An Introductory History of British Broadcasting

Andrew Crisell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134538058
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

An Introductory History of British Broadcasting is a concise and accessible history of British radio and television. It begins with the birth of radio at the beginning of the twentieth century and discusses key moments in media history, from the first wireless broadcast in 1920 through to recent developments in digital broadcasting and the internet.
Distinguishing broadcasting from other kinds of mass media, and evaluating the way in which audiences have experienced the medium, Andrew Crisell considers the nature and evolution of broadcasting, the growth of broadcasting institutions and the relation of broadcasting to a wider political and social context. This fully updated and expanded second edition includes:
*the latest developments in digital broadcasting and the internet
*broadcasting in a multimedia era and its prospects for the future
*the concept of public service broadcasting and its changing role in an era of interactivity, multiple channels and pay per view
*an evaluation of recent political pressures on the BBC and ITV duopoly
*a timeline of key broadcasting events and annotated advice on further reading.

Part I

The phenomenon of broadcasting

The phenomenon of broadcasting

It seems a good time to write a history of British radio and television because we can now see broadcasting as a distinct phase in the development of communications technology. Broadcasting followed upon print, the first automated mass medium, but is itself, after a relatively brief reign of some eighty years, being caught up in newer technologies that are bringing about a convergence, even a blurring, of mass and private media. Before offering an account of these eighty years we therefore need to isolate the distinctive characteristics and functions of broadcasting by locating it within the broader history of mass communication. Inevitably this historical sketch will be simple and crude, containing no room for specifics, subtleties and exceptions, but if it gives the reader a general and roughly accurate perspective it will have justified itself.

We might begin with a simple definition of mass communication: the sending of messages to a multitude of receivers. Its original mode was live in the sense that the receivers were in the presence of the sender – that is, within hearing and/or sight of him – and in a space which, in needing to be large enough to accommodate both parties, was most likely public. In these circumstances mass communication was inevitably a kind of performance, so we might term this public space a theatre even though it could accommodate almost any kind of message – political speeches, philosophical disquisitions, religious rituals, educational lectures, story-tellings or factual reports, spectator sports and circuses, as well as the more conventionally theatrical kinds of performance such as drama and light entertainment. Indeed it is probable that not only drama but poetry, that other great literary genre, was originally performed in this space. Before the advent of printing, literacy was very rare, and poetry's inherent acoustic features of rhythm and rhyme suggest that it was intended to be recited to numbers of listeners rather than silently read to oneself.

The first automated mode of mass communication was print, which was utilized in Britain from 1475. The cultural, intellectual and political consequences of printing were enormous – truly incalculable – but it was made possible only by a pre-existing and even more momentous technology: writing (Ong 1982: 81–2). For several thousand years writing had provided a way of fixing speech, of taking human utterance out of its natural, constantly dissolving element, time, and putting it into space, where it could remain permanently accessible. What print did was to turn writing into a mass medium by allowing an indefinite number of copies of an ‘utterance’ to be made. This was the first real instance of mass production, a process which is regarded as the distinguishing feature of industrialization but which in this case preceded the main ‘Industrial Revolution’ by several hundred years. Printing was none other than the mass production of writing or ‘literature’ in its broadest sense: the first stage in the industrialization of communication. Moreover, ‘massification’ entails the democratization of the product to which it is applied in the sense of widening popular access to it. It is not just – perhaps not even primarily – the case that mass production meets a pre-existing mass demand; rather that in order to justify itself economically it must increase demand, and it was the arrival of print which was to prompt the growth of mass literacy.

But in creating numberless copies of its written messages print differed from the earlier mass medium of ‘theatre’ by introducing a gap in space and time between senders and receivers: a public, live medium was superseded by a private, ‘lifeless’ one whose receivers could withdraw into their own separate environments. A paradox thus arose which applied not only to print but to most subsequent modes of mass communication, and which terms like ‘mass’ and ‘broadcasting’ belie: for while these modes have enormously increased the size of the audience they have also ‘atomized’ it – reduced it to small groups or isolated individuals who read or listen or watch in their own private spaces.

From about 1839 print technology was complemented by photography, which could offer fixed images of reality; but what the next two mass media technologies did was to provide fixed messages or ‘recordings’ in which one or both of the two most important live or time-based elements of the communication act, sound and moving vision, would be re-created. We might usefully term the first of these phonography, which from the 1890s produced recordings of different kinds of sound, notably speech and music, and which over the years has variously taken the form of wax cylinders, graphite platters, vinyl records, several kinds of audio tape including cassettes, compact discs and minidiscs. Phonography was always a private mass medium in the sense that sound reproduction equipment and the recordings themselves were purchased and used by families, households or single individuals.

Cinematography, which developed from about 1895, was another quasi-live medium since, through its ‘moving text’ of pictures and (from 1927) sound, it could simulate the conditions of the earliest mode of mass communication. Not surprisingly, the kind of material that seemed most suited to it and likeliest to appeal to its audience was conventional drama, and in focusing upon drama ‘film’, as it came to be known, created a corpus of work – of definitive, ‘best possible’ performances which differed from those of the conventional theatre in being infinitely reproducible. However, like its predecessor, film was a public medium in the sense that its audiences gathered in theatres – ‘cinemas’, as they were called. Although individual cinema audiences were no larger than theatrical audiences, film was much more of a mass medium than theatre because the number of cinemas in which it was possible to show copies of a single film far exceeded the number of theatres to which it was possible to tour a single dramatic performance.

However, broadcasting was the first genuinely live mass medium since ‘theatre’ because it was instantaneous: its messages were received by its audience at the very moment they were sent; they were not fixed messages in the form of printed texts and photographs or recordings of sounds or moving images. From 1922 radio transmitted live sound to a private, domestic audience, and from 1936 television provided the same kind of audience with live sound and live moving pictures.

As in the case of print, the economic logic of all these communications technologies was to maximize their audiences, and to this end they resorted, wherever possible, to the modes of mass production. Since photography was a mass medium only as an adjunct to print – that is, when photographs appeared in books, newspapers and magazines rather than in family albums – its artefacts were mass produced in the same way as those of print. Phonographic artefacts, notably gramophone records, were also mass produced. The artefacts of cinema and broadcasting were not, of course, produced in quite the same way as those of print, photography and phonography, since they were not, at first, tangible objects which could be individually retained by their consumers. But in the sense that they were serially and multiply constructed, according to pre-set patterns or formulas and by teams whose workers each had a specialized role (scriptwriter, director, camera operator, performers, and so on), they too were mass produced.

And all these media had one important advantage over print. Quite apart from the high initial cost of books and pamphlets and the negative impact of certain social and political forces, a real barrier to the mass consumption or democratization of printed products was the fact that they required decoding skills: to enjoy or benefit from print consumers first had to learn how to read. Near-universal literacy was not finally achieved until the end of the nineteenth century (Cannon 1997: 582) and even now there are many who are either non-literate or do not find reading and writing easy or pleasurable activities. The media which have developed since printing, however, are all iconic: their products reproduce the sights and sounds of the world we experience directly and thus require from their consumers only the minimal decoding skills we need in our daily lives. They amply demonstrate the truth of the observation that many technologies are extensions of man's corporeal faculties (McLuhan 1962: 4), and leaving economic considerations aside it is hardly surprising that their democratic spread has been more rapid than print's. The Americans were the first to appreciate the democratizing tendencies of these iconic media and to use them to democratize culture, but as we shall see, this process was less straightforward – was, indeed, consciously resisted – in Britain.

The different characteristics of all these modes of mass communication, or ‘mass media’ as we have also termed them, can be summarized as in the table overleaf.

As we might expect, different media develop their own kinds of message – which we will term genres – but the relationships within and between media and genres are often complicated. One genre may be common to several media, and as well as operating separately different media may be contained one within another, like a nest of boxes. Print was the medium which fostered the third of our great literary genres, the novel, as well as news and current affairs. News is clearly not a genre in the sense that the novel or poetry is, since these are formal categories whereas the term ‘news’ refers to content; but news has its own characteristic forms so we might for the sake of convenience refer to it, too, as a ‘genre’.

MEDIUM	LIVE	RECORDED		PUBLIC	PRIVATE
		Fixed text: (Writing; Pictures)	Moving text: (Soundtrack; Film)		Domestic/ Individual
‘THEATRE’	*			*
PRINT/		*			*
PHOTOGRAPHY
PHONOGRAPHY			*		*
CINEMATOGRAPHY			*	*
BROADCASTING	*				*
(RADIO/TV)

To say that print fostered news and the novel is not of course to deny that they were very much the product of such contemporary social and cultural factors as the growth of capitalism, the political ascendancy of the middle class, the rise of literacy, and changes in the patterns of work and leisure. It is merely to say that print provided the technical preconditions for such factors to operate, as other media have in their turn. Since photographs in themselves are limited or ambiguous in meaning, photography became a mass medium as an ancillary to the print genres, enhancing the content of newspapers, books and magazines.

Though certain genres have remained peculiar to certain media, it is clear that many can be taken over by other media with varying amounts of adaptation and variable degrees of success. When records are broadcast on the radio it is reasonable to speak of one medium, phonography, being subsumed by another, sound broadcasting. Consequently the musical genres which make up the content of the former undergo no adaptation at all. On the other hand, the amount of adaptation may be so great that we might almost speak of a new genre being created. It is clear, for instance, that the cinema feature film has its origins in theatrical drama; but the difference which the physical flexibility, recording and editing techniques of the newer medium have made to acting methods and to the location and changes of scene is such that the two no longer seem closely related.

A genre may migrate to a new medium and become so at home there as to be no longer identified with the old one. Poetry moved from theatre to print, and though poetry readings are occasionally staged it is clear that the move has generally been for the better. Its acoustic elements of rhythm and rhyme can still be appreciated by the private reader even though she may internalize them, and its transformation into a fixed, visible text which she can mull over means that the genre is probably capable of a much greater sophistication of structure and meaning than it was in an oral medium.

For similar reasons, the novel remains largely confined to the print medium in which it was born. It is obvious that the medium of television can subsume that of print (as in the case of teletext): nevertheless, for the time-based characteristics of radio, cinema and television the novel is invariably turned into drama (though straight, abridged readings are sometimes heard on the radio). Only print is equal to the fact that the novel is quite as much concerned with the workings of the inner consciousness as with the sensory world of actions and events.

News has been a cosmopolitan genre. It has always flourished in its native medium, print, which affords the scope and depth that it needs. Photography added a useful visual dimension to the newspapers, but cinema brought the vivid illustration of sound and moving pictures. Later, television could match this illustrative power, and in addition offer the absolute up-to-dateness of a live medium, and cinema capitulated with the demise of Pathé News in 1969.

The rise and fall of cinema as a news medium is reflected in the fortunes of its word ‘newsreel’. Though offering live sound, radio news, which evolved at much the same time, could not match cinema's visual power. The BBC therefore sought to borrow this power by titling one of its programmes Radio Newsreel, but once television news had established itself during the 1950s ‘newsreel’ implied something not up-to-date but merely recorded, and thus declined in status. We might also note in passing that because it can subsume the medium of print, television can borrow something of the stability and continuous accessibility of newspaper news as well as offering its own kind of news, for it gives us not only live bulletins but the fixed summaries of teletext.

Drama is another much-travelled genre. Although it has always remained in the theatre its dialogue and stage business were soon transposed to print, and several centuries later it was adapted for cinema, radio and television. Drama in the latter medium may take the form either of theatrical adaptation or feature film, and the genre is a good illustration of the fact that the historical development of the mass media has not been a simple matter of continuous improvement, but that what is in one respect an advantage is in another a limitation. Theatrical drama was hit by the cinema, cinema was hit by broadcasting, and for some time broadcasting has been feeling the effects of newer media; but because each of them has irreplaceable characteristics or functions the older media survive, albeit in reduced circumstances. Cinema and television incorporate the visual, auditory, temporal elements of theatrical drama in a way that a printed script cannot; but handy, portable print can ‘stabilize’ it and permit an overview of its structures and themes in a way that is beyond the other media. Thanks to this stability it is print, above all, which has facilitated the enormous expansion of scholarship and intellectual inquiry that has taken place over the last five centuries. The domesticity of radio and television is in general a great asset, but a visit to the cinema is a public, communal experience which can be much more pleasurable than an evening at home – and in addition to this pleasure, the theatre affords a genuinely live performance that the cinema cannot.

Even that most protean of the new media, the network of computers known as the internet, has its limitations. With varying degrees of effectiveness, the internet can subsume most older media – print, photography, phonography, film and broadcasting – and now offers many of their typical products: on-line newspapers and magazines, various literary texts, records, and both radio and TV transmissions. We shall have more to say about this hybrid and baffling medium later in the book, but for all its comprehensiveness and versatility the keyboard and screen through which it is accessed are – for the time being, at least – less wieldy and flexible than a book or newspaper, more physically and visually constricting than a radio set.

However contingent they might be, the advantages of broadcasting as it developed in the first half of the twentieth century were clearly considerable because they embraced so many of those of the earlier mass media. First, radio and then television domesticated various live or live-seeming genres which hitherto could be experienced only in public. Any kind of instantaneous performance that had been received in a collective, ‘theatrical’ space – talks, plays, narratives, debates, spectacles and light entertainment – could now be received at home. Likewise, television could domesticate the cinema film – an important achievement since film's earlier attempt to re-create the liveness of theatric...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements to the first edition
• Acknowledgements to the second edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• Part I The Phenomenon of Broadcasting
• Chapter 1 The birth of radio
• Chapter 2 The BBC: from private company to national institution
• Chapter 3 Keeping the sabbath, waging a war and building a pyramid
• Chapter 4 The golden age of radio and the rise of television
• Chapter 5 Television: the first years of competition
• Chapter 6 Pilkington and after
• Chapter 7 The fall and rise of radio
• Chapter 8 Modern television (1): some characteristics and tendencies
• Chapter 9 Modern television (2): social impacts and influences
• Chapter 10 A growth of sights and sounds
• Part II The rise of the active audience
• Chapter 11 Cables, dishes and government: the duopoly under threat
• Chapter 12 The last age of analogue
• Chapter 13 The Dawn of the Digital Era
• Part III From broadcasting to multimedia
• Chapter 14 Future history: some speculations
• Timeline of British broadcasting
• Bibliography
• Index