Books reviewed: Beebology, or the history of the ‘British Bastard Corporation’

By Dilip -

Margaret Thatcher hated the ‘British Bastard Corporation’, as her husband liked to call it. Coverage of the Falklands War was an inevitable flashpoint, with Thatcher raging against reporters’ references to ‘British’ forces rather than ‘our’ troops. The tabloid press sensed an opportunity to put the boot in, with the Sun wheeling out the tiredest of tropes by damning the BBC’s coverage as the work of ‘traitors in our midst’...

The BBC: A People’s History - by David Hendy

This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 - by Simon J. Potter.

Reviewed by Stefan Collini

One of Anthony Eden’s several miscalculations over Suez was his assumption that he could bully the BBC – which he described in a moment of particular exasperation as ‘a nest of communists’ – into supporting the invasion by threatening to cut or curtail its External Services broadcasting. The director general, Ian Jacob, rightly sensing that the country was divided on the issue, stood by the corporation’s commitment to even-handed reporting. Once American pressure had forced Eden into a humiliating withdrawal from the Canal Zone, the threat evaporated, but the episode did nothing to lessen some politicians’ suspicions about the subversive character of the nation’s principal broadcaster.

The Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s were almost equally antagonistic to the BBC, with Tony Benn ‘equating it with the medieval Catholic Church, controlling thought from a middle-class, establishment position’. Harold Wilson, naturally given to suspicion, thought the BBC was somehow conspiring against him, and in the mid-1970s suggested abolishing the licence fee in order to bring the corporation more directly under government control, a frequent reflex of disgruntled politicians.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n08/stefan-collini/beebology


George Orwell statue 'too left-wing' for the BBC


George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)


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