Editorial

Eminent historian of the BBC, Jean Seaton, describes how the British broadcasting institution was invented as the solution to various problems of the early 1920s: concerns that (newly enfranchised) voters would not have enough knowledge to make rational political judgements; that hostile foreign powers might spread disinformation that distorts democratic processes; new technologies of public communication, barely understood by politicians, were proliferating quickly; and that politics and business had developed too symbiotic a relationship. Deliberately echoing current circumstances in this sketch, Seaton explains that the BBC was created in a ‘fretful and uncertain time’ (2021: 88). One hundred years later, the political context is no less febrile, and the institution faces existential threats: competition from powerful international media corporations with seemingly endless pockets and enormous power, and the machinations of a government that is openly hostile to it. UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries proclaimed within a week of her appointment to the role, that the BBC may no longer be here in a decade’s time (Forrest, 2021). A beleaguered ‘Auntie’ finds herself critiqued for bias on all sides of the political spectrum, losing the support of many of her staunchest defenders and of a public increasingly reluctant to pay for her. Dorries’ prophecy (or policy) seems ever more likely to come to fruition.

With such a gloomy prognosis, it would be reasonable to question why Critical Studies in Television is dedicating so much of its space during 2022 to a commemoration of the BBC’s centenary. To answer this, I will turn again to Seaton: ‘The BBC swiftly developed an international service and role that was both a reflection of the UK values and a gift to the world, and other broadcasting systems came to be measured (and in some ways still are a century later) by reference to the BBC’ (2021: 89). Undoubtedly one of the most influential broadcasting institutions in the world, the BBC has had an indelible impact on the development of television as a technology, as a form and as a central part of global communications and popular culture. Formed to deliver broadcasting with a public service ethos, the BBC has been a testing ground for new developments in broadcasting technology and infrastructure. It has provided space for programme makers to innovate new forms, as well as to display national traditions – and invent some of its own. It has offered important public space to playwrights, scientists, politicians, musicians, historians, performers and many more thinkers to enlighten, to amuse, to infuriate. It is fitting, then, that this journal should mark its achievements, enrich our historical understanding of the institution, analyse its output and evaluate its influence.

Some readers may find this journal’s celebration of the BBC’s centenary in 2022 a curious one. It wasn’t until 1927, when it received its Royal Charter, that the British Broadcasting Company became the public service Corporation as it is known today. And even then, the BBC was exclusively a radio broadcaster for the first 14 years of its life, until the institution began its experimentation with television in 1936 (McLean, 2018). However, the early foundations of the BBC would set it on the path to becoming the central public institution that it now is. The origins of much television output in formats and techniques adapted from radio means that, even if the BBC only became a television institution much later, its national and international reputation as a broadcasting pioneer – starting from 1922 – remains relevant for our scholarship today. Indeed, for those of us who research and write about television from the United Kingdom, the BBC looms large over our work, ever-present, if sometimes unconscious or implicit. As a British television scholar, I simply cannot fathom how different my research would have been had it not been for the BBC, and I’m certain I’m not alone.

Given the BBC’s national and international significance and (for better or worse) its centrality to the story of television, Critical Studies in Television has taken the unusual step of marking the centenary with a series of four special issues. Each issue explores an aspect of the BBC’s contribution to television culture along broad themes. This first issue, as outlined below, examines the institution’s relationship to the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. The second issue will look at BBC programmes and brands, with a focus on inclusion and diversity. The issue will have a special dossier, guest edited by Leanne Weston and Michael Samuel, that explores BBC Four, a digital channel whose vicissitudes can tell us much about British broadcasting culture since the turn of the 21^st century. The third issue, co-edited with Janet McCabe and Sarah Arnold, focuses on Women and the BBC. Through experimental ‘working papers’ and interviews, it examines some of the important contributions of, and the challenges faced, by women who have worked in, and appeared on, BBC Television. The final issue looks at how the BBC faces out into the world, exploring its international reach, reputation and influence. The issue will also contain a special Books retrospective, edited by Christine Geraghty, in which reviewers will discuss their favourite academic text that explores, explains, challenges, or historicises the BBC.

This opening issue focuses on one of the BBC’s core public purposes, as outlined in the corporation’s current charter: ‘to reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom’ (BBC, 2021). Although based primarily in London, and with a longstanding reputation for metrocentrism, it is nevertheless true that ‘as the main national publicly funded broadcaster, the BBC has a responsibility to be regionally representative’ (Noonan, 2012: 363). Historically, the BBC interpreted this aspect of its mission as broadcasting to a ‘unified, but highly diverse nation’ (Hajkowski, 2010: 109), although as the dominant media institution in the United Kingdom, the corporation has been responsible for creating this fragile ‘unity’ as much as it has been for reflecting it. This aspect of the BBC’s duty is set to be ever-more crucial in the corporation’s coming years, given the compounding issues of rising pressure for Scottish independence; the impact of Brexit on relations between the United Kingdom and Ireland and the Johnson government’s proclaimed ‘levelling up’ agenda, which pits northern English regions against the south, often manifested in a demonisation of purported institutions of the ‘metropolitan elite’. It is easy to see how, in these contexts, the BBC becomes a convenient scapegoat. Unequal relationships between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom in broadcasting have been compared to those between the United Kingdom and Hollywood, where economic and cultural power on one side renders the other disempowered and dissatisfied (Beveridge, 2018). Despite a century of development of regional centres, and the devolution of broadcasting authority and funding to the ‘nations’ of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the BBC has retained its reputation as a centralised institution, making programming primarily to suit the tastes and sensibilities of the minority of British citizens located in the South-East of England. Yet the BBC has also been a crucial component in the creative economies of UK regions, creating large production hubs in centres like Glasgow, Cardiff, Bristol, Birmingham and Salford. Whether these efforts to diversify the output of the BBC result in a stronger and wider representation for UK nations and regions is, as this issue reveals, a matter of dispute.

We begin with a ‘Long View’ that examines some of the complexities of the BBC as a ‘national’ public service broadcaster in a state with multiple nations. Jamie Medhurst illustrates the BBC’s fraught relationship with the ‘nations’ via a case study of Wales, ‘an awkward area’ according to former chair of BBC Governors Charles Hill. The controversial incorporation of Wales as part of the ‘West Region’, including Western England, during the establishment of the BBC’s regional radio network, is indicative of the tensions between the centralised institution and the regional and local audiences it serves. These problems, as Medhurst explains, continued beyond the introduction of television, heightened by several factors, including the competition from Television Wales and the West (TWW), the regional outpost of the ITV network and a growing nationalist movement focused on, among other things, the preservation of the Welsh language. Medhurst’s article shows how archival research can illuminate hidden elements of BBC history and can complicate our understanding of the relationship between centre and ‘periphery’ in the institution.

While Medhurst focuses largely on the BBC’s past, in his provocation, David Hutchison considers the potential futures for the corporation’s relationship to the nations. Hutchison argues that the impact of political devolution is to create a situation of ‘quasi-federalism’, marked in broadcasting by an imbalance of funding, representation and corporate power between the different UK nations. He argues that a properly devolved broadcasting system could ease some of these tensions, but that, without modification in the UK’s constitutional arrangements, this may be untenable.

Bringing the examination of the BBC’s nations and regions up to date, Caitriona Noonan and Ruth McElroy present an interview with Rhodri Talfan Davies, who became Director of Nations in January 2021. In their introduction to a wide-ranging discussion, Noonan and McElroy set out the historical and contemporary contexts for the BBC’s ‘rooting’ in nations and regions, to borrow a phrase from their interviewee. These include representational matters, the creation of programmes that speak for, of and to regional communities. It importantly also speaks of the corporation’s organisation, the physical location of centres of production and power outside the mythical M25 ringroad that signifies the UK’s capital and the source of the BBC’s perceived (and, in the case of some political and commercial opponents, strategically exaggerated) elitist bias. Interviewing the Director of Nations at the beginning of his new tenure with a remit that some might see as rather daunting, Noonan and McElroy capture a moment of transition in the BBC’s relationship with the nation(s) it serves.

The BBC has made many attempts during its hundred-year history to redress imbalances between the supposed metropolitan sensibilities of those in charge of it and the interests and needs of its national and regional audiences. One of these was the creation, masterminded originally by David Attenborough, of the Community Programmes Unit (CPU), a means to fund and produce ‘access’ programming made by and for local groups and/or communities of interest. Jo Henderson’s article traces the development of the Unit, explaining how it helped to introduce new television conventions, including the concept of the publisher-as-broadcaster later developed for Channel 4. The CPU widened the scope of what was broadcast on the BBC, both in thematic terms and in the use of new production methods. Henderson argues that, although the 30-year access project concluded in 2002, its aims to broaden programming at a community and regional level may fit the contemporary agenda of ‘levelling up’, of offering a louder voice with which the BBC could ‘let the people speak’.

Concluding this opening special issue is Vanessa Jackson’s in-depth interview with David Waine, whose work as Head of Broadcasting at BBC Pebble Mill put him at the heart of a BBC unit with the express intention of widening the corporation’s reach and representation outside of London. Jackson writes as both a researcher and historian of Pebble Mill and one of its former employees, a subject position which enables her a specific insight into its workings. Her edited extracts from a much longer interview cover four key programme areas that relate Waine’s work with the theme of this issue: daytime television, leisure, drama and multicultural output. The interview provides invaluable insight into the working life of a BBC executive in the 1980s, and how he interpreted and enacted his remit to produce programming in and of the Midlands region.

Between them, these articles and interviews demonstrate a range of responses to the BBC’s work across UK nations and regions. They variously explore the tensions between centre and periphery, the challenges faced by programme makers in regions and nations, the battle for control and funding between the central BBC and its regional and national hubs, and, ultimately, the ways that the BBC as a ‘national’ broadcaster responds to a nation as fragmented as the United Kingdom.

In addition to the BBC special theme, this issue will introduce a new and important initiative for Critical Studies in Television: In Translation. As editor Cathrin Bengesser notes in her introduction, this journal has always been proud to publish work on television outside of English-speaking contexts. In Translation will take this a stage further, by translating key television studies texts originally published not in the English language. Bengesser introduces our inaugural translation, Kirsten Frandsen and Hanne Bruun’s originally Danish article 'Time and timing – A methodological perspective on production analysis' (2017) with an invaluable interview with Hanne Bruun, reflecting on the different ways in which translation is of value and importance for our work as scholars of television.