Jack Thorne is a furiously busy scriptwriter and, although he’s celebrated for bringing Harry Potter to the stage and His Dark Materials to the screen, he loves a chewy subject. In recent years, he’s tackled child abuse, the plight of care homes in the pandemic, and a Grenfell-like catastrophe that devastates a community. At the moment, his play The Motive and the Cue, about the famously rocky process of putting together John Gielgud’s production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, is at the National Theatre in London.
He will soon have another play on in the city. When we meet, Thorne – tall, gangly, scrappily bearded, wearing a T-shirt with a printed design that instantly calls to mind the armoured bear in His Dark Materials – is on a break from watching a run-through of his newest work, When Winston Went to War With the Wireless. It stages an early crisis for the BBC that shaped its future and set the tone for the way it handles political pressure to this day.
The play takes place in spring 1926. The General Strike has been called. On the right, there’s a climate of, says Thorne, “absolute paranoia” that a Bolshevik revolution is on its way. Winston Churchill, then chancellor, sets up the British Gazette as the voice of the Conservative government. He also wants to grab the BBC, then a mere four years old, and bring it under full state control.
What was John Reith, the high-minded, complicated BBC director general, to do? Fight the government and imperil the young corporation? Or accept that, in a time of national crisis, the BBC should sacrifice its independence and impartiality on the altar of national stability? What played out, says Thorne, was “a defining moment” for the BBC. And it is wonderful material for a drama, with two remarkable characters – Reith (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Churchill (Adrian Scarborough) – at its heart.
Thorne himself has huge love and respect for the BBC. He is delighted that it was early to throw its weight, with Channel 4, behind The TV Access Project, which aims to transform working conditions for disabled people working in production (the subject of his 2021 MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival). He himself suffers from a long-term condition called cholinergic urticaria, an allergy to heat or movement that, though manageable now, was debilitating when he was younger.
He was recently formally diagnosed as autistic, after a doctor wrote to his agent suggesting as much, having heard him on Desert Island Discs. It has been hugely helpful, he says, and not just to give him an excuse to get out of going to the parties he had always inexplicably hated. “It’s helped a lot with my history,” he says. “It’s helped me put things in a box – scars – that I didn’t understand before.” Stuff from school? Yes, he says, and other things. “I don’t think I was happy until I was 32.” That was when he met his wife, Rachel.
I wrote about Reith and the General Strike in This New Noise, my book about the BBC, and I still can’t decide what I really think about the episode. On the one hand, Reith did not hand over the BBC to Churchill, and he did broadcast communiques from the TUC as well as the government. On the other, he made some serious compromises – for example, bowing to pressure from prime minister Stanley Baldwin not to allow Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, access to the airwaves.
For Thorne, it is precisely “the uncertainty that makes it interesting”. The play “doesn’t have a polemical message. It’s much more asking, ‘What would you have done? What would I have done? How the hell would we have done it?’ And by the way, it could have been any of us.”
What he means by that last comment is that the BBC was in its infancy. It was a tiny startup, staffed by a group of young war veterans, misfits, impresarios, intellectuals and engineers. But Reith, a visionary with immense ambition – matched by Churchill’s immense personal ambition – understood that broadcasting could be a great democratic power. “Most of the good things of this world are badly distributed and most people have to go without them,” he wrote. “Wireless … may be shared by all alike … the wealthy and the poor listen simultaneously … there is no first and third class.”
Thorne adds: “I hope this whole play is a love letter to the BBC. I hope this whole play is a love letter to people in authority and how they find their way through these crises. Because I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”
• When Winston Went to War With the Wireless is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, 29 July. Charlotte Higgins’ This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC is published by Guardian Faber.
