Abstract
Asa Briggs has met every Director-General of the BBC (with one recent fleeting exception) and many of the Chairmen of the Governors since the British Broadcasting Corporation was founded in 1927.1 Briggs may be the last person to bear this rich bloodline of personal understanding back into the foundations of an institution that has come to define Britishness. Many of the director-generals and chairmen he knew well. Briggs has also marked all of them out of ten for posterity: the criteria being strategic intelligence, the capacity to push BBC values out into new areas, ‘grip’ and creativity — an assessment that for the moment remains private. He has a reservation about director-generals whose dominating experience is of news and current affairs, ‘[t]heir perspectives are too short term. News colours how they see events’.2 Yet most leaders of the Corporation come from this background as it is the boiler room of BBC interaction with political forces. Those at the top of the Corporation have to be able to enable imaginative programmes to be made, to lead the organisation and give it a ‘face’ — but they all need the ability to second guess and navigate whatever the politics of the moment are — Briggs has also worked with these BBC leaders in the pressurised back office of Corporation life where historical precedent is a resource for people making difficult decisions about an institution that has to evolve and yet remain true to itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Briggs, ‘Problems and Possibilities in the Writing of Broadcasting History’, Media, Culture and Society, 2 (1980), p. 181.
Briggs, Governing the BBC (London, BBC Books, 1979).
Reith dismissed Churchill as ‘an imposter’ and ‘a menace’, ‘whose egotism masked the eccentricity of his views’, whilst Churchill was critical of Reith’s ban on him broadcasting to warn of Germany’s expansionary aims. Churchill later called the BBC ‘an enemy within the gates, doing more harm than good’: Ian McIntyre, The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith (London: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 267;
entry for 5 May 1934, in Charles Stuart (ed.), The Reith Diaries (London: Collins, 1975), p. 143;
Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991), p. 456;
Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, 1900–1955 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 341.
Briggs, interview with Frank Gillard, 4 December 1991, BBC Oral History, WAC. However, Briggs was taking as his own a comment by A. P. Ryan from July 1941, quoted in Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Volume 3: The War of Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 212.
Jean Seaton, ‘Atrocities: the BBC and the Holocaust’, in Jean Seaton and Ben Pimlott (eds.), The Media in British Politics (London: Constable, 1988), pp. 123–56.
Will Wyatt, The Fun Factory: A Life at the BBC (London: Aurum, 2003), p. 26.
Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 13.
Quoted in Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Volume 4: Competition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 76.
Briggs, Secret Days: Code-Breaking in Bletchley Park (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2011), p. 56.
Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Odhams Press, 1963), p. 28.
Briggs, Victorian Things (London: Batsford Books, 1988), p. 214.
Mary Hodgson, ‘The BBC’s Archives’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 3 (1962), pp. 18–22.
Igor Vinogradoff, son of the Russian historian and professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, Sir Paul Vinogradoff, was commissioned to write a history of the Corporation during the war. He complained that the material was never presented in any form he could use, and that the BBC was unclear about what they wanted: Miranda Seymour, Ottoline Morrell: Life on a Grand Scale (London: Hodder, 1992), p. 143.
R. H. Coase, British Broadcasting a Study in Monopoly (London: Collins, 1950), p. 121.
See Jean Seaton, ‘Traitors and Pinkoes’: The BBC and the Nation, 1974–87 (London: Profile Books, 2015), p. 125.
For example, Joseph McLeod, A Job at the BBC: Some Personal Reminiscences (Glasgow: W. MacLellan, 1947);
Roger Eckersley, The BBC and All That (London: Sampson Low, 1949);
Arthur Reginald [Rex] Alston, Taking the Air (London: Stanley Paul, 1951);
Frederick Grisewood, The World Goes By: The Autobiography of Frederick Grisewood (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952);
William Holt, I Still Haven’t Unpacked (London: Harrap, 1953);
Eric Maschwitz, No Chip on My Shoulder (London: H. Jenkins, 1957).
Henry Fairlie, ‘The BBC’, in H. Swinnerton-Thomas (ed.), The Establishment: A Symposium (London: New English Library, 1963), p. 75.
Susan Briggs, Those Radio Times (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981).
D. R. Thorpe, Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (London: Chatto and Windus, 2010), p. 302.
Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting. Volume 1, 1922–1939. Serving the Nation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991);
David Hendy, Life on Air: A History of Radio 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London: Profile Books, 2013);
Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996);
Alban Webb, ‘Auntie Goes to War Again: The BBC External Services, the Foreign Office and the Early Cold War’, Media History, 12 (2006), pp. 117–32;
Joe Moran, Armchair Britain: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (London: Profile Books, 2013).
Michelle Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
Michael Schudson, Origins of the Ideal of Objectivity in the Professions: Studies in the History of American Journalism and American Law, 1830–1940 (London: Garland, 1990);
Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Martin Kessler Books, 1998).
Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 2: The Golden Age of Wireless (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. xxi.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Jean Seaton
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Seaton, J. (2015). Asa and the Epochs: The BBC, the Historian, the Institution and the Archive. In: Taylor, M. (eds) The Age of Asa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392596_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392596_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48337-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-39259-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)