Perhaps it was bashfulness that led the BBC to leave until the final item of the Radio 4 news bulletins this morning a mention of celebrating its own centenary today. Or maybe the reticence reflected mild embarrassment.
The British Broadcasting Corporation as we know it (state-owned, licence-fee funded) doesn’t strictly come to dance at its centenary ball until 1 January 2027. What launched on 18 October 1922 was the British Broadcasting Company, a private consortium of radio manufacturers, with programmes that were initially no more than an inducement to buy a wireless, as they were known. But because the logo conveniently remained BBC, and John Reith managed both institutions, it’s reasonable to cut a cake today.
And there is much to celebrate. The two most generally cherished Britons of the last century – Queen Elizabeth II and Sir David Attenborough – were both BBC creations. The naturalist’s revelatory reports over seven decades on global flora and fauna most exactly capture Reith’s declared mission to “inform, educate and entertain”. The late queen, from her first annual Christmas broadcast on radio in 1952 (also on television from 1957), to her platinum jubilee tea party sketch with Paddington Bear in 2022, moulded her own and the monarchy’s image through astute use of broadcasting, with the BBC always the main media partner.
But, with the Queen dead, the King a more awkward TV performer and Attenborough now also making shows for other networks (Sky, Netflix), what has been cannot be a model for what will be seen next.
At any stage in the BBC’s history, a useful interview question for new recruits would be the relative significance of the words in the organisation’s title.
British, which applicants until recently would have been wise to put first, seems an escalating fantasy, with Scotland, Belfast and Cardiff politically pulling away from London, thereby making viewers in the nations ever more dubious about the “impartiality” of BBC News.
Broadcasting, something done only by the BBC until 1955 (ITV’s arrival), and long after that only on devices called TVs and radios, now comes from everywhere by anyone on everything.
Corporation meant a staff, often staying for life, pensioned and union-protected. But almost all of the BBC’s biggest hits are now made by external independent companies.
So a more accurate name for the organisation now would be EDC – English Digital Consortium.
The past is great but gone, and the future is contested. On holiday this summer in France and Italy, I did something mildly illegal. Clicking on Test Match Special on BBC Sounds prompted a message warning this programme was not available in that territory. So I paid money to one of the services that trick your devices into thinking you’re still in Blighty.
But, even while apologising to the ghost of Reith for my sin, my frustration is that I would happily pay a fee, as I think millions would, for being able to receive all BBC programmes outside the UK.
The word from inside Broadcasting House is that the corporation doesn’t want to provide such a service as it would show how easily Sounds and iPlayer could be adapted to subscription, hastening an alternative to the licence fee at home. Such defensive sentimental attitudes must end if the BBC is to flourish in its second century.
Whatever the comforts of the licence fee, accelerating evasion (no longer plausibly challenged by criminal sanction) and digital transmission make it impossible to sustain. Subscription – perhaps topping up a free “basic” service of news and royal funerals – will eventually come.
The BBC that results from this will be smaller, less able to pay footballers’ wages to football presenters and bankers’ salaries to newsreaders. But that is an inevitable consequence of no longer having the absolute monopoly over content and transmission that the BBC claimed in 1922.
Celebrations often lead to hangovers and for the BBC the throbbing headache once the centenary fun is done is how to maintain its significance in a world Reith never faced – of rival, richer, ravenous media all around.
Mark Lawson is a Guardian writer and broadcaster
