Chapter 11
The crest of the British Broadcasting Corporation bears the motto ‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation’. Inscribed not only upon its coat of arms but also above the entrance doors of Bush House in central London, the headquarters of the World Service, the inscription stands as an enduring reminder of the potential of mass communication in acting as a forum to facilitate international co-operation and understanding. Yet the phrase, first devised in 1927 by Dr Montague Rendell, one of the Corporation’s first governors, had by the late 1960s come to take on a quite different connotation when applied to the BBC’s domestic broadcasting. No longer simply an expression of BBC internationalism, the maxim became an effective rhetorical device, used in irony by a range of journalists, organizations and pressure groups who believed the BBC was failing in its duty to provide representative programming to all parts of the United Kingdom. It seemed to many that, within the British broadcasting system, the English voice and, more specifically, a London-centric one was being heard loud and clear. In contrast, Scotland and Wales appeared to have all but lost theirs.
A cartoon published in the Welsh journal Planet in October 1970 summed up this sense of grievance neatly. Standing in front of a range of hills atop of which were situated transmitters beaming broadcasts into the valley below, one perplexed looking Welshman turned to another to ask ‘What do you mean “Nation shall Speak unto Nation?” That’s what we’ve got isn’t it?’ The cartoon was emblematic of a recurring criticism made of the corporation throughout the twentieth century, namely that, despite its public service ethos, the BBC had a poor record in representing Britain’s cultural diversities and minority tastes. More recently, Glen Creeber has argued that, throughout its history, the BBC has presented a very narrow view of the nation, based on a limited range of values and attitudes. As a consequence, it is ‘responsible for producing a form of cultural hegemony that has helped to dictate and form British public opinion and social attitudes’ (Creeber 2004a: 28–29). Indeed, such was the culturally conforming power of the Corporation, he contends, that the BBC brand, or ‘Publicservicization’, should be allied with the concepts of Coca-Colonization and McDonaldization because of its culturally homogenizing force.
This chapter takes a different approach. It seeks to show that, far from simply acting as a catalyst for a common culture, the BBC also played a significant role in maintaining and fostering distinct identities in what the historian Hugh Kearney has labelled as ‘Outer Britain’. By presenting an overview of various key developments in Scottish broadcasting, as well as reference to Wales, I want to demonstrate how, from the late 1960s onwards, the BBC sought to reconceive its role as the ‘national’ broadcaster, making a concerted effort for the first time since the 1920s to develop and expand upon a range of programmes and services designed to appeal specifically to audiences at a ‘regional’ and local level, thus offering a much more plural ‘projection of Britain’. In doing so, it seeks to move beyond narrow ‘culturally imperialist’ accounts that privilege a narrative of the BBC as imposing ‘English’ culture on an unwilling audience in Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’. Not only were audience responses invariably much more complex, but this approach belittles the significant contribution made by the Corporation to Scottish and Welsh culture, especially in the decades after the Second World War. From this vantage point, the BBC can be seen to have played a significant role in sustaining identities at multiple levels across the United Kingdom rather than simply moulding a homogeneous Britishness. Neither Britishness nor the BBC’s projection of it, as we shall see, remained static across the decades.
Since its establishment as the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927, the history of broadcasting, as John Tulloch (1990: 141) notes, ‘has essentially been the history of a debate about the composition and maintenance of the British nation state’. Over the course of the twentieth century, this debate has taken on a variety of forms as the BBC has been forced to reinvent itself in the light of often rapid social, political and cultural change. Innovative programming of the 1960s, such as ‘kitchen sink’ dramas like Cathy Come Home or the groundbreaking satire of That Was the Week That Was, are frequently cited as exemplifying a time when the Corporation was at the forefront of societal trends (Tulloch 1990; Weight 2002; Creeber 2004b; Sandbrook 2005) On the other hand, however, the longevity of The Black and White Minstrel Show, a programme in which performers ‘blacked up’ to sing and dance in stereotypical portrayals of black people, is alluded to as evidence of the BBC’s failure to engage changing notions of Britishness. As one historian put it, the programme, like much of British popular culture of the period, ‘reflected a country which had not accepted the physical portrayal of black people, never mind come to terms with the need to alter its national identity’ (Weight 2002: 428). Indeed, in this instance, the BBC can be seen as simply reflecting societal prejudices rather than challenging them. Although the programme eventually became an anathema in an ever more multiracial society and was finally taken off the air in 1978, the fact that it attracted an audience of up to 18 million viewers, as well as hundreds of protest letters on its demise, exemplified the difficulties faced by the broadcaster when mediating between the values of different sections of society (Briggs 1995: 433–34; BBC WAC R78/1921).
Despite such differences, however, the BBC has been central to constructing a unified notion of Britishness throughout the twentieth century. Krishnan Kumar (2003: 237) labels the Corporation as being ‘surely the most pervasive force’ shaping British identity in this period, while as Monroe Price (1995: 16) reminds us, ‘dominant broadcasters like dominant religions set forth the framework of national identity…supporting it with a set of moral precepts, providing a history and vision for the future’. This vision was articulated most forcefully in the philosophy of the BBC’s first Director-General John Reith. Imbued with a strong sense of religiosity and moral purpose, Reith viewed broadcasting as a means of bettering society through a process of cultural and spiritual uplift. From 1930 when the National programme was first established, the listening public were afforded a single service that bound them together as a common audience in a process both more intimate and immediate than that of the mass newspaper reading publics of the early twentieth century.
Early radio broadcasting was imbued with the principles of democratizing culture, of bringing what was deemed to be the best of metropolitan life, through live programming of, among other things, theatre and music, as well as the production of a range of talks and actualities, to a previously excluded public. In doing so, it aimed to ‘raise the level of taste, information and understanding and so make all members of society more actively responsive to and more responsible for, the nation’s culture and politics’ (Cardiff and Scannell 1987: 158). To make, as Reith put it in an oft-quoted phrase, ‘the nation as one man’. As an institutional mindset, it was a philosophy that would dominate the ethos of the Corporation for at least a generation after his departure as Director-General in 1938. As Tom Burns’ (1977: 42) seminal sociological study of the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s put it:
The BBC was developed under Reith into a kind of domestic diplomatic service, representing the British, or what he saw as the best of the British – to the British. BBC culture like BBC standard English, was not peculiar to itself but an intellectual ambience composed out of the values, standards and beliefs of the professional middle class, especially that part educated at Oxford and Cambridge. Sports, popular music and entertainment that appealed to the lower classes were included in large measure; but the manner in which they were purveyed, the context and the presentation, remained indomitably middle class.
‘Representing the best of the British’ also included the relaying of the great occasions of nation and state. Despite initial reluctance from Buckingham Palace, royal occasions were closely followed, with the speech by George V at the opening of the Wembley Empire Exhibition in 1924 the first to be broadcast. From then on, the BBC became a ‘vigorous promoter of the state ceremonial’ (Samuel 1998: 183). It acted, with the start of outside broadcasting in 1927, as a witness to national events such as the State opening of parliament and Remembrance Sunday, as commentator on sporting occasions such as Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final, the Boat Race and the Grand National, a celebrator of Christmas, Easter and other religious festivals as well as an instigator, as with the monarch’s Christmas message, of annual broadcast traditions. As Scannell and Cardiff (1987) note, the ‘programmes of national identity’ were ‘set apart’ from the rest. Not only were they imbued with a ‘sacred’ dimension, but their ‘ritualistic regularity’ brought a sense of order to the randomness of the early schedules.
Yet within this homogenizing role, there also existed a diversity of sorts with the gradual implementation of a ‘Regional programme’ from 1930 onwards. Although the function of radio remained fundamentally that of a national medium, the development of the ‘Regional scheme’ allowed for a distinct, if albeit limited, arena in which to reflect the country’s cultural diversities. This was not, however, the scheme’s original purpose. Rather, its origins lay in Reith’s overall policy of the centralization and standardization of broadcasting structures and with its enactment came the elimination of the nineteen localized stations that had operated under the auspices of the British Broadcasting Company in its embryonic years (see Briggs 1965; Scannell 1993). Indeed, as Briggs notes, in England at least, the regions were not developed along recognized historic, geographical or cultural delineations but rather were divided into the three huge regions of North, Midland and West based on ‘engineering practicalities’ (Briggs 1995: 623). Hence, Wales was joined in a rather unhappy ‘marriage of convenience’ with the West region until 1937 in what the Region’s director E. R. Appelton rather improbably claimed was an attempt to reunite ‘the Kingdom of Arthur after centuries of separation by the Bristol Channel’ (BBC Yearbook 1934: 189).
The establishment of six regional stations, including those that covered Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, laid the initial foundations for the development of the BBC’s regional services across the twentieth century. In the interwar years, they contributed both to the limited diversity that existed within BBC broadcasting as well as to its unifying impulses, with their programming often playing a central role in many of the great ceremonies of state. Take for example the ‘Coronation week’ leading up to the investiture of George VI in 1937 when Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all produced special celebratory programmes to mark the occasion. Northern Ireland relayed an ‘all British variety show’ from Belfast; a children’s programme in Wales elided the greatness of the future King with Bendigeidvran, a hero of Welsh folklore; while programming in Scotland included a talk on the Scottish roots of the new Queen (Hajkowski 2005).
Although regional broadcasting did enjoy something of a renaissance in the late 1930s, the outbreak of the Second World War resulted in the closure of the Regional scheme until the end of hostilities. The development of television from the early 1950s followed similar centralizing tendencies to those of prewar radio, although there were gradual concessions to the regionalist cause with the establishment of television centres across the country ostensibly for news and current affairs. In addition, the opening of Network Production Centres in Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham initiated a broader decentralizing tendency away from London – a process continuing intermittently to the present day. In part, these developments can be seen as a response to the Beveridge Report of 1949 which, among other things, criticized the excessive ‘Londonization’ of the Corporation. Indeed, a direct consequence was the establishment in 1952 of National Broadcasting Councils for Scotland and Wales, which were granted responsibility for the policy and content of programmes produced in their respective areas. The arrival of ITV in 1955 also played its part. Its federal structures stood in marked contrast to the highly centralized BBC, although the extent to which this directly impacted upon the balance of national and regional programming produced by the Corporation is difficult to assess (see Turnock 2005).
It was changing political dynamics, however, that acted as the major catalyst for change. From the mid-1960s onwards, the rise of previously latent political nationalisms in both Scotland and Wales not only threatened to undermine the postwar political consensus but also presented a fundamental challenge to the BBC. Although cultural nationalist groups such as the Saltire Society and Cwm Deri had as far back as the 1920s campaigned for better programming, the electoral success of the Scottish National Party (SNP), first in a byelection in 1967, and then at the general elections of 1970 and 1974, transformed the political paradigm.1 Although the nationalists never gained a majority in either Scotland or Wales, their presence shifted the parameters of debate and, throughout the 1970s, broadcasting officials conducted their work in anticipation, at the very least, of a new Scottish Assembly in Edinburgh and the devolution of power and responsibility that would entail.
Thus, with the growth of Celtic nationalisms and the prospect of a new constitutional settlement, there was much soul searching about the ‘regional’ nature of the BBC. In January 1965 in a BBC Lunchtime Lecture, the then Head of Programmes Wales, Hywel Davies, had outlined his vision of the role of the regions in British broadcasting. ‘The things we are broadly concerned with’, he stated, ‘are the frustration, the satisfaction and resentment, the inspiration and vanity of those who are not at the seeming heart of things. We are concerned with the joys and tribulations of being offcentre’ (Davies 1965: 3). It was in many ways a surprisingly metropolitan view and one that, within a decade, had become somewhat obsolete. Scotland and Wales were no longer content with being ‘off centre’. They were now firmly centre stage.
In an article published in 1970 entitled The Backwardness of Scottish Television, Stuart Hood, a former BBC programme controller, offered a forthright critique of the nature of programming produced in Scotland. A Scot himself, his criticism was not so much focused on the structures of broadcasting but more on the insular vision of those who had previously worked for the BBC in Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow2 and, in particular, their subservience to Scotland’s political and religious elite. As a consequence, they were often ill-equipped to deal with the broader changes taking place in Scottish society. As the Annan Committee reported in 1977:
Something is wrong with the image of Scotland which television projects to the rest of the United Kingdom. The national culture is reflected too much by hackneyed symbols, and too little importance is given to the new opportunities and hopes, the shifts in pattern of industry and occupation, as well as the dour problems and grim realities of life in some parts of Scotland today.
Annan Committee (1977: 409)
The first steps in reshaping the output of BBC Scotland had been taken ten years earlier with the appointment of Alasdair Milne as Controller in 1967. His predecessor, Andrew Stewart, had first joined the BBC in 1926, which meant that, when compared with Milne, he was not simply from a different generation but from a different broadcasting era all together. With most of his experience gained in the radio age, there was reluctance from many executives in London to substantially expand the scope of BBC Scotland’s television output. A substantial outlay of resources on the new and expensive medium needed a Controller who enjoyed the confidence of the centre. Stewart was not that man. Thus, Milne’s appointment represented more than simply a break with the past; his arrival brought brand new horizons to the Scottish broadcasting landscape, something unthinkable when compared with the ‘puritanical parochialism’ that had effectively become the Corporation’s institutional mindset north of the border (Harvie 1982: 128).
At the age of just thirty-eight, Milne became the youngest Regional Controller in the history of the BBC. But with him he brought experience unparalleled on the Scottish scene, especially in television production. Although he may not quite have been the ‘tiger at the gates’, as the Glasgow Herald described him, he was certainly a very different type of Controller compared with those who had preceded him. Indeed, it would not be unfair to state that a certain degree of paralysis in terms of broadcast/programme innovation had been reached before his arrival. Milne’s entrance heralded a very different way of doing things, bringing with it a new culture of professionalism and a new mindset that sought to modernize the dominant Reithian image that was still very much in the ascendancy. Having worked previously in London on the groundbreaking current affairs programme Tonight as well as on That Was The Week That Was, he brought with him expertise in the latest television techniques as well as a proven track record of working on some of the Corporation’s most cutting edge programmes. It was during his tenure that Scottish television developed for the first time into a truly professional service and engaged with subjects, most notably Scottish nationalism, which had previously only been addressed in a very peripheral manner. Indeed, one of his first actions – the decision to add the word Scotland to the letters BBC that were adorned upon the side of the Corporation’s headquarters in Glasgow – although superficial, was also symbolic of a broader desire to highlight the fact that the BBC was not simply broadcasting to Scotland but was itself part and parcel of Scottish life.3
This was to be reflected in BBC Scotland’s two central remits. The first was to produce programming about Scotland to a Scottish audience, with the second to reflect Scottish distinctiveness in network programming, i.e. on BBC One, BBC Two as well as Radio 4, which were transmitted across the whole of the United Kingdom. Reflecting Scotland both to itself and to a broader British audience were on the face of it complimentary goals, yet the latter was dependent both upon the outlook of controllers in London and on their willingness to finance and commission any substantial projects with funding drawn in large part from their own network budgets. Indeed, according to Tony Whitby, the perspectives of London-based staff often struggled to reach beyond the Watford Gap. As he noted in a memo, ‘it is notorious that most producers and programme executives are more familiar with the Costa Brava than with Birmingham and Manchester, let alone Cardiff and Glasgow’ (quoted in Hendy 2007: 120). Having worked in London in the formative years of his career, Milne was in a strong position to negotiate programmes for the network, but it was a process that was fundamentally dependent upon a strong individual rapport between Regional and Network Controller and one that necessitated Scottish culture to be viewed through a London-centric, or at the very least British-oriented, perspective.
In many ways, this was the root cause of the Annan Committee’s criticism cited earlier. Throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s, a central function of networked Scottish programming was, according to one former BBC executive I interviewed, to provide ‘Light Entertainment for Britain’.4 Programmes such as The White Heather Club and The Kilt is My Delight typified the tartanclad imagery and music hall tradition of many of the most popular Scottishoriginated series transmitted throughout the UK. With the addition of programmes such as Dr Finlay’s Casebook, which remained on air until 1970 and presented a romanticized view of the work of an interwar rural medical surgery, these programmes provided the staple fare of Scottish-orientated output produced for the networks. As one columnist writing for The Scotsman in 1976 noted, the association of this particular version of Scottishness with the BBC proved difficult to shake off in both its Scottish and British-oriented productions.
In the past week we have had several doses of the Kenneth McKellar brand of ‘folk song’, sheep dog trials, and ‘Matter of Opinion’ courtesy of the Women’s rural institute of Ballater…The result is a programme better suited to expatriates in need of gentle reminders of the old country, than a changing, challenging Scotland…Considering the severe economic restrictions imposed on the BBC it seems bad budgeting to spend so much of Scotland’s broadcasting time on music and a limited, repetitive diet at that. Can you imagine ‘BBC England’ cheerfully grinding away at ‘Hearts of Oak’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory?’ BBC Scotland often seems not much more than the BBC with tartan frills.5
Yet though there were many shortcomings, it would be unfair to label the output of BBC Scotland in the 1970s as simply being that of the BBC with ‘tartan frills’. From the controllership of Milne onwards, there were a number of important innovations that, combined with constant internal and external political pressures, resulted in ever more diverse representations of Scottish life. Indeed, in addition to an expanding news and current affairs service, programmes such as Who are the SNP? and Lilybank, an undercover exposé of the extent of poverty in Glasgow’s East End, were some of the most prominent television documentaries dealing with contemporary Scottish issues. This was an area of output that expanded greatly in the latter half of the 1970s, most markedly under the guidance of Alastair Hetherington who became Scottish Controller in December 1975. Having worked as editor of The Guardian for more than twenty years, his appointment to what was in effect a middle-ranking BBC post was not simply testament to a desire on his part to return to Scotland, but also to the importance the BBC placed on finding an appropriate figurehead for Scottish broadcasting in an era of great political uncertainty.
Drama production also offered a greater diversity of representation. Although tending more towards the adaptation of literary classics rather than contemporary works, the groundbreaking production of Sunset Song in 1971, for example, showed that gritty realism, in this instance in the hardship of life in an early twentieth-century crofting community, was not prone to romanticism. This is not to say that television shied away from controversial contemporary issues, but much of the most groundbreaking work of the period about Scotland was edited in London rather than Glasgow. Most prominent among these was Just Another Saturday about Protestantism and Orange order marches in Glasgow and The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil by John McGrath, which followed in the tradition of a long line of radical plays that featured in the BBC’s Play for Today. Focusing upon English ‘exploitation’ of the Highlands, from the Highland clearances to the discovery of North Sea Oil, The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil was adapted from a successful touring production by the 7:84 Theatre Company. As Les Cooke (2003: 110) argues, it was ‘unique within the history of British television drama…politically, with its radical socialist agenda, it is a product of its time, a period when such an “extreme” play could not only get made within the BBC but could be screened at primetime on BBC One’. The audience may not have cared that it was produced in London rather than Glasgow but, to those within the Corporation who called for greater devolution of responsibility, it was a prime example of a programme that should have been made by BBC Scotland (Hetherington 1992).
An additional point to note in the production of Scottish programmes, however, was that a combined lack of resources and the problem of scheduling programmes for a Scottish audience, which in television could only be provided at the expense of rather than in addition to network programmes, often raised considerable tensions about what should be shown and when (McDowell 1992: 212–13). Although the situation was by no means as severe as that in Wales, where schedulers had to deal with the problem of a linguistic divide, the response of the Scottish audience showed that a significant number of viewers would be happy to forgo Scottish ‘opt outs’ altogether. Indeed, a survey conducted in 1976 concluded that the public thought programming produced by BBC Scotland was ‘less professional, less experimental and less controversial’ than that broadcast across the rest of Britain (ibid.: 213). Thus, somewhat paradoxically, although the rhetoric for more Scottish-oriented programming increased sharply in these years, large sections of the audience remained happy with the status quo.
It was radio, however, that presented the greatest opportunity for providing a truly distinctive Scottish service. Unlike in television, where programmes formed part of a broader UK-wide schedule, the decision to launch separate radio stations for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in November 1978 presented for the first time the opportunity to move beyond simply producing individual programmes. As John Gray, the chief assistant of radio in Scotland noted, this meant ‘the freedom to plan a service, to place (programmes) at times and durations determined solely by policy and editorial decisions made in Scotland for a Scottish audience’. He continued, ‘this is more important than the actual quantity of origination. A service operating as an “opt out” from another channel, however sympathetic and understanding the planners of that channel may be, and however autonomous in the use of its resource Scotland may be, can never become a Scottish service’ (BBC WAC SC1/71/1).
Yet Radio Scotland was a service that the listening public by and large failed to fully engage with. Despite attempting to offer a mix of genres to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, listening figures showed that the station struggled to maintain a 10 per cent share in its early years, often falling to just over 5 per cent in the mid-1980s, in part because it was operating in competition with both local commercial radio and the BBC’s main networked stations (BBC WAC SC1/71/1). Indeed, audience reaction to Radio Scotland’s initial programmes was especially illuminating on two counts. Not only did it mirror beliefs expressed in relation to television that anything produced in Scotland was inferior to material emanating from London, it also pointed to a regional divide within Scotland itself. As one survey respondent from Aberdeen noted, there was ‘too much Glasgow…You’d think there was a gate at Dundee and we’re in the North Pole’ (BBC WAC SC1/63). The expansion of Radio Scotland to include a range of community and area stations for the north and west of the country undoubtedly helped to placate some of these critiques. However, the allegation that BBC Scotland remained too focused on the Glasgow-Edinburgh central belt was one that reverberated across the decades and at times was every bit as potent as the charge of London centrism levelled at the BBC as a whole.
In programming terms, however, Radio Scotland in the early 1980s in particular witnessed a greater degree of innovation and experimentation, especially around non-music-based shows. Central to this was the success of programmes such as Naked Radio – a comedy sketch show – which, as its risqué logo of a dekilted Scotsman baring his backside indicated, was a very deliberate attempt to move beyond tartanry clichés. Other programmes had more practical purposes. Kilbreck, for example, a weekday ten-minute soap often likened to a Scottish Archers was first broadcast in 1981 and was conceived as a way of improving the health and well-being of the Scottish public. Financed in association with the Scottish Health and Education Group (SHEG), the programme, set in a fictional Scottish new town, strove to deal directly with a range of personal and community health issues. Although it attracted a considerable audience of about 300,000 listeners a week, it also provoked the ire of some religious leaders for its promotion of premarital sex and advice on contraception. As Charles Renfrew, Auxiliary Bishop in Glasgow and clearly more of an Archers fan, wrote in a letter of complaint, ‘I would, if this sort of thing continues, be tempted to burn down the little village and return to Ambridge forever’ (BBC WAC SC1/40/30/2). Although Kilbreck would run for less than three years, its brevity did not detract from the fact that it was the first daily soap opera to be produced by BBC Scotland. And while it may not quite have attained the same status as The McFlannels a generation earlier, Kilbreck was certainly much more attuned to the sensibilities of contemporary Scotland and central to the changing representations of Scottishness produced by the BBC.
Writing in 2001 about British cinema in the ‘Celtic fringe’, Martin McCloone highlighted the ‘reimagining’ and ‘reworking of national or regional tropes and stereotypes’ that was taking place. He noted, ‘if many of these are inventions of the metropolitan centre, nevertheless their reinterpretation impacts upon a concept of Britishness, which is already under pressure…the peripherality has moved towards the cutting edge of contemporary debate’ (quoted in Blandford 2007: 11). McCloone was writing in the aftermath of political devolution in Scotland and Wales in 1999, yet in reality Britishness had been under pressure for at least three decades, and its reimagining was something that was not solely confined to the first years of the twenty-first century. As we have seen, despite often justified criticism of its London centrism and centralized bureaucracy, the BBC played a central role in this reimaging thirty years earlier. With no ‘national’ theatres in either Scotland or Wales, let alone film industries, the BBC was undoubtedly the major institutional patron of Scottish and Welsh cultural life. Although there were undoubtedly many shortcomings, not least in the amount of programmes produced outside London, the changes in the 1970s were emblematic of the Corporation’s response to broader societal change. As Jean Seaton (2007: 42–43) notes, the BBC,
has repeatedly metabolised Britishness. The Corporation, in competition with other public service programme makers has reflected the mutating condition of the nation. This is the bedrock of everything it has achieved. Yet it has also added something to the reflection. The spectacle of being British that public service broadcasting has provided has, at its best, added careful thoughtfulness to the image, and an empathy with the audience that is like the responsiveness of a market, yet driven by other values. The BBC has done this as an institution, with principals and habits of working and things it fears to get wrong, standards that it applies to British life, ambitions and a worrying away at problems, not just as a ‘broadcaster’.
What in effect this chapter has highlighted is one aspect of the continuing debates about the Britishness of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Although such debates have again been accentuated by the success of the SNP in the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary elections and, for example, by the decision of the BBC to relocate production facilities away from London to Salford, as we have seen, their genesis can be traced back at least forty years. Indeed, although the idea of a homogeneous British culture has quite rightly long been considered problematic by academics, the role of the BBC in simply reinforcing a common culture has not. It is perhaps time that greater attention was paid to the Corporation’s considerable role in reflecting the diversity of British life, not simply its role in homogenizing it.
1 At the October 1974 General Election, the Scottish National Party returned eleven MPs to Westminster.
2 The headquarters of the BBC in Scotland until 2007.
3 Alasdair Milne, interview with author, 19 May 2006.
4 Christopher Irwin, interview with author, 11 March 2006.
5 BBC WAC Governors Press Cuttings 6.12.1975–1.6.1978, Fay Young, The Scotsman, 8 March 1976.