Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

The Â鶹Éç, like many British institutions, has always inspired love and hate. I joined the Corporation in 1972, (just after its fiftieth birthday) and every morning I walked into the lobby of Broadcasting House in London, to be confronted by Eric Gill statuary and the Latin dedication: ‘This temple of the arts and muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first governors of broadcasting’. I crossed the (temple) threshold into gilded lifts: up to the offices or down to the studios with their infernal thrum of the London underground. There was an atmosphere of constant excitement and almost childish enthusiasm for breaking news, making programmes, being the first and the best. It was obvious to me that this devotion was not shared by everyone. The Â鶹Éç infuriated my mother, who read the Daily Mail and saw it as a socialist, if not quite communist, enterprise. My university friends on the other hand thought it had long ago betrayed the Revolution for the complacency of Establishment. 100 years on today since its foundation, the Â鶹Éç continues to polarise. People still love it or hate it, and often both at the same time. It is still the child of its creator, the shy, stern John Reith, his own character a web of unresolved contradictions and hypocrisies. There’s always been that mix of high idealism and simmering scandal, that genius for nourishing talent while from time to time betraying its own ideals. One thing I realised early on was that the Â鶹Éç was not, and is not, one thing. The world view of Radio 4 was not the same as that of Radio 2, Arena was different from Horizon, the gritty Wednesday plays of the 1960s were a million miles away from Line of Duty or Doctor Who. It is as though ‘this temple of the arts and muses’ contains different and conflicting deities. The dedication of 1931 included a prayer that ‘all things hostile to peace and purity might be banished from this house’ – and yet perhaps the true secret of the temple was that they were not banished but contained and so limited. Information and entertainment, satire and sport, fact and opinion. If the Â鶹Éç has a purpose it is not to dictate what we should believe but to give space for the many voices that make up our national conversation. Any broadcaster, any government, any faith can be a mouthpiece for an imposed unity, a correct ideology. A temple mediates order and chaos, there is smoke, blood and sacrifice, there is light, prayer and purification. The struggle for truth and unity goes on even in unpropitious times. I wish the Â鶹Éç a happy 100th birthday.