2001.03 谁需要BBC？

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谁需要BBC？
英国广播公司正在艰难地践行它的过去。但那是怎样的一个过去啊! 我们的记者回顾了它的历史，寻找其目前问题的根源。

作者：Geoffrey Wheatcroft
2001年3月号
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在20世纪，没有多少套首字母被普遍认可，而那些被认可的首字母往往带有不祥的意味，从党卫军到克格勃。外国人对一些美国首字母的认识比其他的要好（例如，中情局和联邦调查局，而不是国税局或税务局），一个英国人不会认为每个美国人都认识LSE或QPR。但每个人都知道BBC。你只需要用当地的方式说出它--法国的bay-bay-say，意大利的bee-bee-chee--就能立即被理解。伦纳德-斯拉特金是第一个成为BBC交响乐团首席指挥的美国人。当他在最近的任命后说这三个字母有一个神奇的响声时，他无疑想到了他自己的国家。

英国广播公司的声誉确实可以令人烦恼，至少对其竞争对手来说是这样。虽然英国广播公司对英国电视的垄断在四十多年前就结束了，但我们这个潮湿的小岛以外的人们似乎还没有掌握这一点。其他英国电视公司的工作人员总是报告说，他们在美国工作时得到同样的回应："那么，你们是BBC的人。" "不，实际上，我们是格拉纳达"（或ITN，或LWT，或其他什么）。"是的，英国电视台--BBC"。

但是，不仅仅是来自竞争对手公司的心怀怨恨的专业人士，他们现在怀疑BBC的声誉是否可能是以前辉煌的阴影--尽管是一个非常大的阴影。在过去的一年里，该公司的伦敦总部发生了动荡，BBC作为一个机构受到了严厉的批评，这不是第一次，但批评的方式比以往更加隐蔽和具有破坏性。有些批评是政治性的，而且是政治党派性的，但更多的批评是针对更深层次的目的问题。BBC的国内产出已经变得如此多样化，以至于对它的概括没有什么意义，这就提出了一个问题，即把公司作为一个单一的实体来保存是否有意义。

BBC的国际地位是来之不易的。有一个全球性的BBC电视网络，到目前为止与CNN和其他卫星公司的竞争并不十分有效，但全世界有超过1.5亿人收听BBC世界服务广播，该广播长期以来以其诚信、高标准和不加修饰、不加感性的新闻而闻名。美国的上瘾者现在抱怨说，这个曾经辉煌的电台显示出衰落的迹象--这就是那些从事这项工作的人称之为促进更多的可及性，而我们其他人则称之为蠢化的结果。这些批评者可能有道理。

当然，BBC的立场是很特别的。它的创始理念是 "公共服务广播"，这个短语既有提升的意思，也有爱护的意思。只要它是国内唯一的广播公司，它就可以为所欲为，不考虑观众的感受。现在，它在市场上竞争，虽然没有被市场的商业需要所驱动；它必须追逐观众和听众，虽然没有从他们身上赚到任何钱：它的大部分收入来自于对电视机征收的许可费，无论电视机的主人是否观看BBC。这是一个奇怪的、不令人满意的安排。

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BBC的起源同样不尽如人意，而且也很奇怪。广播作为一种大众媒体诞生于20世纪20年代。不同国家对其到来的反应生动地说明了它们不同的政治文化。美国有一个自由市场（在一开始，联邦和州政府甚至没有对波长进行管理，这些波长是由强占者的权利掌握的）。在大多数欧洲国家，国家很快就在自己的指导下建立了一个广播垄断。在美国的生意就是生意的时代，美国的广播成为全心全意的商业。在极权主义时代，欧洲电台成为党的宣传和灌输的主要工具，这也是足够恰当的。

像往常一样，英国的方式介于两者之间。在对商业赞助的广播进行了非常短暂的试验之后--1920年由女歌手内莉-梅尔巴（Dame Nellie Melba）举办的歌曲音乐会--私人拥有的英国广播公司于1922年开始拥有独家许可。1927年，它变成了英国广播公司，这是一家国有公司，表面上由董事会（当然是由政府任命的）与政府保持一定距离，并以一种高尚和超然的方式，通过向所有当时被称为无线装置的所有者收取费用来提供资金。广告是未知的，也是不可想象的。

正如历史学家A.J.P.泰勒在《1914-1945年英国历史》（1965）中所说，这种安排适合两个政党。"保守派喜欢权威，工党不喜欢私营企业"。应该说，由于泰勒自己与BBC的冲突，他对BBC怀有强烈的敌意，而且这种敌意使他对BBC对音乐生活的贡献也持轻蔑和荒谬的否定态度。但他声称多年来BBC很少播放有争议的观点，这就更难否认了。

BBC是平淡中的平淡，几乎不自觉地倾向于采取既定的观点。它当然支持在位的王朝，在其重塑为健康的家庭生活模式的过程中，该公司发挥了不小的作用，例如，从乔治五世开始的君主圣诞日的广播。詹姆斯-瑟伯描述了另一个假正经的人，《纽约客》的哈罗德-罗斯，是他所认识的唯一一个在成年人面前拼出委婉语的人。罗斯会对办公室里的一些情侣说："我确定他和她在一起，是在做爱"。在雷斯的时代，电台播音员在话筒前要穿上晚宴夹克，任何被怀疑有A-D-U-L-T-E-R-Y的员工都会被立即解雇。

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罕见的事件打断了这种礼节。在20世纪30年代，有一次对皇家海军的夜间检阅，由一位前海军军官提供评论。当他用含糊不清的语调一遍又一遍地重复 "舰队亮起来了......现在不见了 "这句话时，很明显他的状态已经无法继续，于是他被打断了。这个插曲引起了公众的欢笑，无疑也让雷斯感到震惊。(有趣的是，在广播中往往比在电视上更容易分辨出一个人是否喝醉了，尽管我确实有一个愉快的记忆，那就是布伦丹-贝汉在BBC电视上明显地喝醉了。）


总的来说，雷斯并不鼓励异议；他对自己的重要性有一个非常崇高的概念；而且他对BBC教育和改善观众的使命非常着迷。事后看来，他并不那么可鄙。他是一个很有能力的人，他真正相信张贴在牛津广场北面的广播大楼大厅里的宏伟口号：国家要向国家讲和平。他同样热衷于维多利亚时代的原则，即我们必须教育我们的主人--应该适合民主的 "民众"。

也许BBC真正的黄金时代是从二战开始的，在赖斯离开之后。从1939年到1945年，BBC成为一个国家机构，因为英国人民在战败和胜利时，都会在晚上9点聚集在一起看新闻。那些日子仍然让人产生共鸣。虽然我当时还没有出生，更不用说听了，但我对战时的BBC有很深的记忆，从1940年温斯顿-丘吉尔的伟大演讲到1943年温福德-沃恩-托马斯从兰开斯特轰炸机上对柏林的报道，以及1945年理查德-丁布尔比在被解放的卑尔根-贝尔森几乎惊恐得说不出话来。战争年代也见证了BBC在娱乐方面成为一个国家机构，从严肃的音乐（有一个原则性的决心，继续播放德国作曲家的作品，无论文化的最新腐败情况如何）到流行的喜剧，最有名的是ITMA（又是那个人），另一个民间的记忆，一个相当难以描述的综艺节目，结合荒谬的小品、口头禅和歌曲，并借鉴了两个真实的英国传统：音乐厅和无厘头幽默。从那时起，广播喜剧一直是BBC最独特的声音之一，有一长串的精彩节目。


在这一点上，我也许应该遵循下议院的惯例，声明我的利益。除了偶尔露面，就一些话题进行论证以获取微薄的费用外，我从未为BBC工作过，但我周围似乎都是它的雇员。我的姐姐曾经是BBC电视台的高级主管，就像她的前夫一样；我的另一个姐夫（妻子的弟弟）指导艺术节目，而我已故的岳父弗兰克-穆尔属于该公司的圣徒日历。穆尔在战后就开始为BBC写作，他和他五十年的搭档丹尼斯-诺登，在他们创造出令人愉快的语言节目《我的话》之前几年，几乎发明了古怪的广播情景喜剧，该节目在美国有相当多的粉丝。他们的节目带有P.G.沃德豪斯式的巧妙和暗示性的幽默。我经常遇到一些人，他们还记得四十多年前的《从这里开始》的片段，比如只有一分钟左右的小品，其中一个罗马军团正在阅兵场上接受百夫长的操练，百夫长叫道："好的......按正确的数字排列！"而回答是："眼睛！" "眼睛-眼睛！" "眼睛-眼睛-眼睛！" "Eye-vee!"

另一个战时发展使BBC成为所有国际广播公司中最伟大的。广播被广泛用于宣传，尽管有很大的地方差异。早在战前，每个德国人都从希特勒的咆哮演说中知道他的声音，但俄国人不知道斯大林的声音，直到1941年7月苏联被入侵后，他第一次广播。他的听众一定被他的格鲁吉亚口音吓了一跳，就像日本人在广岛被炸后第一次广播时，被他们的天皇轻快的宫廷音调所迷惑，他用令人难忘的梅花话宣布即将投降，"战争形势的发展不一定对日本有利。"


由于短波传输可以跨越国界，甚至环绕地球，一个又一个国家开始利用无线电进行对外和对内宣传。在战争期间，德国向英国播送令人沮丧的新闻--由威廉-乔伊斯（又名霍-霍勋爵）宣读，而埃兹拉-庞德则从罗马喷出反犹太主义的谩骂。随着战争的进行，BBC发现自己正在用英语（乔治-奥威尔在印度服务部工作）和其他40种语言进行国际广播--用法语、捷克语和丹麦语向被占领的欧洲传递希望的信息，用西班牙语、阿拉伯语和印地语发布新闻和讨论。

用迪安-艾奇逊（Dean Acheson）的话说，英国失去了一个帝国，却没有找到一个角色，到20世纪50年代，BBC也是如此。当时有一场激烈的运动，旨在建立一个由广告资助的替代电视频道。如今，美国电视的一无是处在英国是一种信仰，将反美左派和文化保守派联合起来。(作为一个相当好的喜欢舒伯特和提波洛的文化势利眼，我想说，如果美国电视能给我们带来《辛普森一家》和《黑道家族》，它做得并不差。) 但有趣的是，早在20世纪50年代，像评论家肯尼斯-泰南（Kenneth Tynan）这样的人--政治上是反美左派的一部分--不仅支持商业电视，而且还坚持认为美国电视在文化和技术上的优越性。

英国广播公司（BBC）激起了某种类型的亲英派美国人的钦佩之情，就BBC广播而言，这并非没有理由。在我成长过程中，如果有一件事能证明BBC的崇高声誉是正确的，那就是《听众》。这是一份周刊，看起来很像《旁观者》和《新政治家》，或者是《新共和国》和《国家》，但它的大部分内容都来自BBC的广播。德怀特-麦克唐纳（Dwight Macdonald）在1956年的文章中说，在美国，像《听众》这样水平的杂志，如果有类似的来源，就不能每周出版，而要每年出版。

当时，麦克唐纳住在伦敦，正在制定他的文化理论，即高、低、中--或者如他所说，高文化、Masscult（"对高文化的模仿"）和Midcult，后者 "假装尊重高文化的标准，实际上却将其淡化和庸俗化。" 令他感到高兴的是，BBC当时有三个完全符合他的模式的广播电台：轻型节目（Masscult）、家庭服务（Midcult）和 "巧妙地命名 "的第三节目（High Culture）。第三节目是不折不扣的、出色的高尚文化。人们可以打开来自伦敦或维也纳的歌剧转播，或一场精彩的音乐会--可能是由BBC自己的交响乐团演奏的，多年来，这些乐团在英国首演了勋伯格的《Erwartung》和肖斯塔科维奇的《第八交响曲》等作品，并听到伯特兰-罗素或E-M-福斯特在中间的谈话。显然，这项服务不是在商业基础上运行的；其员工认为讨论收视率都是不好的，而且为其工作被视为一种特权。有这样一个故事：当一位可敬的学者就一些不可言喻的深奥话题发表演讲时，制片人在他离开时对他说："教授，费用是15基尼。"这位先生回答说："很好，我应该把支票给谁？"

对于战后四分之一世纪在英国长大的人来说，《第三方案》和《听众》作为非官方教育的深远影响渠道，只有企鹅平装书能与之媲美。资深政治专栏作家艾伦-沃特金斯（Alan Watkins）在他最近的回忆录《沿着舰队街走一遭》（A Short Walk Down Fleet Street）中，描述了他在南威尔士一个采矿村的童年，他在1950年获得了一个大学名额。50年过去了，他仍然坚信，是阅读了《听众》杂志从第三期节目中印制的《维多利亚人的思想和信仰》系列，才让他进入剑桥大学。

在最好的意愿下，这些都不再是BBC的事实了。发生了什么？为什么，电视发生了。该公司实际上在战前开创了电视广播（并在战时暂停了这种新媒体，在1946年重新开始），但在20世纪50年代，BBC电视在技术上被美国电视甩在后面。它继续断断续续地推出了关于艺术和历史的精彩系列节目，以及一些非常有趣的情景喜剧。但它的垄断地位已经不复存在，在英国和其他地方一样，观众和听众现在可以从几十个电台和电视频道中选择。BBC的地位似乎越来越不协调，而且越来越受困扰，不断有人指责它有政治偏见。

最近发生的几个事件突出了这一点。一个相对较小的事件发生在5月，当时BBC决定不转播7月的皇太后百岁生日庆祝活动，而是让独立电视台来转播。这激起了右翼报纸不完全是事实的愤怒，但这个决定足以说明问题。BBC确实有广泛的政治--或者更准确地说，文化--偏见，这在一个由六七十年代受过教育的孩子管理的组织中几乎是不可避免的。正如我耐心地向保守党小报的读者解释的那样，BBC的工作人员并不是赞成征收大量再分配税的革命社会主义者（不是以他们的工资为基础），但他们是雅皮士、波普和党徒，以一种相当不自觉的方式，对他们来说，皇室生日的想法隐约是可笑和尴尬的。

不那么微不足道的是英国广播公司（BBC）新任总干事（该公司首席执行官的称呼）的选择。格雷格-戴克（Greg Dyke）曾在商业电视台担任过多年的高管，并似乎因此赚了一大笔钱：以至于他有能力在五年内向托尼-布莱尔的工党提供相当于8万美元的资金。去年，在戴克上任后不久，安德鲁-马尔被任命为BBC的政治编辑。他曾是《独立报》的编辑和《观察家报》的专栏作家，这是两家自由派报纸，他是一位受欢迎和令人钦佩的记者，但毫无疑问是工党政府的同情者，更不用说是一位认真对待神秘的布莱尔计划的人。

试图为这些任命辩护的做法非常露骨，并暴露了两个谬误。一位中左翼的专栏作家写道，不可能选择一个保守派记者，因为大多数保守派记者都是论战者，而不是 "弄清真相 "的人。这里的谬误是，党性和偏袒只存在于一个假想的左右光谱的外缘，而越是靠近中心，就越是靠近美德和真理。这与逻辑和日常观察都是相悖的：往往没有人像极端温和派那样有倾向性。

但是，对于BBC的未来来说，更不祥的是另一个谬论：这样一个组织在政治上可能永远是完全中立和纯粹的。事实上，BBC已经多次受到政治偏见的攻击，特别是在欧洲一体化问题上。去年12月，在BBC的广播旗舰节目 "今天 "中发生了一场激烈的争吵，一位尖锐的批评者指责该节目提倡欧洲联邦制。他可能听起来有点歇斯底里，但他有一个观点：不管是错是对，那些经营BBC的雅皮士比普通英国选民更同情欧洲的想法。然而，他们却躲在BBC赖以生存的绝对客观和完全脱离政治的寓言故事里，而这种寓言故事今天看来比以往任何时候都不靠谱。大多数美国电视和广播公司尽管有明显的缺陷，但至少没有鼓励这种幻想；只有在偶尔的慷慨时刻，CBS和NBC才会假装是准神圣的机构。至于伦敦的媒体：当你购买自由派大报《卫报》或保守派小报《每日邮报》（我设法为这两份报纸撰稿）时，你看到的就是你得到的。英国广播公司所追求的奥林匹克式的公正性没有任何伪装，但从这些任命来看，这种公正性显得如此滑稽。在报纸的一个专栏中，马尔用和蔼可亲的面孔把这一点撇开了。当我加入BBC时，我的 "意见机关 "被正式删除。这是一个庄严的、令人生畏的仪式，在电视中心的一个密室里进行，涉及到一个高级行政人员的会议，一双生锈的剪子和一个白兰地酒瓶。该死的痛苦，虽然现在缝合了，但至少没有播出。" 但在他的小笑话背后，人们可能会发现对这种伪装还能维持多久感到某种不安。


BBC最近一直在遭受更大的磨难。前任总干事是约翰-伯特（当时是约翰爵士，现在是伯特勋爵，因为他的第一位前任成为约翰爵士，然后是雷斯勋爵）。几年前，他和当时的同事彼得-杰伊一起宣布了电视新闻业的 "解释使命"。从1992年到2000年，在他担任BBC负责人期间，他花在解释上的时间较少，而花在对BBC的日常内部运作实行 "市场纪律 "上的时间较多；这意味着即使是最平凡的程序（使用复印机）也要进行微观核算。内部市场造成了难以言喻的不便。任何有经验的人都会知道，一个大型组织在热衷于创新的官僚手中的感觉。其结果是不正常的，就像以往一样。有人决定，为了会计目的，每次工作人员从办公室图书馆借书时，各部门都要收取几英镑。"一位工作人员回忆说："所以我们就把书夹起来。

不用说，Greg Dyke已经推翻了他的前任的各种政策。现在有一个公司的口头禅叫 "建立一个BBC"。其他的变化则更为昂贵。从赖斯时代开始，BBC的广播总部就在广播大楼。世界服务部设在斯特兰德附近的布什大厦。电视台从广播大楼扩展到伦敦北部的亚历山德拉宫和伦敦西部的莱姆格罗夫，然后又扩展到附近的电视中心。巴特将广播新闻和时事节目搬到了电视中心，包括每天早上6:30至9:00在第四电台播出的《今天》。工作人员别无选择，但受访者却有选择；每天在节目中接受采访的政客和专家都准备一大早去牛津广场，但却不愿意去伦敦郊区，结果是越来越多的此类采访是通过电话完成。现在，新闻将搬回伦敦市中心，尽管没有计划撤销另一个造成很多痛苦的变化：将BBC电视台的主要晚间新闻从晚上9点推迟到晚上10点，当时它几乎和60年前同一时间的旧广播新闻一样，是一种制度。


这些事情本身并不重要，而是表明（正如我所说的，任何在一个正在迷失方向的大型组织中工作过的人都熟悉这一点）方向不稳，这种印象被人员的大量流动所证实，电台和电视台的高级管理人员突然离职。这并不是说所有的悲哀都是自己造成的。在商业电视出现后的几十年里，BBC接受了挑战，并受到了竞争的刺激。但是，卫星电视，特别是以鲁伯特-默多克（Rupert Murdoch）的庞大业务形式出现的卫星电视，带来了几乎不可战胜的威胁。曾几何时，BBC播放每一个重要的体育赛事。然后，它一个接一个地失去了它们：板球、橄榄球、赛车。最具破坏性的打击是，默多克的天空频道买下了英超所有比赛的播放权，我们的足球大联盟现在被自命不凡地称为英超。BBC最近一直在反击，试图再次确保一些伟大的体育赛事的权利。

即使这样，也提出了一个尴尬的问题。一个公共服务机构应该为它的节目支付多少钱？这个问题以另一种方式被提出来，例如，《我有新闻》，这是一个聪明、机智的节目，对于美国人来说，他们有时会参与到令人震惊的淫秽的小组节目中。据可靠消息，该节目的三位固定表演者每人每周工作几小时的报酬与英国广播公司管弦乐队的许多演奏者一年的收入相当。除了在一个具有独特的法律和道德责任的公司里，这些费用不会与其他人有关。许可证费用的存在是为了让喜剧表演者或足球俱乐部大规模地致富吗？


与以往一样，BBC在英国的文化生活中扮演着重要的角色，尤其是音乐生活。它每年夏天在伦敦皇家阿尔伯特音乐厅举办为期八周的 "舞会"（更正式的说法是 "亨利-伍德长廊音乐会"），每场音乐会都在第三电台直播，是第三节目的继承者。这有时被描述为地球上最伟大的音乐节，而这一次，这种夸耀是难以否认的。一张季票 "promming"，或站在舞台上，听70多场音乐会，其价格相当于萨尔茨堡音乐节的一张门票。去年夏天，观众听到了柏林爱乐乐团和旧金山交响乐团，以及迈克尔-蒂尔森-托马斯和伯纳德-海廷克等指挥家的演出。

但是，对可及性的呼声已经感染了BBC的每一个角落，甚至是第三电台，它现在像其他古典调频电台一样整天和晚上进行广播。第三电台有关于音乐的垃圾八卦节目，还有Making Tracks，这是一个完全令人厌恶的20分钟的节目，在下午3点40分，两个来自儿童电视的令人毛骨悚然的主持人向所有年龄段的人唠叨，其心理年龄为9岁。即使是世界广播公司也受到了影响。它的标准在最好的情况下仍然非常高，但在那里也有明显的淡化新闻的倾向，尤其是认为听众无法忍受一个新闻播音员不间断的声音持续几分钟。从凌晨1点到5点35分，第四广播电台切换到世界服务，作为一个顽固的失眠者，我经常听这个节目。奥运会期间，世界广播电台的 "今日世界 "节目中有一个关于妓女涌入悉尼的俏皮话题，其中有各种陈词滥调，就连《世界新闻报》记者在妓女向他求婚时的台词都没有。"我找了个借口就走了"。我没有找借口，就关机了。


像其他所有人一样，BBC一直面临着支持文化多样性的压力。而且也很正确，我正准备虔诚地补充说--但是，在世界服务社被命名之前，它早就实行了多样性。布什大厦的外语部门一直是人们所希望的多元化，也是迷人的流亡异见者的温床，从60年前德国服务部门的反纳粹难民，到后来的反共产主义难民，再到可能帮助破坏伊朗国王的伊朗难民。英语服务也是多样化的，但它最近经历了一个微妙的变化。标准口音或牛津口音，或实际上是BBC口音的一个巨大优势是它对外国人的可理解性。现在，你可以经常听到印度人在世界服务中用如此浓重的口音说话，只有讲英语的非洲人或西印度人才能听懂。BBC英语与其说是一种帝国的种姓标志，不如说是一种真正的通用语言。现在不是了。这可能与与BBC有关的那种有罪的焦虑有关。就在一月份，戴克进行了一次奇怪的攻击，说它是 "可怕的白人"。

BBC的最后也可能是致命的问题是，它的数量实在太多。从一个国家电台变成了两个，然后是三个；现在有五个。第二电台是经典的流行音乐，从百老汇民谣到早期的摇滚乐，我必须承认（作为一个文化势利眼，同时也是一个潮人），我是这样一个系列的秘密信徒，比如不久前由小理查德提出的一个崇高的系列，以及另一个对查克-贝里伟大的海岸到海岸歌曲 "应许之地 "的解构主义地形分析。但是第一电台是直接的商业流行音乐，相当于一百个美国的调频摇滚电台，虽然对我们这些文雅的英国人来说，听到由赞助商介绍的弦乐四重奏可能很奇怪，但听到没有广告的全天摇滚，听起来也几乎一样奇怪。


由于各种原因，很难相信BBC会以其目前的形式存活很长时间。绝对禁止广告是没有意义的，因为电视和广播中的许多节目都与商业对手的节目没有区别。许可证费用一半是虚构的，一半是勒索的：即使你从来没有在电视上看过任何东西，只有第四频道的赛车、CNN或淫秽视频（我看了很多前两者），你也必须支付它。而对BBC的纯洁性进行近乎狂热的辩护，从那些无论政治上多么正确，都不愿意为国家拥有的报纸或图书出版商写作的记者口中说出来，就很奇怪。

最有可能的结局是逐步解体，BBC电视台接受广告，受欢迎的广播电台（与雷斯的公共服务广播的理想没有什么相似之处）被私有化，正如我们许多国有企业已经被私有化。如果是英国航空公司和英国电信，为什么不是英国广播？我并不狂热地反对对文化和教育的公共补贴，我很乐意看到第三广播电台以类似其目前的面貌继续存在，还有世界服务--原因无非是在其最好的时候，它是一个伟大的大众媒体，是一个淘气的世界中的善举。英国广播公司的缓慢消亡可能是一个悲伤的理由，因为曾经伟大的阴影已经消失了；但是，正如一个更简单的说法，所有的好东西都必须结束。





Who Needs the BBC?
The British Broadcasting Corporation is having a hard time living up to its past. But what a past! Our correspondent reviews its history, seeking the roots of its present troubles

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
MARCH 2001 ISSUE
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Not many sets of initials became universally recognizable during the twentieth century, and those that did often had ominous overtones, from SS to KGB. Foreigners know some American initials better than others (CIA and FBI, say, rather than IRS or SAT), and an Englishman doesn't suppose that every American recognizes LSE or QPR. But everyone knows the BBC. You need only to say it the local way—bay-bay-say in France, bee-bee-chee in Italy—to be instantly understood. Leonard Slatkin is the first American to become chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He was no doubt thinking of his own country when he said after his recent appointment that those three letters have a magical ring.

The reputation of the British Broadcasting Corporation can be truly vexing, at any rate to its competitors. Although the BBC's monopoly on British television ended more than forty years ago, people outside our damp little island don't seem to have grasped that. Crews from the other British television companies always report that they get the same response when working in America: "So, you guys are from the BBC." "No, actually, we're Granada" (or ITN, or LWT, or whoever). "Yeah, British TV—the BBC."

But it isn't only resentful professionals from rival companies who now wonder if the BBC's reputation may not be a shadow—albeit an awfully big shadow—of former glories. The past year has seen turmoil at the corporation's London headquarters and heavy criticism of the BBC as an institution, not for the first time but in a manner more insidious and damaging than ever. Some of the criticism is political, and politically partisan, but more of it addresses the deeper question of purpose. The BBC's domestic output has grown so varied that generalizing about it makes little sense, and that raises the question of whether preserving the corporation as a single entity makes sense.

The BBC's international standing was hard-earned. There is a worldwide BBC television network, competing so far not very effectively with CNN and other satellite companies, but more than 150 million people around the world listen to BBC World Service radio, which was long famous for its integrity, high standards, and unembroidered, unsensationalized news. American addicts now complain that this once splendid station shows signs of decline—the result of what those who engage in it call promoting greater accessibility and the rest of us call dumbing down. These critics may have a point.

Certainly the BBC's position is peculiar. Its founding concept was one of "public-service broadcasting," a phrase with both an elevating and a patronizing ring. As long as it was the only broadcaster in the country, it could do as it liked, without giving any thought to the audience. Now it competes in a marketplace, though without being driven by the commercial imperatives of a market; and it has to chase viewers and listeners, though without making any money from them: most of its income derives from the license fees levied on television sets whether the owners watch the BBC or not. It's an odd and unsatisfactory arrangement.

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The BBC's origins are likewise unsatisfactory, and also curious. Radio was born as a mass medium in the 1920s. How different countries responded to its arrival vividly illustrated their differing political cultures. America had a free market (at the very beginning federal and state governments didn't even regulate wavelengths, which were held by squatters' rights). In most European countries the state soon established a broadcasting monopoly under its own direction. Appropriately enough in the age when the business of America was business, American radio became wholeheartedly commercial. Appropriately enough in the age of totalitarianism, European radio became a prime vehicle for party propaganda and indoctrination.

As usual, the British way fell somewhere in between. After a very brief experiment with commercially sponsored broadcasting—a concert of songs by the diva Dame Nellie Melba, in 1920—a privately owned British Broadcasting Company began in 1922 with an exclusive license. In 1927 it became the British Broadcasting Corporation, a state firm ostensibly kept at arm's length from the government by a board of directors (appointed by the government, of course), and financed, in what was meant to be a high-minded and detached fashion, by fees exacted from all owners of what were then called wireless sets. Advertising was unknown and unthinkable.

As the historian A.J.P. Taylor observed in English History 1914-1945 (1965), this arrangement suited both political parties: "Conservatives liked authority; Labour disliked private enterprise." It should be said that Taylor was bitterly hostile to the BBC, owing to clashes of his own with the corporation, and that such hostility colored his contemptuous and absurd dismissal of even the BBC's contribution to musical life. But his claim that for years it rarely aired controversial views is harder to deny.

The BBC was the bland leading the bland, tending almost unconsciously to take an establishment view. It certainly supported the reigning dynasty, in whose reinvention as a wholesome model of family life the corporation played no small part, with, for example, the monarch's Christmas Day broadcasts, which began with George V. Presiding over the BBC's formative years was John Reith, a stern Scotch Calvinist much mocked as a cultural dictator and a prude. James Thurber described another prude, Harold Ross, of The New Yorker, as the only man he'd ever known who spelled out euphemisms in front of adults: Ross would say of some couple in the office, "I'm sure he's s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g with her." In Reith's day radio announcers were expected to wear dinner jackets in front of the microphone, and any employee suspected of a-d-u-l-t-e-r-y was fired immediately.

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Rare incidents interrupted this decorum. In the 1930s there was a nighttime review of the Royal Navy, with a former naval officer providing the commentary. As he repeated the words "The fleet's lit up ... now it's gone" over and again in slurred tones, it became clear that he was in no state to continue, and he was cut short. The episode caused much public merriment and doubtless shocked Reith. (Funnily enough, it's often easier to tell on radio than on television when someone is drunk, though I do have a happy memory of Brendan Behan visibly sozzled on BBC television.)


Altogether Reith did not encourage dissent; he had a very exalted conception of his own importance; and he was obsessed by the BBC's mission to educate and improve its audience. In hindsight he doesn't seem so contemptible. He was a man of great ability, who truly believed in the grandiose slogan posted in the lobby of Broadcasting House, north of Oxford Circus: nation shall speak peace unto nation. And he believed just as passionately in the Victorian principle that we must educate our masters—the "demos" who should be fitted for democracy.

It may be that the BBC's true golden age began with World War II, after Reith's departure. From 1939 to 1945 the BBC became a national institution, as the British people gathered, in defeat and in victory, for the news at 9:00 p.m. Given that the country was engaged in a total war for survival, the news was remarkable for its honesty and objectivity. Those days still resonate. Although I wasn't yet born, let alone listening, at the time, I have folk memories of the wartime BBC, from Winston Churchill's great speeches in 1940 to Wynford Vaughan-Thomas reporting from a Lancaster bomber over Berlin in 1943 and Richard Dimbleby almost speechless with horror at liberated Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The war years also saw the BBC become a national institution in terms of entertainment, from serious music (there was a principled resolve to continue playing German composers, whatever the latest corruptions of Kultur) to popular comedy, most famously ITMA (It's That Man Again), another folk memory, a quite indescribable variety program combining absurd sketches, catchphrases, and songs, and drawing on two authentic English traditions: the music hall and nonsense humor. Radio comedy has remained one of the most distinctive voices of the BBC ever since, with a long line of brilliant series.


At this point I should perhaps follow the practice of the House of Commons and declare an interest. Apart from the occasional appearance, pontificating on some topic or other for a minuscule fee, I have never worked for the BBC, but I seem to be surrounded by its employees. My sister used to be a senior BBC-TV executive, like her former husband; my other brother-in-law (wife's brother) directs art programs, and my late father-in-law, Frank Muir, belongs to the corporation's calendar of saints. Muir began writing for the BBC just after the war, and he and his partner of fifty years, Denis Norden, practically invented the zany radio sitcom years before they created their delightfully dotty language program, My Word!, which had a considerable American following. Their shows were laced with a clever and allusive humor in the manner of P. G. Wodehouse. I've often met people who remember fragments of their Take It From Here from more than forty years ago, such as the sketch, lasting only a minute or so, in which a Roman legion is being drilled on the parade ground by a centurion who bawls, "All right ... by the right—number awf!" and is answered "Eye!" "Eye-eye!" "Eye-eye-eye!" "Eye-vee!"

Another wartime development made the BBC the greatest of all international broadcasters. Radio was widely used for propaganda, although there were significant local variations. Well before the war every German knew the sound of Hitler's voice from his ranting orations, but the Russians didn't know Stalin's voice until he broadcast for the first time, after the Soviet Union was invaded, in July of 1941. His listeners must have been taken aback by his Georgian accent, just as the Japanese were bemused by their Emperor's lilting court intonation when he broadcast for the first time, after the bombing of Hiroshima, announcing the coming surrender in the memorably meiotic words "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage."


Because shortwave transmissions can cross frontiers and even circle the globe, one country after another began to use radio for external as well as internal propaganda. During the war Germany beamed disheartening news at England—read by William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw—while Ezra Pound spewed anti-Semitic bile from Rome. And as the war progressed, the BBC found itself broadcasting internationally, in English (with George Orwell working for the Indian Service) and forty other languages—messages of hope to occupied Europe in French, Czech, and Danish, news bulletins and discussions in Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi.

In Dean Acheson's phrase, Great Britain lost an empire without finding a role, and by the 1950s something of the same was true of the BBC. There was a fierce campaign to start an alternative, advertising-financed television channel. Nowadays the utter worthlessness of American television is an article of faith in chattering-class England, uniting the anti-American left with cultural conservatives. (As a pretty good Schubert-and-Tiepolo-loving culture snob myself, I would say that if American television can give us The Simpsons and The Sopranos, it isn't doing badly.) But it's interesting to find that back in the 1950s someone like the critic Kenneth Tynan—politically very much part of the anti-American left—not only supported commercial television but also insisted on the superiority, cultural as well as technical, of American television.

The BBC excited the admiration of a certain type of anglophile American, and in the case of BBC radio not without reason. If there was one thing that justified the BBC's exalted reputation when I was growing up, it was The Listener. This was a weekly magazine that looked very much like The Spectator and the New Statesman—or The New Republic and The Nation—of those days, but most of its contents were taken from BBC broadcasts. Writing in 1956, Dwight Macdonald (a distinctly if not besottedly anglophile American) said sourly that in America a magazine on such a level as that of The Listener and drawn from a similar source would have to appear not weekly but annually.

At the time, Macdonald was living in London and was formulating his theory of culture, high, low, and middle—or, as he called them, High Culture, Masscult ("a parody of High Culture"), and Midcult, which "pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them." To his great amusement, the BBC then had three radio stations exactly fitting his pattern: the Light Programme (Masscult), the Home Service (Midcult), and the "tactfully named" Third Programme (High Culture). The Third Programme was uncompromisingly and brilliantly highbrow. One could turn on an opera relay from London or Vienna or a superb concert—maybe played by the BBC's own symphony orchestra, which over the years gave the British premiere of such works as Schoenberg's Erwartung and Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony—and hear an interval talk given by Bertrand Russell or E. M. Forster. Plainly, the service was not run on a commercial basis; its employees thought it bad form even to discuss ratings, and working for it was regarded as a privilege. The story goes that when a venerable scholar had given a talk on some ineffably esoteric subject, the producer said to him as he was leaving, "The fee will be fifteen guineas, Professor," and the don replied, "Very good, and to whom shall I make the cheque?"

For anyone who grew up in England in the quarter century after the war, the Third Programme and The Listener were rivaled only by Penguin paperbacks as profoundly influential conduits of unofficial education. In his recent memoir, A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, the veteran political columnist Alan Watkins describes his boyhood in a South Wales mining village, whence he won a university place in 1950. Fifty years on he remains convinced that more than anything else, it was reading the series Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians, which The Listener printed from the Third Programme, that got him into Cambridge.

With the best will, none of that is any longer true of the BBC. What happened? Why, television happened. The corporation actually pioneered television broadcasting before the war (and suspended the new medium for the duration, to start again in 1946), but in the 1950s BBC television was left behind technically by American television. It has continued intermittently to put out marvelous series on art and history, along with some very funny sitcoms. But its monopoly is gone, and in England as elsewhere, viewers and listeners can now choose from dozens of radio stations and television channels. The BBC's position seems more and more incongruous—and more and more beleaguered, with continual accusations of political bias.

This is highlighted by several recent events. A comparatively trivial one came in May, when the BBC decided it would not televise the July celebration of the Queen Mother's hundredth birthday, leaving it to be picked up by independent television. This provoked howls of not entirely factitious rage from right-wing newspapers, but the decision was telling enough. The BBC does have a broad political—or, more accurately, cultural—bias, which is almost inevitable in an organization run by educated children of the sixties and seventies. As I have patiently tried explaining to the readers of Tory tabloids, the BBC's apparatchiks are not revolutionary socialists who favor heavy redistributive taxation (not on the salaries they earn), but they are yuppies, bobos, and partisans in a quite unconscious way, people for whom the very idea of a royal birthday is vaguely risible and embarrassing.

Less trivial was the choice of a new director-general (as the corporation's chief executive is called) of the BBC. Greg Dyke spent years as an executive in commercial television, and seems to have made a tidy sum of money thereby: so much so that he could afford to give the equivalent of $80,000 to Tony Blair's Labour Party over the course of five years. Last year, not long after Dyke's arrival, Andrew Marr was appointed the BBC's political editor. A former editor of The Independent and a columnist for The Observer, two liberal papers, he is a popular and admired journalist but unquestionably a sympathizer with the Labour government, not to say a man who takes the mysterious Blair project seriously.

Attempts to defend these appointments were very revealing, and exposed two fallacies. One center-left columnist wrote that a conservative journalist couldn't have been chosen, because most conservative journalists are polemicists, rather than people who "tease out the truth." The fallacy here is that partisanship and partiality are found only on the outside edges of an imaginary spectrum of left and right, and that the nearer one is to the center, the nearer one is to virtue and truth. This is contrary to both logic and everyday observation: there's often no one so tendentious as an extreme moderate.

But much more ominous for the future of the BBC is the other fallacy: that such an organization could ever be completely neutral and pure at political heart. In fact, the BBC has been repeatedly attacked for political bias, notably on the question of European integration. Last December there was a ferocious spat on the Today program, the BBC's radio flagship, when the show was accused by one bitter critic of promoting Euro-federalism. He might have sounded a trifle hysterical, but he had a point: wrongly or rightly, those yuppie bobos who run the BBC are more sympathetic than the average British voter to the European idea. And yet they take refuge in the fable convenue of absolute objectivity and utter detachment from politics on which the BBC was built and which today seems less plausible than ever. For all their obvious failings, most American television and radio companies at least don't encourage this illusion; only in occasional fulsome moments do CBS and NBC pretend to be quasi-divine institutions. As for the London press: when you buy the liberal broadsheet Guardian or the Tory tabloid Daily Mail (for both of which I manage to write), what you see is what you get. There is no pretense of that Olympian impartiality to which the BBC aspires, but which looks so comical in light of those appointments. In a newspaper column Marr has brushed this aside with genial facetiousness: "When I joined the BBC, my Organs of Opinion were formally removed. It was a solemn and intimidating ceremony, carried out in a back room at Television Centre, involving a conclave of senior executives, a pair of rusty secateurs and a brandy bottle. Damn painful, though the sutures are out now and at least it wasn't broadcast." But behind his little joke one might detect a certain unease about how much longer that pretense can be kept up.


The BBC has been suffering larger tribulations lately. The previous director-general was John Birt (then Sir John, now Lord Birt, as the first of his predecessors became Sir John and then Lord Reith). Years ago, with his then colleague Peter Jay, he announced television journalism's "Mission to Explain." During his tenure at the head of the BBC, from 1992 to 2000, he spent less time explaining and more time imposing a "market discipline" on the BBC's everyday internal operations; this meant subjecting even the most mundane procedures (using the photocopier) to micro-accounting. The internal market caused untold inconvenience. Anyone who has had experience of a large organization in the hands of zealously innovating bureaucrats will know the feeling. And the results were perverse, as always. Someone decided that, for accounting purposes, departments would be charged several pounds every time a staff member borrowed a book from the office library. "So we just pinched the books instead," one staff member recalls.

Needless to say, Greg Dyke has reversed various of his predecessor's policies. There is now what a corporate catchphrase calls "Building One BBC." Other changes have been more expensive. From Reith's time, BBC radio headquarters was at Broadcasting House. The World Service was based at Bush House, near the Strand. Television expanded from Broadcasting House to Alexandra Palace, in North London, and Lime Grove, in West London, and then to the nearby Television Centre. Birt moved radio news and current affairs to Television Centre, including Today, which runs on Radio 4 from 6:30 to 9:00 each morning. The staff had no choice, but the interviewees did; the pols and pundits who are interviewed on the program daily were prepared to go to Oxford Circus early in the morning but not to the outskirts of London, with the result that more and more such interviews are done over the telephone. Now news is to move back into central London, although there is no plan to undo another change that caused much woe: the postponing of the main BBC-TV evening news from 9:00 p.m., when it had been almost as much of an institution as the old radio news at the same time sixty years ago, to 10:00 p.m., when it clashes with Independent Television News and Radio 4's main evening news.


None of these things is important in itself so much as symptomatic (as I say, this is familiar to anyone who has been in a large organization that is losing its way) of rudderless direction, an impression confirmed by a heavy turnover of personnel, with senior managers from both radio and television abruptly departing. By no means is every woe self-inflicted. For decades after the coming of commercial television the BBC rose to the challenge and was stimulated by the competition. But satellite television, particularly in the form of Rupert Murdoch's vast operation, presents an almost insuperable threat. Once upon a time the BBC showed every important sporting event. Then it lost them, one after another: cricket, rugby, racing. The most devastating blow was when Murdoch's Sky Channel bought the rights to air all games in the Premiership, as our soccer major league is now pretentiously called. The BBC has recently been fighting back, trying to secure the rights to some of the great sporting occasions once more.

Even this raises an awkward question: How much should a public-service corporation pay for what it shows? The question is raised in another way by, for example, Have I Got News for You, a smart, witty, and—to Americans, who sometimes take part—startlingly lewd panel program. Its three regular performers are each paid, I've been reliably told, as much for a few hours' work a week as many players in the BBC orchestras earn in a year. The fees wouldn't be anyone else's business except in a corporation with unique legal and moral responsibilities. Does the license fee exist to enrich comedy performers, or soccer clubs, on a vast scale?


As ever, the BBC plays an important part in British cultural life, above all musical life. It puts on the Proms (more formally, the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts) for eight weeks every summer at the Royal Albert Hall, in London, with each concert broadcast live on Radio 3, successor to the Third Programme. This is sometimes described as the greatest music festival on earth, and for once the boast is hard to deny. A season ticket for "promming," or standing in the arena, to hear more than seventy concerts costs the price of a single ticket at the Salzburg Festival. Last summer prommers heard the Berlin Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, with such conductors as Michael Tilson Thomas and Bernard Haitink.

But the clamor for accessibility has infected every corner of the BBC, even Radio 3, which now broadcasts all day and night like any other classical FM station. Radio 3 has trashy gossip programs about music, and it has Making Tracks, a perfectly detestable twenty-minute spot at 3:40 p.m. in which two gruesomely winsome presenters from children's television chatter to those of all ages with a mental age of nine. Even the World Service has suffered. Its standards are still very high at its best, but the tendency toward lightening the news is evident there, too, not least in the belief that listeners can't bear one newsreader's uninterrupted voice for several minutes at a stretch. From 1:00 to 5:35 a.m. Radio 4 switches over to the World Service, and as a hardened insomniac, I often listen to it. During the Olympic Games, The World Today on the World Service included a saucy item about the influx of prostitutes to Sydney which had every catchpenny cliché short of the hallowed News of the World reporter's line when a hooker propositioned him: "I made an excuse and left." Without making an excuse I switched off.


Like everyone else, the BBC has been under pressure to favor cultural diversity. And quite right, too, I was about to add piously—but then, the World Service practiced diversity long before it had been named. The foreign-language departments at Bush House have always been as diverse as one could wish, and also fascinating hotbeds of exiled dissidence, from anti-Nazi refugees on the German service sixty years ago, to anti-Communist refugees later, to refugees from Iran who may have helped to undermine the Shah. The English-language service was also diverse, but it has undergone a subtle change of late. The one great advantage of the standard—or the Oxford, or, indeed, the BBC—accent is its comprehensibility to foreigners. Now you can regularly hear Indians speaking on the World Service in accents so thick that they would be understood only with difficulty by English-speaking Africans or West Indians. BBC English was not so much an imperial caste mark as a genuine lingua franca. No longer. This may be connected with the kind of guilty angst associated with the BBC. Only in January, Dyke made a bizarre attack, saying that it was "hideously white."

The BBC's final and possibly fatal problem is that there is just too much of it. From one national radio station it became two and then three; now there are five. Radio 2 is classic pop music, from Broadway ballads to early rock, and I must admit (as a culture snob who is also a Boomer) that I am a secret devotee of such series as one sublimely presented not long ago by Little Richard, and another given over to a deconstructionist topographical analysis of Chuck Berry's great coast-to-coast song "Promised Land." But Radio 1 is straight commercial pop, equivalent to a hundred American FM rock stations, and although it might seem strange to us refined English to hear a string-quartet recital introduced by a sponsor, it sounds almost as odd to hear all-day rock without ads.


For various reasons it is hard to believe that the BBC will survive in its present form for very much longer. An absolute ban on advertising makes no sense when so much of the output, on television and on radio, is indistinguishable from that of commercial rivals. The license fee is half fiction and half extortion: you have to pay it even if you never watch anything on your television but Channel 4 Racing, CNN, or obscene videos (I watch a good deal of the first two). And the almost fanatical defense of the BBC's purity is odd coming from journalists who, however politically correct they may be, would not want to write for newspapers or book publishers owned by the state.

The most likely end is a gradual breakup, with BBC-TV taking advertising and the popular radio stations, which bear little resemblance to Reith's ideal of public-service broadcasting, privatized, as so many of our state-owned enterprises have been. If British Airways and British Telecom, why not British Broadcasting? Having no fanatical objection to public subsidy of culture and education, I would be happy to see Radio 3 continue in something like its present guise, and also the World Service—for no other reason than that at its best it has been a great mass medium and a good deed in a naughty world. The slow demise of the BBC might be a reason to grieve that the shade of that which once was great has passed away; but then, as a simpler saying goes, all good things must come to an end.