At a time of scouring scrutiny of the financial affairs of politicians, a new documentary reveals that a beloved British prime minister once tried to bribe the BBC to put him on air.
In 1929, during his period of exile from Westminster before returning to win the second world war, Winston Churchill was excluded from the airwaves of the then seven-year-old BBC by a rule that the parties must select all participants for political programmes.
A frustrated Churchill wrote to John Reith, the founding director-general, and offered £100 for a half-hour to air his political views. He was rebuffed by Reith, who expressed horror at this invocation of the “American model of cash for broadcasting”.
One of the oddities of Britain’s national broadcaster is that it was happy in its early days to throw away programmes – meaning copies of many comedies and dramas from the 50s and 60s no longer exist – but, true to its civil service roots, it stored every single piece of correspondence, which, according to BBC: The Secret Files 2, now stretch to “four-and-a-half miles of written archives”, including the Churchill-Reith exchanges.
This is not an investigative documentary, as shown by the choice of actor Penelope Keith as presenter. Yet behind the cosy nostalgia – Keith refers to her “erstwhile sparring partners” Morecambe and Wise – there is an editorial agenda.
Referring to the Reith-Churchill dispute, Keith reads from the Autocue that “battle lines were drawn”, which would have “far-reaching consequences” for the BBC. Before their clash, Churchill, as chancellor of the exchequer during the General Strike of 1926, had tried to take the BBC under government control to censor its reporting.
Reith beat the government on that occasion, but the uneasy blend of state funding and supposed editorial freedom has led to clashes between Downing Street and Broadcasting House for nine decades. The corporation, currently engaged in fractious negotiations with the Cameron administration over a new royal charter and licence fee agreement, might like viewers of the documentary to conclude that politicians have always had it in for the BBC.
But, while the current prime minister might be delighted to be compared even subliminally to Churchill, the parallel doesn’t fit, any more than the current director-general, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, is a latter-day Reith. Although Keith tells us that Reith’s mission for the BBC – to “inform, educate and entertain” – is “still the bedrock of the company he founded”, it seems highly unlikely that the stern Presbyterian Reith would endorse the vast management salaries and cantilevered layers of officials with dubious responsibilities that have become the topsoil of the organisation today.
It is true that the BBC has frequently been a target of attempts at external censorship from ministers and moralists, but the material presented here also shows that the BBC has been prone to its own authoritarian instincts. Astonishing memos from the Dance Music Advisory Committee in the 1950s and 60s warn that the lyricist of a pop song must “insert a reference to marriage” if the record is to be broadcast. Other discs are binned for alleged drug references, although the advice to producers notes (in a fudge reminiscent of more recent moral writhings) that, while the song must never be played, it is “not officially banned”.
BBC: The Secret Files 2 does educate, inform and entertain, although Lord Reith would perhaps have craved more intellectual rigour. Although BBC4 is not officially supposed to worry about ratings, the producers have focused on the crowdpleasers, from Morecambe and Wise to David Attenborough. Perhaps confusingly for the corporation’s channel branding, there is nothing here that could not happily go out on BBC2 or even late-night BBC1.
One overlooked star of light entertainment, though, does emerge. Patrick Newman, a BBC booking manager, built up a hilarious correspondence with Eric and Ernie (who always wrote together as “we”) and the agents of Tony Hancock. Using a topical gag about Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to sugar an offer to Morecambe and Wise that was lower than they had asked for – or seeking payment for the bottles of booze that Hancock sent underlings out to get – Newman had a wryness and timing that suggests he should have been given his own show.
The title BBC: The Secret Files 2 may confuse you if you never noticed the first edition of this occasional series. But the series will surely stop before they reach the folders that hold the records of the BBC’s dealings with Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris.
