interruption, of noises harvested from a beach. He introduced it thus:
Throughout the ages, the eye of mankind has always been kept in training … but sound has never been preserved for us. I notice that very few people really listen, either to the radio or natural sounds, or even to beautiful mechanical sounds out of doors such as church bells or carillons. Most people still use their radio as a daily background to work or conversation. I want you to concentrate only for quarter of an hour. Close your eyes. Do not fall to sleep. Simply listen …
There follows the susurration of waves lapping at the sand; the cry of melancholy seabirds, the buzz of a motor-launch engine and the voices of distant, happy children. ‘War or no war, bird life is going on and even the armed power of the three dictators cannot prevent it,’ he had written a few years earlier in a letter to The Times . ‘I would like to advise everybody in a position to do so, to relax his nerves, inlistening to the songs, now so beautiful, of the British birds.’ In his voice, the injunction becomes almost an act of resistance. To stop, to open your ears, to delight in birdsong: to grip humanity close though war raged.
*
Huw Wheldon – D-day war hero and founder, in 1958, of the first TV arts programme Monitor , nursery of Ken Russell, John Schlesinger, Humphrey Burton and Melvyn Bragg – invented a ringing phrase to describe the BBC’s cultural mission. It was about making ‘the good popular and the popular good’. But doing so has never been as simple or as uncontested as his neatly balanced chiasmus implies. Within the BBC, the politics of ‘inform, educate and entertain’ have been fought over, the Reithian inheritance ferociously debated and subjected to widely differing interpretations. In the BBC that Wheldon worked in, music programmer William Glock was taking forward Clark’s inheritance and introducing listeners of the Third Programme to a new generation of the European avant-garde. Now audiences could hear music by composers such as Pierre Boulez, who would become the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor from 1971 to 1975. Glock took the view, he remembered in his memoir Notes in Advance (1991), that ‘to try to give the public “what it wants” inevitably means falling below its potential standards and appetites’.
Over in television, Bill Cotton, the man who would become the head of light entertainment at the BBC in 1970, and later managing director of television in the 1980s, had a different view on the relative importance of the tricolon ‘inform, educate and entertain’. He andWheldon, he remembered in his autobiography, ‘both believed that the BBC’s core duty was to entertain the public, for the simple reason that unless listeners and viewers found a programme agreeable they wouldn’t stay with it long enough to be educated or informed’.
Cotton, the son of the wildly popular band leader Billy Cotton, himself a fixture on post-war BBC television, described himself in his memoir Double Bill (2000) as representing the ‘vulgar end of the market’. In an age of ratings battles with ITV, he invented Top of the Pops , and had the idea of a show for Jimmy Savile called Jim’ll Fix It. (‘Jim’, he recalled, in what now seems ominous phrasing, ‘could get kids to do anything.’) He brought Morecambe and Wise into the BBC, had the idea of asking Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker to form a double act, and, borrowing the format from a Dutch show he encountered at a European awards ceremony, devised the hugely popular Generation Game , which ran from 1971 to 1982 and was revived in the 1990s.
Cotton, steeped in show business, came from a different world from that of most of the decorously educated, solidly middle-class executives at the BBC. So did his protégé, Michael Grade, now Lord Grade. He was also the scion of an entertainment dynasty. His father, Leslie, and uncles, Bernie and Lew, were impresarios, agents
Throughout the ages, the eye of mankind has always been kept in training … but sound has never been preserved for us. I notice that very few people really listen, either to the radio or natural sounds, or even to beautiful mechanical sounds out of doors such as church bells or carillons. Most people still use their radio as a daily background to work or conversation. I want you to concentrate only for quarter of an hour. Close your eyes. Do not fall to sleep. Simply listen …
There follows the susurration of waves lapping at the sand; the cry of melancholy seabirds, the buzz of a motor-launch engine and the voices of distant, happy children. ‘War or no war, bird life is going on and even the armed power of the three dictators cannot prevent it,’ he had written a few years earlier in a letter to The Times . ‘I would like to advise everybody in a position to do so, to relax his nerves, inlistening to the songs, now so beautiful, of the British birds.’ In his voice, the injunction becomes almost an act of resistance. To stop, to open your ears, to delight in birdsong: to grip humanity close though war raged.
*
Huw Wheldon – D-day war hero and founder, in 1958, of the first TV arts programme Monitor , nursery of Ken Russell, John Schlesinger, Humphrey Burton and Melvyn Bragg – invented a ringing phrase to describe the BBC’s cultural mission. It was about making ‘the good popular and the popular good’. But doing so has never been as simple or as uncontested as his neatly balanced chiasmus implies. Within the BBC, the politics of ‘inform, educate and entertain’ have been fought over, the Reithian inheritance ferociously debated and subjected to widely differing interpretations. In the BBC that Wheldon worked in, music programmer William Glock was taking forward Clark’s inheritance and introducing listeners of the Third Programme to a new generation of the European avant-garde. Now audiences could hear music by composers such as Pierre Boulez, who would become the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor from 1971 to 1975. Glock took the view, he remembered in his memoir Notes in Advance (1991), that ‘to try to give the public “what it wants” inevitably means falling below its potential standards and appetites’.
Over in television, Bill Cotton, the man who would become the head of light entertainment at the BBC in 1970, and later managing director of television in the 1980s, had a different view on the relative importance of the tricolon ‘inform, educate and entertain’. He andWheldon, he remembered in his autobiography, ‘both believed that the BBC’s core duty was to entertain the public, for the simple reason that unless listeners and viewers found a programme agreeable they wouldn’t stay with it long enough to be educated or informed’.
Cotton, the son of the wildly popular band leader Billy Cotton, himself a fixture on post-war BBC television, described himself in his memoir Double Bill (2000) as representing the ‘vulgar end of the market’. In an age of ratings battles with ITV, he invented Top of the Pops , and had the idea of a show for Jimmy Savile called Jim’ll Fix It. (‘Jim’, he recalled, in what now seems ominous phrasing, ‘could get kids to do anything.’) He brought Morecambe and Wise into the BBC, had the idea of asking Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker to form a double act, and, borrowing the format from a Dutch show he encountered at a European awards ceremony, devised the hugely popular Generation Game , which ran from 1971 to 1982 and was revived in the 1990s.
Cotton, steeped in show business, came from a different world from that of most of the decorously educated, solidly middle-class executives at the BBC. So did his protégé, Michael Grade, now Lord Grade. He was also the scion of an entertainment dynasty. His father, Leslie, and uncles, Bernie and Lew, were impresarios, agents
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