There are many different ways of doing a good text commentary on this passage – this is just one.
It is important to bear in mind that the purpose of the exam is to evaluate the series of the classes on the history of the BBC. If you do not show you know the history, it is impossible to succeed in the exam.
This passage is an extract from a speech by Tony Benn. Tony Benn was a Member of Parliament and here is speaking to the people of the town he represents. It is not an electoral speech – there was to be no election for some time : rather it is made up of general reflections on the role of public service broadcasting in a modern society.
Tony Benn was a leader of the left wing of the Labour Party, and so we would expect his priorities to be public service and working-class people, and, as we shall see, a criticism of elitism will be made in this speech.
By 1968, television was becoming ever more common in ordinary homes, as radio had been for some decades. Since 1964, there had been three television channels – two run by the BBC and one commercial channel making its money from advertising, while the BBC had a monopoly on radio broadcasting. At the time Benn speaks, then, the BBC controls most broadcasting in the country, a situation very different from that of today.
Benn begins by explaining what he is not doing. He is not defending the idea of direct government control of the BBC or other broadcasting, (l2) and he is not, in this speech looking at the question of whether the BBC favours one political party too much (l4). At this time, direct government control of the media was a characteristic of Eastern Bloc countries known as « communist » : it is no doubt because Benn has some communist ideas that he is keen to underline that he does not support such direct control.
Tony Benn deals, in the rest of the article, mostly with two questions about broadcasting which have always been important when looking at the BBC. He looks at the question of elitism concerning presence on air – do we always hear only elite people on the radio and the TV ? And he also considers the treatment of news and current affairs – is it not slanted and distorted by particular priorities ? Both of these questions are connected to a major topic in discussions about the BBC : who does the corporation serve ? Is it really « for the people » as Hendy suggests it can be in his People’s History of the BBC ? Or it the BBC part of the establishment, and essentially serving the interests of the elite ?
The first of these questions – elitism – has often been at the centre of conversations about the BBC. People have sometimes considered elitist the concentration, especially before the Second World War, on high culture, and a distaste for popular culture. But here Benn looks at a related question – why does it seem that we alway hear the same voices on the BBC ? Before 1939, there was even a committee whose job was to survey radio and make sure that regional or working class accents were not broadcast. John Reith’s opinion was that ordinary people should not be heard on air.
Throughout the history of the BBC there have been people who, like Benn, considered it essential to make a wide selection of popular voices available on air. Olive Shapley’s work on documentaries, or Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s radio ballads were examples of this, as were some of the best known productions for « The Wednesday Play », where working class people were at the centre of the stories.
The second question of what influences the « angle » or the viewpoint of news has also been much discussed (lines 45 to 49 and elsewhere). Benn suggests that the personal touch of a small number of presenters, and the influence of audience figures (l 42), lead to important subjects being sensationalized and simplified, and some key subjects never being the subject of programmes (l40). He is worried about the future of BBC news and current affairs and suspects it will not carry out what he sees is its mission – to inform and educate citizens as widely as possible.
Although Benn expresses these criticisms of the BBC, he does so at the same time as recognizing that the BBC has been an immense success (lines 19-23). As John Reith had planned from the beginning, it has been a major force in informing, education and entertaining countless millions of people. Finally, Benn suggests that a fourth aim be added to the three mentioned in the official aims of the BBC in its royal charter : he suggests that helping people adapt to rapid social change should be a priority, too (l13). It is not clear if he is speaking mostly of technological change, which has been accelerating for many decades, or if he is referring to social change – attitudes to women, or to ethnic and sexual minorities, for example. In either case, the BBC has certainly made important contributions. Its computer literacy project in the early 1980s or its production of numerous science documentaries could be taken as examples of helping adapt to technological change. The BBC was also very much involved in the Open University. As for social change, the BBC programmes for immigrants from the 1960s on, the founding of the Asian Network on radio, or the attempts to encourage equal treatment for homosexuals through their representation on Eastenders or other shows, might be mentioned
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