Abstract
Pinkoes and Traitors covers much the same ground as Michael Leapman's The Last Days of the Beeb (1986), which suggested that John Reith's creation could expect only a brief life, at least as an indestructible national treasure. Jean Seaton, professor of media history at the University of Westminster, has had the advantage of access to hitherto unavailable BBC and state papers.
Her book opens with Harold Wilson returning to Downing Street and Portugal heading for democracy. It closes when the Berlin Wall and the career of Alastair Milne were smashed to fragments. There have been few stormier stretches in British public life: the BBC, Seaton reminds us, was in the thick of it.
Her choice of title reflects her personal approach to the BBC story. It's taken from the Private Eye “Dear Bill” letters in which an imaginary Denis Thatcher carped about anyone or anything he disliked. Seaton strives to take an objective approach, but her admiration for Auntie keeps leaking through. She evidently, and quite reasonably, reveres the Beeb for the very qualities that so incensed the fictional and actual Denis.
The Beeb's record, of course, hasn't always been squeaky clean. Seldom untouched by political and economic pressures, more than occasionally it has been obliged to cave in to them. It tended towards perhaps unconscious unbalance in early reporting of The Troubles, for example, and it succumbed to near-fawning deference to Buck House over the Charles-Diana wedding.
It's the faultline between the BBC's requirement to remain impartial and its need to survive in the often vicious world of politics that its foes have been able to exploit. Margaret Thatcher was only one of them, though the most formidable. According to Seaton, if advertising companies hadn't feared that forcing ads on the Beeb would deplete their own profits, Maggie could well have succeeded in driving a stake through its heart.
Another adversary was Rupert Murdoch, whose advice on BBC matters Thatcher, Seaton records, scandalously sought. Murdoch's notorious speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival claiming that the BBC was “not compatible with mature democracy” was written, she notes, by Andrew Neil, who nowadays may feel a tad conflicted when fronting The Daily Politics.
Anyone who needs reminding about the Beeb's vulnerability to mendacious attack, whether from Conservatives or Labour, will find plenty here to ponder. An institution whose charter defies logic and yet which tries to speak truth to power, privilege and prejudice can always expect trouble.
Some may dissent from Seaton's take on key characters. She shows limited sympathy for the journalist Alasdair Milne, under deadly fire from BBC governors and their political chums, and yet rates highly his successor, the accountant Michael Checkland. That isn't how it seemed to programme makers for whom the switch was like being plucked from a sauna and offered a wet blanket.
Instead of telling a sequential tale, Seaton focuses on a dozen themes. Her account of the BBC's difficulties during the Falklands War underlines the perpetual problem it frequently faces as part of the establishment it is reporting on. It was worth chronicling the rise of women in the BBC, but a chapter on arts and music seems tedious and dreary. As a user of BBC programmes, Seaton doesn't hide her likes. Her 31-page paean on David Attenborough – “blond god”, “Prospero”, exemplar of “Michelangelo's golden mean” – betrays an awe for that brilliant broadcaster that even his most devoted admirers may think extreme.
Two important sub-themes elude Seaton's attention. As well as Life on Earth, 1974–87 produced wonderful programmes – for example, Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Blackadder. These could be made largely because the BBC then benefited from looser, horizontal production structures. Programme makers didn't have to contend with the top-down (some say Stalinist) framework later imposed by John Birt, and still largely in force.
Nor does her account do justice to a development that still colours the BBC ethos. “News” – defined as reports of what happened – began shoving aside “current affairs” – issues worthy of attention but too cool for headline treatment. Seaton notes that Newsnight countered this trend, but elsewhere current affairs, Canute-like, fought a losing battle against a running news tide.
In television the BBC's Six o'clock News compares poorly with Channel 4 News, where the immediate jostles with the broadly informative. Seaton could usefully have tackled news as a separate theme. That said, this is a vivid account of the corporation seeking to reflect and shape the nation while struggling to remain independent. Those familiar with Asa Briggs's five-volume Beeb history, which stops where Seaton takes up, may however feel shortchanged.