To Each Its Own

The British Broadcasting Corp. is not, as it appears to many Americans, a socialistic, state-operated trust. Britons call BBC a public corporation. It has a monopoly on all broadcasting in Britain, and allows no commercials on the air.

Every British radio owner pays an annual fee of -L-1. BBC operates on only three wave lengths: the "Light" (mostly variety shows and dance music), the "Home" (slightly heavier fare), and the "Third Program" (strictly cultural). Thousands of listeners add to BBC revenues by buying BBC publications. Radio Times, a sort of fan magazine and weekly listing of programs, has a 6,000,000 circulation; The Listener, which reprints BBC talks, goes to 140,000; London Calling is subscribed to by 16,000 listeners overseas.

In the BBC Quarterly, a sort of trade journal with a small circulation, nine British pundits have just completed a long, solemn look at radio in its larger social aspects. Since the British experts strongly favor their brand of radio, the assortment of brickbats and posies they lob at the U.S. will be particularly interesting to U.S. radiomen.

One Mistake. Radio's biggest impact has been in politics, says Viscount Samuel, elder statesman and philosopher. "A single speech may found a national reputation," but "one mistake may be magnified into a catastrophe. A succession of eloquent and moving broadcasts during the war helped Mr. Churchill to win fame and influence . . . The war over, a single broadcast, out of tune with the spirit and mood of the people, brought disaster."*

Radio as a cultural phenomenon impressed Oxford Historian E. L. Woodward because "for the first time a single voice can address the whole world." In praise of BBC, Woodward says that the British "at once saw the control of broadcasting as one of the problems of liberty. They treated this new source of power over men as they had treated in the past the power of kings and magnates . . . Considered politically, the arrangements governing the BBC and its broadcasts follow the same lines of thought as the order and rules under which the House of Commons has protected the freedom of debate, the interest of minorities, and the dignity of the quiet and moderate speaker." Woodward believes that "every country gets the broadcasting it deserves." In a parenthetical swipe at Hollywood, he adds that, "It is not true that every country gets the films it deserves; most countries get the films which the least educated section of the American plutocracy sends them."

As for radio's sins, Woodward has a typically British complaint: "By adding to speech, the BBC has lessened the amount of desirable silence in the world."

Deliberately Dull? Journalist Ivor Brown thinks there is something to be said for the "odd appetite for knowledge in our times, an appetite which radio [through quiz shows] stimulates and feeds." With relief and some surprise he notes that radio, "instead of flattening out all our accents and idioms, and reducing the rich variety of our national speech . . . has actually popularized diversity." Even "American and Canadian voices seem to have especial powers of coaxing one to listen and to like what one hears."

The important point about radio to scholarly Mary Agnes Hamilton is the fact that it has "ended isolation. A sense of loneliness, of inhabiting an alien universe ... is the commonest cause of personal misery. It is now being lifted." BBC's often-criticized newscasts, she thinks, are not so bad: "Americans, of course, constantly assail our news service as dull. It is meant, in a sense, to be dull. Anyone who wants it ... lively should listen for a spell to [American] news commentators and 'analysts,' each striving to be more arresting, more dramatic, more charged with a sense of crisis than the other."

Sir Arthur Salter, who edited the symposium, concludes by weighing the merits of British and U.S. radio. "The American system . . . gives the listener without license fee a greater variety of programs. It has two disadvantages which have made this country prefer a public monopoly. There are the irritating interruptions of the advertiser; and the programs tend to follow rather than to lead the public taste."

*In a radio speech preceding the 1945 general elections, Churchill predicted that a Labor victory would result in a Socialist totalitarian state employing "some form of Gestapo."

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