This New Noise Read Free Page B

sensible arrangement. The Manchester Guardian ’s leader of 20 October 1922 noted that ‘broadcasting is of all industries the one most clearly marked out for monopoly. It is a choice between monopoly and confusion … the only alternative to granting privileges and monopoly to private firms is that the State should do the work itself.’
    By 1925, when the Crawford Parliamentary Committee on Broadcasting made its recommendations, some of the societal and political implications of the new service were beginning to become apparent. The decision was taken to transform the young British Broadcasting Company into a public corporation. Broadcasting was too significant to be turned over to mere profit-making. ‘No company or body constituted on trade lines for the profit, direct or indirect, of those composing it, can be regarded as adequate in view of the broader considerations now beginning to emerge,’ it reported. ‘We think a public corporation is the most appropriate organisation … its status and duties should correspond with those of a public service.’ Reith’s Broadcast Over Britain had already laid out some of the abiding principles of the corporation-to-be. The BBC should be the citizen’s ‘guide, philosopher and friend’, he wrote. Broadcasting, in his hands, was moulded into something that was not merely a kind of pleasing technological curiosity, but a phenomenon with the capacity to ennoble those who used it. It may, he wrote, ‘help to show that mankind is a unity and that the mighty heritage, material, moral and spiritual, if meant for the good of any,is meant for the good of all’. Wireless ‘ignores the puny and often artificial barriers which have estranged men from their fellows. It will soon take continents in its stride, outstripping the winds; the divisions of oceans, mountain ranges and deserts will be passed unheeded. It will cast a girdle round the earth with bands that are all the stronger because invisible.’
    Reith was drawing on Shakespeare: it was Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who boasted that he could ‘put a girdle round the earth’. Reith cast himself as magician – more Prospero than Puck, for certain. I hear too the voice of his distant, adored preacher father in those rolling, ecclesiastical phrases. And Reith the younger was to outdo his father: his own congregation would consist not just of the good people of the West End of Glasgow, but the whole population of the United Kingdom, and all its empire.

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‘People, telephones, alarms, excursions’: Hilda Matheson
    Savoy Hill, London, the frost-hard January of 1929. The atmosphere in the offices of the BBC is, according to talks assistant Lionel Fielden, ‘one third boarding school, one third Chelsea party, one third crusade’. The head of variety, Eric Maschwitz, finds himself killing a rat in one of the dingy corridors one day by ‘the simple method of flattening it with a volume of Who’s Who ’. There are studios, if you can call them that – ‘just small rooms with distressing echoes’, according to Fielden. His fellow talks assistant, Lance Sieveking, who has a ‘vivid and sometimes erratic imagination’, has framed notices and set them beside each microphone: ‘If you sneeze or rustle papers you will deafen thousands!!!’ There is a creaking lift, a set of narrow stone stairs. Offices with coal fires. The BBC is partway through its triumphant march, at breakneck speed, from a staff of four in 1922 to a glorious future in the palatial Broadcasting House, where it will move in three years’ time.
    The BBC is a ‘new and exciting dish, sizzling over the fire’, according to Fielden. Val Gielgud is reinventing drama for the wireless. Percy Pitt is conducting music of all types, and Maschwitz is lending his debonair personality to variety shows. Reith stalks the corridors – ‘this giant with piercing eyes under shaggy eyebrows’, as