![]() This ethos remains part of the BBC’s “public service” mission, shaping the nature of the institution one early producer characterized it as “one-third boarding school, one-third Chelsea party, one-third crusade.” (Fitzgerald, for her part, described the organization as “a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn’t too sure where next week’s money was coming from.”)īut what does public service mean in broadcasting? A tempting analogy is always with the National Health Service-an almost universally loved institution in British society, the last edifice still standing (just barely) of the social-democratic “New Jerusalem” that Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government aimed to build. He was also the devout son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, and his mantra of “inform, educate, entertain” was very much in that order-with entertainment a grudging, concessionary third. ![]() Like many of the BBC’s first generation of executives, Reith was a decorated, wounded veteran of World War I who had returned from its battlefields with a powerful belief in the need to renew civilization and redeem its cultural heritage. Yet the BBC belongs to none, as long as the spell lasts. Each of its three implicit owners could be excused for thinking that it belongs to them above all. The arrangement poises the BBC delicately, confusingly, in a special zone of ambiguity. The license fee, currently £159 per household per year, notionally gives every BBC listener and viewer (which in practice is almost everyone in the UK) a stake in the corporation-not a share, by any means, but a sort of proxy for public ownership. The charter subjects the broadcaster to periodic government scrutiny. The royal charter and the license fee are crucial parts of the flawed genius of the BBC’s institutional architecture. Its first engineer had worked for the Marconi Company, pioneer of wireless radio communication, and understood the new technology in terms that sound almost startlingly like those of our own era: a “platform” that could enhance “the social life of the people.” In 1927 it became a corporation-a public entity, still licensed by the post office but now operating under royal charter (actually issued by Parliament, not the Crown) and largely self-funding through royalties on sales of radio sets and a “license fee.” This permit was essentially an annual flat tax on every household that owned a wireless, later a TV set, and now any device with a screen used to play BBC content. The British Broadcasting Company began life in 1922 as a commercial entity operating under license from the General Post Office. This seems unjust, Haggard thinks: To whom should the BBC belong if not the listener? Yet Fitzgerald identifies a contradiction: Prospero will inform, Ariel will entertain, but Caliban is to be educated-two active figures and one passive. Prospero, Caliban, Ariel: this Shakespearean triad corresponds neatly to the BBC’s original mandate, laid down by its founding chief executive, John Reith: Inform, educate, entertain. All this was so that virtue should prevail. Ariel, on the other hand, was a liar, pretending that someone’s father was drowned full fathom five, when in point of fact he was safe and well. And Caliban, who wished Prospero might be stricken with the red plague for teaching him to speak correct English, never told anything but the truth, presumably not knowing how to. When all was said and done, oughtn’t he to preside over the BBC? Ariel, it is true, had produced music, but it was Caliban who listened to it, even in his dreams. It had been his, after all, in the first place. And when this favored spirit had flown off, to suck where the bee sucks, and Prospero had returned with all his followers to Italy, the island must have reverted to Caliban. Prospero was shown preparing to launch his messenger onto the sound waves of the universe…. Haggard-usually referred to simply as DPP, an abbreviation of Director of Programme Planning, one of Fitzgerald’s jokes about BBC nomenclature-muses on the sculpture, which was carved by the English artist Eric Gill: Toward the end of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1980 novel Human Voices, a fictionalized account of her time working at the BBC during World War II, an executive named Jeff Haggard finds himself standing outside Broadcasting House, the organization’s London headquarters, looking up at the stone figures of Prospero and Ariel that have stood above the entrance since 1933.
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