley had been a wireless operator in the Royal Flying Corps. Now, as an engineer with the Marconi Wireless Telegram Company, he was launching Britain’s first weekly radio station, broadcasting under the call sign 2MT (“Two Emma Toc”). Eckersley was a joker, a character, a bit of a card. And every Tuesday, radio enthusiasts across south-eastern England would tune their sets to catch his latest offering: a quiz, perhaps, or a spoof weather forecast.

Eckersley and his pals put on Britain’s first ever radio play, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. They persuaded some of the capital’s most popular singers to trek out to Writtle and perform into the ether. On one memorable occasion the world-famous Danish-American baritone Lauritz Melchior even agreed to trudge across the fields to the Writtle army hut and sing to an audience of… hundreds? Thousands? Who knows?

What happened at Writtle a hundred years ago isn’t just a lovely little tale about the triumph of the amateur spirit. It’s the origin story of one of Britain’s most beloved and controversial institutions, the BBC, which celebrates its centenary this autumn. And since the BBC’s future has never been more contested, with Boris Johnson’s government publicly contemplating the end of the licence fee and a turn towards a subscription model, it’s worth looking back at how it all began.

To its defenders, the BBC represents the collective national good over selfish private interest. But is that really true? If you were feeling cynical, you might argue that it began as a commercial monopoly to promote the interests of the major electronics firms. Its champions celebrate it as modern history’s greatest vehicle for popular cultural uplift. But you could just as well see it as a massive exercise in selling radios.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

To the BBC’s fans that probably sounds like sacrilege, so let’s go back to that man in the hut. Peter Eckersley didn’t just happen to work for Marconi. The fact that he worked for the Marconi Company, one of the most innovative, ruthless and expansionist firms in the land, was absolutely crucial. Since the end of the First World War, Marconi’s engineers had wasted no opportunity to promote the latest wireless technology. It was Marconi, for example, that organised Britain’s first live radio broadcast on 15 June 1920, when the soprano Dame Nellie Melba performed at its Chelmsford factory. This was a landmark in broadcasting history, with people reportedly tuning in from as far away as the Champs-Elysées. These days, though, the BBC makes little of it. Why not? Alas, it was sponsored by the Daily Mail. Quelle horreur!

You can draw a line directly from Dame Nellie’s performance, via Eckersley’s hut, to the formation of the British Broadcasting Company on 18 October 1922, and the Marconi name is there at every turn. In one crucial memo, the firm’s publicity manager, Arthur Burrows, argued that they could make an awful lot of money through the “radiation” of entertainment to the public, rather than by merely selling hardware to the government. So perhaps, in some parallel universe, there’s a Britain in which the Marconi Company really did establish its own private radio service, and where the papers are currently badgering the Marconi streaming giant to cancel Jimmy Carr.

But as we know, things didn’t work out like that. In a world obsessed with the danger of political and cultural disorder, the men who ran the General Post Office were anxious to avoid the “chaos” of the United States, where hundreds of radio start-ups had blossomed in 1921 and 1922. What was more, state control had been legitimised by the experience of total war, covering everything from military conscription to pub opening times. Much better, they thought, to have a single authorised broadcaster, a state-approved consortium: a British Broadcasting Company.

So in the autumn of 1922 the six largest firms, led by Marconi, formed a monopoly, authorised by the General Post Office and funded by a 10-shilling radio licence fee. And everybody won. The BBC set out on the path that would lead to Fawlty Towers, I, Claudius, Blake’s 7 and Eldorado. Arthur Burrows became its first director of programmes. Eckersley became its first chief engineer. And Marconi sold thousands and thousands of radios.

Why isn’t this story better known? The BBC’s centenary website, barely mentions it at all. Its timeline begins in the autumn of 1922, erasing poor Dame Nellie and skipping the Writtle story entirely. The explanation is obvious. The Marconi story just doesn’t fit. The history of the BBC is supposed to be an object lesson in paternalistic liberalism and public service, but the Marconi story is all about private enterprise. Marconi meant novelty; Marconi meant disruption. But today’s BBC is the guardian of continuity, a reassuring comfort blanket in a world of change. How do Dame Nellie and the Daily Mail fit into that?

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By Dominic Sandbrook

It’s easy to see why the BBC has forgotten its entrepreneurial prehistory. By the time of its 20th birthday in 1942, it had transcended its buccaneering origins to become a genuinely national institution, the voice of a people standing together against the horrors of Nazism. For the next few decades, it was one of the chief pillars of the social democratic consensus, the broadcasting equivalent of the NHS.

This BBC didn’t just influence the national conversation; it was the national conversation. Famously, the very last show Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise made for the corporation, which went out on Christmas Day 1977, was watched by more than 20 million people. The supporting cast — Elton John, Michael Parkinson, Penelope Keith, Richard Briers, Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Frank Bough, James Hunt, Angela Rippon — was a Who’s Who of the British imagination, every name immediately recognisable. When you walked down the street the next day, almost half of the adults you met had seen it.

In his novel The Rotter’s Club (2001), Jonathan Coe uses that Morecambe and Wise Christmas special as a symbol of national consensus, the teenage hero realising that everybody he knows is watching it too. “It came to him,” writes Coe,

“that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets… all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of… oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter.”

There’s an underlying melancholy to that scene, though. By the time Coe wrote The Rotter’s Club, the BBC’s paternalistic monopoly was already under siege. The first blow came in 1955 with the launch of ITV, followed by the advent of Channel Four in 1982. British Satellite Broadcasting arrived in 1986, Sky three years later. We all know the rest: the internet, Amazon, Netflix, Disney. Or to put it another way, change — the kind of technological and cultural innovation previously embodied by the men in that Writtle hut.

It’s change, not Conservative hostility — and certainly not Nadine Dorries — that represents the real threat to the BBC’s survival. In the last few weeks its defenders on social media have circulated a wonderful advert from 1986, in which pub bore John Cleese curses the licence fee and wonders what the BBC “has ever given us for fifty-eight quid”. Up pops a host of famous faces — Sir Michael Hordern, Barry Norman, Alan Whicker, Sir Patrick Moore — to put him right.

It’s heart-warming, nostalgic stuff. But to anybody under the age of 30 it must be completely irrelevant. Most of those people have long since died, retired or been cancelled. They’re relics of a vanished age.

It’s telling, then, that when people try to defend the BBC, they typically point to Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who — two shows that, one way or another, could have been watched by Sir Winston Churchill in his dotage. Strictly’s current incarnation dates from 2004, but in its original form, as plain Come Dancing, it dates from 1949. As for Doctor Who, it dates from 1963 and is now attracting its lowest audience since the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. In a bid to revive its fortunes, the BBC have just persuaded its former writer Russell T. Davies, who ran the show more than a decade ago, to return to the helm. You can’t get much more backward-looking than that.

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I take no pleasure in pointing this out. For anybody like me, born in the Seventies or earlier, a world without the BBC seems unimaginable. I have merely to hear the opening bars of Grandstand, a staple of my Saturdays for decades, and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But Grandstand has been dead for 15 years, rendered obsolete when the BBC’s commercial rivals snapped up all the sports rights. And although Match of the Day endures, it’s easy to imagine a future in which Amazon bags the Premiership highlights. How long before that jaunty theme music vanishes forever? Five years? Ten?

Against that background, talk of the current government’s “attack” on the BBC strikes me as fundamentally inconsequential. Even if Boris Johnson’s successor kneels in penance outside Broadcasting House and promises to preserve the licence fee till the end of time, the basic problem remains: the BBC was designed for radio and television sets, not for mobile phones and iPads. It’s a national institution in a globalised world, a product of the twentieth century struggling to stay afloat in the twenty-first.

A few weeks ago a YouGov poll found that only one in four people aged 18-30 watch the BBC every week. A third of them never watch it at all. No doubt some will graduate to the BBC’s output as they grow older — but surely not all of them. What about today’s primary-school children? Will the Marvel and Mandalorian addicts be watching Newsnight in the year 2040? Will they really still be clinging to Grandad’s comfort blanket?

To some readers, I know, this probably sounds like heresy, a premature obituary for a much-loved institution. But I do like the BBC. (I don’t “love” it, obviously, because I’ve worked for it, and nobody who’s been a victim of its taxi-booking system is ever going to love it.) And because I’m a nostalgic, backward-looking sort of person, I want it to survive. I adore In Our Time, I love The Apprentice (I know, ridiculous) and I still watch Doctor Who, albeit out of a joyless sense of duty.

Much of what the BBC does, it does brilliantly. I’ll be sorry, then, when it goes. But it will go, eventually. Or rather, it’ll probably fragment into its constituent parts, some of which will charge for subscriptions. No doubt it’ll be a gradual process, and many people will barely notice. On Twitter, the BBC’s champions will lament the death of a common national culture. But our common national culture has been fragmenting for decades, which is why Jonathan Coe lamented its passing more than 20 years ago.

Cultural moments come and go. Institutions are born and they die. In fact, everything dies; that’s how history works. The future belongs to the ambitious, the disruptive, the change-makers — people like the engineers in that hut. But these days, people like that don’t work for the BBC. They work for Amazon.

Yet there are far more profound issues facing the BBC than the annual furore over presenter pay. For the institution confronts an existential crisis: it is funded by a tax that defies logic in the modern media world, faces threats from far-richer rivals, and is being assailed from all sides for perceived political bias. It looks like a wounded beast, limping along and licking its wounds while clouds of vultures circle hungrily overhead.

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The BBC is having a good coronavirus war

By Robin Aitken

Tim Davie, the new director-general who must grapple with how to protect the state broadcaster in an age of streaming, social media and intensifying culture wars, was greeted in post by a ridiculous row over the singing of Rule, Britannia! at the Proms. This fuss showed the toxicity of so much of the debate surrounding the corporation at this time of unprecedented financial, commercial, political and social challenge. The BBC must deal with hostility from Downing Street in a country that is becoming ever more divided, while trying to find ways to appeal to younger generations that, unlike my own, lack any special affection for Auntie.

It is almost a century since the BBC was founded by Lord Reith with his mission to “inform, educate and entertain”. The birth came in October 1922, exactly one week after the arrival of my own father. Yet my son’s generation sees the £157.50 licence fee as an absurd anachronism when they spend so much time on Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and YouTube — and they scoff at the idea of watching a news broadcast at a fixed evening time amid so many digital offerings. The BBC’s annual report showed people aged 16 to 34 consume only seven and a half hours of its content each week.

The director-general was right to declare “we have no inalienable right to exist”, in his debut speech. Yet for all the BBC’s faults — and there are many — I believe it is a force for good in our nation as we saw at start of the pandemic with its calm, public-spirited response. It is also a crucial part of British soft power and beacon for many people trapped under dictatorship. The licence fee can be seen as cheap when its daily output on radio, television and online costs us one-fifth of the price of a coffee in major cafe chains. But such is the BBC’s unique place in British life that everyone has a view on what it is doing wrong. And mine is simple: it has lost its bottle.

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What is the BBC worth?

By Maajid Nawaz

Ever since tangling with the Blair government over Iraq, the BBC has been cursed by tragic lack of confidence as it stumbles from crisis to crisis. Its reaction to each scandal, its response to each savaging, has been to calcify a bit more under tiers of timid managers who are terrified at being perceived as out of touch, condemned by some noisy lobby group or attacked for frittering away resources. The latest annual report reveals the number of these senior managers rose again with an astonishing 106 of them pocketing more in pay than the Prime Minister. Yet the legacy of these swarms of suits is an organisation in funk: stymied by fear, stifled by bureaucracy and suffering clear loss of nerve on news. This makes the corporation harder to defend as it cuts budgets, churns out banal bulletins and screws up digital output.

The BBC employs 6,000 people in news, which includes more than twice the number of journalists as the country’s most successful newspaper group. Yet how often do its main television news shows reveal a domestic story they have not been spoon-fed? Genuine scoops and jaw-dropping stories are far more likely to come from papers, despite their ever-smaller teams and shrinking sales.

Bland evening bulletins on television are fleshed out with analysis of mind-numbing banality designed to avoid causing offence followed by dreary vox pops rigidly controlled to ensure balance. Reporters are sent to stand pointlessly outside empty buildings at night for dramatic effect. Highly-paid editors pontificate but say little of substance. Even the BBC news website that was once strong — if unfairly undermining commercial media — has become a stodgy mess rarely worth the effort of trying to navigate.

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There is much talk of diversity as the corporation tries to reflect the country. This is right and proper, both in personnel and issues. Yet attempts to step out of their comfort zone often look patronising. Such is the lack of editorial confidence that when Newsnight tried a segment this week on migration, I was shocked to see it failed to challenge repugnant extremist views — presumably since scared of looking like ‘metropolitan liberals’. At the same time aid is seen as sacrosanct by BBC bosses in bed with Comic Relief and running their own development charity while there is no room for nuance on critical issues such as tackling climate change. “We’ve signed up to the Greta Thunberg agenda,” said one well-known presenter. “I’m not a denier but we’ve lost the ability for any debate around this issue.”

Boredom has become a bigger problem than bias. There are, of course, still fine exceptions to the flow of sludge. The foreign reporting and world service remain strong, their reports and analysis often offering real insight — perhaps since the journalists and editors are freed from fear of upsetting domestic factions. Its recent documentary series on Iraq was stunning, even if downplaying British involvement, while it has delivered big scoops on the atrocities inflicted on Uighurs by Beijing. Yet there is no current Africa or China editor, although one-third of the global population live in these places. “We cover the world through David Miliband,” joked one senior journalist, such is the ubiquity of the charity chief on the BBC — although needless to say, the former foreign secretary is never asked why he pockets almost one million dollars annually in the poverty industry.

I have sympathy for the political team, whose diligent efforts to cover Westminster spark torrents of bile on social media. Panorama has carried out brave and strong investigations, Victoria Derbyshire and reporters such as Jayne McCubbin on BBC Breakfast offer incisive reporting on neglected social issues while the main radio news programmes still cling to Reithian ambitions. But compare the key evening television bulletins, or Newsnight and Channel 4 News — and the BBC too often comes off second best. Meanwhile its flagship Question Time has descended from serious political discussion into a shouting match in search of applause on social media.

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Now as new rivals plan partisan news operations and Rupert Murdoch’s Times launches its own radio station, the BBC’s top brass has decided this is just the moment to tarnish some jewels still in its tatty crown. They are axing their remaining national radio reporters, telling them to reapply for a smaller number of jobs as multi-tasking television, radio and digital reporters. This may mark the end not only of the careers of some stalwarts but also the organisation’s era of world-leading specialist radio journalism. Yet there is no attempt to rationalise sprawling news output, although this might deliver bigger savings to invest in better journalism.

I was astonished to learn that Radio Four’s Today programme, the most influential radio news show in the country, no longer has any dedicated reporters. I asked one radio insider what would happen if it wanted to mount a serious investigation into an issue and was told that either this would be carried out by one of the presenters, who may not have a background in hard news let alone sufficient time, or they would have to bid for a reporter from a pool, who would then be expected to offer a variety of reports on the issue for other BBC platforms. Clearly the bean counters and suits care less about news, let alone exposing dodgy behaviour by powerful bodies, than on their misconceived vision of value for money.

Many other issues confront the BBC. Most British citizens turn to the broadcaster for drama, entertainment or comedy rather than its news. The corporation made the mistake of partnering challenger firms such as Amazon and Netflix on programmes, helping to oil their path into the valuable world of British creativity and production. Now these behemoths threaten to devour their host like voracious parasites as they splurge vast budgets on buying up talent.

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Maybe the solution is to focus on content rooted in this country rather than outright competition; if something is good enough, it will still sell as proved by The Fall, the crime drama set in Northern Ireland and now a Netflix hit, or Channel 4’s Derry Girls. “If you tell a story well enough you can get a hit because truths and good stories are universal,” said one top UK producer. “But if you try to do everything and reach everywhere you end up nowhere.”

After 30 years in journalism, however, my focus is on news. So here is my advice for Davie: show some confidence, take risks and revive your floundering news operation. Journalism is not about ticking boxes. It should tell stories and cause waves, sometimes even offence, since it is about revealing things powerful people and vested interests seek to hide — and this is why they turn on critics with such force. So sack most of the suits, silence the shallow pontificators and unshackle the editors by giving them more freedom and responsibility. If they deliver dross, miss scoops or fail to connect with their public, find bolder editors and better reporters. Otherwise the BBC news operation will roll downhill as audiences dwindle further.

Every day staff entering Broadcasting House pass a statue of George Orwell. The new director-general needs to remember this great man’s words, that truth is a revolutionary act in an age of deceit, if he wants the BBC to retain support and relevance.

Surely it is better to reassert that noble desire to inform, educate and entertain by sparking debate over enlightening news stories than wave the white flag amid hostility? Otherwise those of us who believe in the BBC are left defending an organisation that is simply indefensible. And those wishing it dead may be among the most distraught when it has gone.

For years I have listened and watched Tory politicians being patronised and traduced by BBC interviewers but, no matter how badly they were treated, they always returned to abase themselves and receive more blows and curses from the masters. But this time, maybe, it’s going to be different. There have been a number of highly significant briefings from government sources since Friday morning’s political earthquake; suggestions that, if carried through, pose a real threat to the Corporation.

First the Sunday Telegraph reported that the government is considering decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee. On the face of it that doesn’t sound earth shattering but if the threat of prison, or even a fine, is removed from those who refuse to pay their annual £154.50 that would be a serious threat to the Corporation’s revenue. Increasingly the licence fee — a tax introduced, let us remember, nearly a century ago — looks anachronistic in an era of digital fragmentation; the BBC’s own figures show that it is finding it hard to attract young viewers accustomed to buying the services they want and resentful of having to pay a tax for a service they don’t use. If the sanction for non-payment is removed the BBC will lose millions in revenue as the audience drifts away.

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On Brexit, Auntie just can't help herself

By Robin Aitken

Second, ‘government sources’ have intimated that, in future, it might feel under no obligation to provide Radio 4’s Today programme with a minister whenever the broadcasters demand one. ‘Empty chairing’ is a game two can play and all current affairs shows have much to lose; though the tone and content of Today has increasingly grated in recent years I have mostly stuck with it because I am interested in politics. But if all the show can offer is a diet of arts news, nature notes and tendentious climate-change activists I can do without.

And that will go for many others too. This might seem far-fetched (the belief that “they need us more than we need them” has always been the broadcasters’ comfort blanket) but if Dominic Cummings has been accurately reported the broadcasters have reason to fear.

Cummings reportedly didn’t listen to Today during the EU referendum; that is entirely in line with his stated belief that it’s not worth the effort of debating politics with the most highly educated because they never change their minds. The acquisition of a degree confers adamantine confidence in the holder’s political judgment, says Cummings, and their political prejudices become unshakeable; much better to concentrate your efforts on those with a lower opinion of themselves who are more open to persuasion.

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By Douglas Murray

Are these suggestions of revenge merely a hubristic response from Tories flushed with victory? Possibly, but to my mind this has been a long time coming. The bias against Conservatives, upper and lower case, is of many decades standing but the tone of this election campaign has brought things to a head.

There was an interview in September when Johnson was trying to negotiate the exit agreement; Laura Kuenssberg could barely disguise her contempt for him. And then there was the Andrew Neil (non-)interview: was it really wise for the BBC to throw down the gauntlet in that way? After all the Tories were in the business of winning an election: they were under no obligation to satisfy Neil’s demands. That episode showed the BBC’s sky-high self-regard but perhaps also a lack of understanding about a change in the terms of trade between politicians and broadcasters.

The BBC’s response to these charges of bias against the Tories has been to point to the fact that the Labour Party has been howling about the Corporation’s supposed bias against Mr Corbyn. But like so much else about the Corbyn project, these complaints are delusional. There is absolutely no equivalence between the bias against conservatives, which is deep-rooted and long-standing, and the BBC’s scepticism about Corbynism, which was a reaction to the sheer implausibility of Mr Corbyn as a leader plus the nasty stain of the party’s anti-Semitism.

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How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

I know about the BBC’s anti-Tory bias from personal, lived, experience. If you go back to the 1980s BBC newsrooms were viscerally opposed to Mrs Thatcher; in the 1990s they relished the demolition of Mr Major’s government; but then came 1997 and the BBC was suddenly worshipping at the altar of New Labour. The Blair Supremacy transformed the Corporation overnight from rottweiler to lapdog.

Ah, I hear you say, this is all entirely subjective; you are merely retailing your own prejudices. There is something in that charge; we all suffer from confirmation bias, hearing only those things we want to hear and ignoring the facts that don’t fit our prejudices. And it is true is that ‘proving’ bias is an exceptionally difficult thing to do given the slipperiness of the subject matter. But one man has made it his business to subject BBC output to rigorous checking.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a former leader of UKIP, hired specialists to monitor exactly what the BBC has been broadcasting about the EU and Brexit over many years. They found, for instance, that in the decade 2005–2015 of 4,275 interviewees on Today talking about the EU only 132 (3.2%) were opposed to the UK’s membership. And the bias persisted after the referendum result right up to the present moment. As Robbie Burns had it “facts are chiels that winna ding” or, in translation, “facts cannot be overturned”. And insofar as bias can be proven it has been so at least in regard to the BBC’s reporting of the EU.

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The trial of Danny Baker

By Eric Kaufmann

My view is that bias is evident across the whole range of BBC output and it bears down particularly hard on social conservatives. Any view that does not conform to the liberal orthodoxy on matters ranging from the LGBT agenda to Islam to immigration is routinely screened out; the BBC simply does not allow any serious challenge to its world-view.

In October the BBC appointed the broadcaster and campaigner June Sarpong to the post of Director of Creative Diversity. The diversity she will be aiming for will be a trivial and superficial thing. What she will not be doing is trying to achieve any real ‘diversity’ of political opinion. The underlying contours of the BBC’s internal political culture will remain untouched.

The question is whether the new government will follow through on its threats. I wonder. Maybe this is just a tactical game, a way of calling the BBC to heel. There are reasons for doubting the Tories have the stomach for the fight; for one thing Boris is himself a thoroughgoing social liberal; for another there will come a time in the political cycle when the government will hit troubled waters and then, perhaps they will discover they need the BBC.

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How political bias blinds us

By Matthew Goodwin

What is more, any significant challenge to the BBC will bring a chorus of complaints from the liberal Establishment (bruised but not vanquished by Friday’s result) about a threat to Britain’s cultural ‘jewel in the crown’. That is why I hope action is taken now, whilst Boris’s political capital is at flood tide.

I have been writing on this subject for many years; the first book I published on the subject in 2007 Can We Trust the BBC? ended with these thoughts: “As currently constituted the BBC is a profoundly influential opponent of everything that social and political conservatives believe… If the time ever comes when British conservatives feel like getting off their knees and fighting back, broadcasting policy might not be a bad place to start.”

This is the moment and I hope the new government grasps it.