When John Reith, the first director general of the BBC, was interviewing candidates for the post of editor of the Listener magazine in 1929, his opening question was: “Do you accept the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ?” It seems a fair bet that he wouldn’t have approved of much of the corporation’s more recent output. Even so, his lofty aim that the broadcaster should seek to “inform, educate and entertain”, that it should be a “guide, philosopher and friend” to the audience, is remarkably still discernible in the vast empire that was built on his one true foundation.
Reith arrived at the British Broadcasting Company, as it then was, in 1922, when there were just four employees; now there are 21,000, a quarter of them journalists. With this growth has come a transformation of the BBC, along with accusations of political prejudice and corporate waste, of institutional paralysis and risk-averse programming. But still the corporation prides itself on being, in the words of current director general Tony Hall, “part of what makes Britain Britain, and all the eddies and currents that make up Britain flow right through the BBC”. Reith would at least recognise the aspiration.
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