A Quick History of the BBC

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0:15Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. You got a quick announcement, huh? I do, huh? I think so. Well, if you're talking about our new playlist that's coming out, that one. That's right. Yeah, we have a new playlist coming out, right, Chuck? Yeah, this holiday season, I think coming out very soon, actually. We have the 12 Days of Holiday Toys because we've got lots of great toy episodes over the years, and we've compiled them together for the whole family to enjoy. That's right. We love those toy episodes.

0:53I think it comes out on December 12th, right? I think so. And that's what, like, I mean, in real time, this probably, or not real time, but in real podcast time this week, I think. I think so, too. And what do you have to do to get these episodes, you may ask? Nothing. You don't have to lift a single finger. We're going to put them in the feed like we have been. And I hope you enjoy them. Yeah, totally. And I have another announcement for this BBC episode. Okay. Is that how you say it? The Beeb? Yeah, I've heard that, too. What do you say? Boog. That's how I was going to say it the whole episode.

1:33This one, even more so than a lot of our others that are, you know, you could potentially do 100 episodes on. This is like serious overview territory when you're talking about something as far-reaching and long-standing and sort of legendary culturally as the BBC is. I don't want our listeners across the pond to be like, guys, you're going to give us 45 minutes on the BBC? That's exactly what we're going to do. And it's with love. Yeah, and big thanks to our man in Britain, Kyle, for wrangling this huge, massive topic into something pretty good and understandable. Yeah, because I've got to say, I love the BBC.

2:16Always have. Since I was a little kid watching their content on public television. You know, everything from Flying Circus to Benny Hill to Fawlty Towers and then having a British roommate in college, he would tell me about the EastEnders and, you know, all the stuff that he grew up with. And it's just been near and dear. I read the BBC News all the time. It's just, you know, I love it. I definitely watched Benny Hill a lot when I was a kid too. So I guess I didn't realize it was BBC content, but it totally was, wasn't it? Yeah, you just thought it was some guy who talked funny from Indiana. Right.

2:55Who liked bare breasts. Yes, he was really into boobs, man. He was. If there was ever a person into boobs, it was Benny Hill. Yeah, and 12-year-old Chuck. So, yeah, that's cool. I guess I've loved the BBC longer than I thought, too. So this is a hat tip, I guess. Also, a big thanks to the BBC. and also deeply critical of it. Yeah, to this 103-year-old institution. Yeah, just in time for its 103rd birthday. So let's get started. You mentioned that it's called Beeb. I had not heard that before, but apparently it's quite accurate. And the Beeb, you can liken it in the U.S. to NPR, where there's a lot of, you know, accusations of it being left-leaning bias, And then people on the left are like, no, it's right bias.

3:48It does its best to stay middle ground if possible. It has to do with public funding, but in a much different way. And it's a venerable institution, but like way more venerable than NPR or public broadcasting is here in the United States. It is a big chunk of British culture. And in that sense, I get the sense that even people who are like, to hell with BBC, still feel some sort of like pride in the BBC and its existence. Yeah. And, you know, that is all, as we have learned by design, that was no accident. It is the world's largest broadcaster, has 21 ,000 plus employees. And nobody knows, it's the oldest national broadcaster and nobody knows how many programs they put out.

4:34Kyle said between 10 and 20 million. So that's a lot of stuff, and that's also a big cushion. That's the real margin. Yeah. That's called hedging. Yeah, and that includes, I think, everything, radio, because as we'll see, their little thingies are in all the figgy puddings. Yeah, and I mean, if you live in the U.K., there's some way, shape, or form that you're taking in BBC content, almost certainly, because they dominate, or they did at one point dominate radio, dominate television. Now that they blaze the trail onto the Internet as far as news sites go, they have a huge web presence. And then across the world as well, they have what's called the World Service, where you can watch BBC news all over the world.

5:21So it's appropriately named. And they say that they have an audience of almost half a billion people around the world. I believe it. I believe it, too. I know probably 250 million people who watch the BBC myself. off.

5:38Should we go back to the beginning? Yeah, let's go with the beginning. All right. So we got to go. I said it was 103 years old. So if you carry the one, you subtract that. 1922 is where we're going in our British Wayback Machine.

5:58Mind the gap. Which, you know, runs on coal and shepherd's pie. and October 18, 1922 is where we're going because that is where the British Broadcasting Company was formed before they became the corporation as a partnership between what they called the post office, which at the time was basically their, they ran the telegraph service over there, and the Marconi Company who said, I got a lot of radios I'd like to sell, but you got nothing to put on the radio. Ooh, we haven't heard that in a while. Yeah, it's been a minute. So, yeah, remember in our AM radio episode, we talked about the Marconi company setting up companies all over the world?

6:39Yeah. This is a good example of that. And the British government was like, hey, how about this? We will make sure you have zero competition that will give you a monopoly. But you got to make some pretty good content here. We want to hear good stuff. Right now all we hear is, and we want to hear better stuff than that. And so the Marconi company set this up. They established this station, like you said, in 1922. And I guess five years later, the British government was like, this is ours now. This is a state-owned monopoly. I don't know what happened to the Marconi Company, but it sounds like they got hung out to dry, I guess, is the nicest way I can put it.

7:22Yeah, I bet they did. Okay. So that was 27 when it became the Broadcasting Corporation. And very, you know, kind of right out of the gate, they were like, here's what we're going to do. We're not going to – it's going to be this weird hybrid of culture and entertainment kind of run through the government. But supposedly the government doesn't intervene too much. It's kind of hard to reckon how that all works. And sometimes it works really well. Sometimes there's been a lot of controversy. But what they did decide early on is we're not going to advertise. We're not going to tax people outwardly at least.

7:58we're going to have what's called a license fee, which is this, to us in the United States, a very strange sort of arrangement wherein households pay a certain amount of money starting in 1923 with 10 shillings a year to fund the BBC. And that's like your household license to listen to and then later watch stuff on television and listen on the radio. Like you have to have a license to watch TV in the UK is what you're saying. Yeah, but they don't say, all right, now here's the codes to turn it on. I mean, I guess, is it just like an honor system? That's what Kyle, so we had to follow up with Kyle, we were like, we do not get this license thing, because it's just, you Brits just take it as like, it's just the most normal thing in the world.

8:46It's not. So it turns out that it does seem to be on an honor system, and that most people follow that, in part because most people have honor, But also, there's apparently a very real threat that the BBC will send out some government goons to show up at your doorstep and be like, hey, do you have a TV license? And I guess some people think that it's incumbent upon them to open their door and let the person in to see that they have a TV and they can't produce a license. And you can get fined$1 ,000. And apparently they have trucks, they say. Pounds, thank you, which is more than$1 ,000. You should have also said the Goon Squad.

9:27I should have. Let me just retake this whole thing. Let's just start at the beginning again. You have to put on your newsboy cap and get out your cup of tea to really get in the zone, you know. My Lipton's Blackberry tea. Yeah. But apparently they will come to your house. So think about this, right? If you are not in the U.K. and you subscribe to Netflix and you get Netflix because you're using a friend's password. Imagine if Netflix showed up on your doorstep and said, are you getting Netflix for free? Yeah. And you say no. And they say, prove it. Let me in. Let me go. Let me go check and see if you have Netflix because we know you don't have your own account.

10:06That's essentially what they do with that. Yeah. I believe the color TV license for 2025 is 174 pounds 50. 22.8 million people pay this. About 12 % don't. They just sort of evade that cost for a total of about 3.8 billion pounds that goes to the BBC and the government. But this license expires in 2027, and there's a lot of hemming and hawing going on over what's going to happen next. Yeah, over the course of its history, these 10-year charters that they get that get renewed and reviewed, usually the government wants something in return or at the very least rakes them over the coals publicly. But it does seem, from what I was reading, that this does seem like to be a particularly dire situation for the BBC and their charter.

10:59Yeah, for sure. So there's a lot of people who are like, no, let's get rid of the BBC altogether or let's let them compete in the free market. They can sell ads. It's an unfair, aggressive tax where the poorest people have to pay the most percentage of their income for it, whether they want to or not, just to watch TV. There's a lot of competing ideas for what to do. And the BBC is like, how about this? Let's just not change anything and increase the license fee a little bit. And they're getting crickets back right now. Yeah, they're getting crickets. So time will tell. In 2027, we'll report back what happened.

11:37Okay. Yeah. Yeah, a little follow-up. But let's go back to the beginning because they had a guiding light at the beginning, which I was talking about, which was after World War I, the Great War, They really said, let's start this thing to embody what it means to be a Briton and to sort of get our common culture out there to the world through, you know, sports obviously would come along and music and interviews and documentaries and plays and things at the time. And there were three dudes early on that were the, I guess, the founders, Cecil Lewis, who was a fighter pilot, former fighter pilot. Man, you are nailing the British pronunciations here.

12:18He might have gone by Cecil, I don't know. A broadcaster named Arthur Burroughs and their first director general, who was the person in charge of the whole thing. His name was John, I think, Wright. I'm going with Reith. You're going with Reith? And the director general is in charge, but there's also a government board of governors that they work with or maybe answer to. Right. And one of the things about the BBC, one of the reasons it's so venerated, it was a huge trailblazer thanks to these three guys and their vision. I saw that John Reith was described by the New World Encyclopedia as a man of high intelligence, great ambition, and rigid moral views.

12:58And just like out of the gate, they set the standard for broadcasting, for broadcast journalism, for what it meant to kind of create a common culture. Remember in our Saturday morning cartoon episode, we talked about how Saturday morning cartoons played like a bardic function? Yeah. Where it gives a common culture to a bunch of people. That was like part of their goal was to create a common British culture. And that happened right after World War I. At the time, nobody had anything in common. So it was a good thing that the BBC came along. Yeah. And this was in the infancy of radio at the time.

13:34And such that Kyle dug up this kind of fun thing. I guess there was a sign in some of the recording studios and broadcasting studios where it said, you will, all caps, deafen thousands. So people didn't know what they were doing. So they really had to kind of figure this whole thing out. It was a very intimidating thing, you know, early on to sit in front of a microphone when no one had done that kind of thing before. Yeah. And even Arthur Burroughs as a broadcaster, he said broadcasting to millions was awful. and they were worried about getting, you know, quote, some madman on the microphone who could do a lot of damage.

14:09So it was a pretty intimidating thing at first when they were getting their feet wet. Yeah. And so for people outside of Britain too, the BBC was it. They were the only radio station, not because there was no competition. They had a monopoly. For years and years and years, they had a monopoly on radio and then television. So just bear that in mind. So it was really incumbent upon these guys and they realized their responsibility to be the provider of mass communication for their entire nation. And they took that responsibility seriously. And they started the whole thing out on November 14th, 1922 with the call sign 2LO.

14:50That was their broadcast license from the Marconi Company. and Arthur Burroughs said, Hello, hello. This is 2LO, the London station of the British Broadcasting Company calling. 2LO calling. And that was my Arthur Burroughs. That's pretty good. Keep in mind, everyone, he was very nervous on the first day. That's why Josh sounded like that. Then he went on to just sort of get the content underway. He did a one-minute weather and news bulletin, and this is adorable. Then he repeated it slower so people could take notes to, I guess, read back to their family. And from the get-go, they didn't call it BBC English at the time.

15:34What it was called was Received Pronunciation. But it was this sort of accent that they all agreed would be the accent. They didn't like regional accents coming on and everyone sort of doing their own thing. They opted for this middle-class Southern English, like at the Eton School. where it was just sort of the same. Yeah, apparently it had been generating among aristocrats since like the 18th century. And at that same time, there were colonists who were setting up colonies in North America who had separated from that. And so there are, in some ways, a lot more similarities to how Americans talk today to how people in Shakespeare's time would have spoken than the people in Great Britain today and the UK have with the people in Shakespeare's time, especially hard R's.

16:25Like Shakespeare would have been like, what is a car? Or the H's instead of. Henry Higgins. Right. You would say Henry Higgins. That's how Americans say it. So those two big differences, that's how Brits used to speak before, like, I guess about the 1800s. Yeah. And so they, you know, they got the ball rolling very fast on all kinds of content. in the 1920s. They had something called a children's hour. They started playing live concerts at some of London's, you know, venerated halls. In 1927, they started sports broadcasting with the FA Cup final, which is the very first ever live commentary for any event, not just sports.

17:08And by the end of the 1920s, by the end of that first decade, really just eight years, they had two million license holders. Those were households, so they had a lot more than that as active listeners. And they were a venerated, respected institution, kind of right out of the gate. Yes, but before that, they ran into their first major headbutt with government. And I say we take a break and come back and talk about that. About Churchill? That's right. We'll be right back.

17:49So, Chuck, we talked about them head-butting with government, and the first time it ever happened was with the 1926 general strike, which is when a bunch of people go on strike from all different kinds of professions. And they were doing this in sympathy with coal miners. I think more than a million coal miners were having their wages reduced. And so a bunch of different people from different professions went on strike, and that included print workers at the newspapers. So the newspapers effectively shut down, except for the British Gazette, which was a government-owned newspaper. And the government-owned newspaper was like, this strike sucks, and everybody who likes it sucks too.

18:30But that left the BBC as the only form of mass communication reporting on this stuff. And apparently Winston Churchill was not very happy with the idea that the BBC, the government-owned monopoly, was not just being like, this strike sucks, and anybody who likes it sucks. They were reporting neutrally on it. Yeah, he was a finance minister at the time, but he had a lot of sway, obviously. And he was like, hey, I think we should declare an emergency and take over the BBC. And the director general resisted. Reith did. And he said, no, we're not going to let that happen. But it seems like they were strong armed into not airing the other side as much.

19:11One example is when they had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin on at one point. And this was at Reif's house they were broadcasting out of. The leader of the opposition, Ramsey MacDonald, was like, well, I get to come on now too, right? And the government refused that. So they remained, you know, through the rest of the strike, somewhat impartial. They didn't let MacDonald on, but they did block Churchill basically from being on the BBC until he resigned in 1938. So they were like, you're never coming on here. No, that's quite a coup, actually, because Churchill liked to talk and give speeches. So throughout the 40s or the beginning of the 40s through World War II, they managed to hang on and keep reporting as best as possible.

19:58The radio definitely did. It became a government propaganda outlet. Some of the European powers that had been overrun by the Nazis and had made their way to the UK used the BBC to broadcast to their people back home. Or I think the Polish army in exile or Polish government in exile sent coded messages to Polish resistance forces. Like it still kept going. Apparently their studio was bombed in 1940 and it took out a lot of the top few floors. But luckily they were broadcasting out of the basement still. And I guess the guy who was reading the news at the time dusted the script off and kept reading.

20:42You heard kind of a boom in the background, but the newsreader basically didn't miss a beat. Yeah, they kept going because they had that charge to do so. In the 1930s is when TV came along. So at the beginning there was a Scotsman named John Logie Baird. This was in 1926 where he had this really archaic, you know, I guess it was pretty advanced for the time, but archaic now, a mechanical system where they had rotating disks scanning and displaying images. And so they said, all right, that's good enough for now. It's 1932. No one will know that this isn't very good. I can't imagine. So they put out a very experimental 30-line service to demonstrate that.

21:25But it didn't look so great, but it didn't take very long before they had Marconi came along again and said that he had a better system along with EMI. And in 1936, they had the first high def television service launched from Alexandra Palace in North London. And at the time, high def meant 240 lines of resolution or more. Yeah, which is nuts because TV high def today has something like 250. Yeah. At least. At least. So the BBC TV, so BBC Radio continued broadcasting throughout the war, but BBC television shut down because apparently there was a lot of concern that the signal could be used to lock on as a target and bomb Alexandria Palace where they were broadcasting from.

22:14So they were like, well, we don't want to risk that. We'll just stop broadcasting. And they did for seven years from 1939 to 1946. Yeah, right after they got this new thing in their households. Yeah. They were like, all right, for seven years. Can you imagine being a child? No. I mean, there wasn't the most kids content at the time, but still anything on a TV screen, I imagine, was hard to lose after you tasted it. I know. And it was around for three years. So that was enough time to get people pretty strong out on TV. Right. Yeah. You know? Uh-huh. So remember, these guys are figuring this stuff out as they go along.

22:49Like the BBC were trailblazers in just about everything they ever dipped their toe into. And one of the ways that they did figure stuff out was basically being dropped into the middle of it. And one really good example of that came in the 50s in 1953 when Queen Elizabeth II, the sequel, when she was coronated. basically the BBC was like this is one of the biggest things we've ever covered if not the biggest thing we've ever covered so far so we're gonna are we're just gonna throw everything we can at it so they started developing new technology they figured out new ways of broadcasting they figured out like rolling news coverage from you know station to station and it was quite successful from what I understand too plus also a lot of people bought TV sets as a result yeah so they could see what Queen Elizabeth looked like finally.

23:44Yeah. They told us on the radio we could see what she looked like on TV. So we went out and bought one. She's got pretty nice hair. She's wearing a tiara. I think those are white gloves or else she's quite pale. I can't see from here. Is that a corgi? So you mentioned the monopoly. That monopoly was eventually broken in 1955 when ITV, independent television, was launched. the oldest commercial network in Britain. And then eventually in 1982, Channel 4 would come along. Yeah. And, you know, all of a sudden programming started to get somewhat interesting in like the 1950s because you started to get a lot more, you know, it wasn't just let's do the coronation or this concert from Royal Albert Hall or something like that.

24:31They started to get into comedy and sort of true entertainment, for better or for worse. One example of for worse was a show called The Black and White Minstrel Show. In 1957, they had 16 million viewers for that show. And it ran from 1957 to 1978, a super, super, super racist minstrel show. We will say from 1962, starting in 1962, the chief accountant of the BBC was like, this is a disgrace and like really racist. And so it took another 16 years for BBC One to say, yeah, maybe you're right. Yeah, that chief accountant's name was Barry Thorne, and he was quite vociferous about getting this thing off the air.

25:20And one of his memos that he sent, he got a reply from one of the higher ups that said, for heaven's sake, shut up. They just buried their heads in the sand. They would not accept that this was an offensive, racist show. And I read, like, even in 1957, this was offensive and racist, let alone 1978. And if you go and watch it, it is jaw-droppingly racist. Yeah. And they're just not good. It isn't. It's like Lawrence Welk terrible. That's essentially, it was, imagine Lawrence Welk where every man is in blackface for no reason whatsoever. There's no context to it. They're just in blackface doing all these different things and doing all these different song performances.

26:04It's insane. Like, you should definitely go check it out. Like, if you're not just, like, completely staggered by it, I will be surprised. Yeah. Or maybe, you know, check in with yourself. That's a good litmus test, watching the black and white minstrel show and seeing what you think of it. Yeah. That should be the test moving forward, I think. It's so nuts, dude. Just hook people up to a machine. Yep. It's 1960s now. We're really flying through the decades. BBC Two has come along in 1964, and Color TV, with a U, comes along in 1967. And this is when some of the legendary shows over there of all time came about in the 60s, not the least of which from 1963 was the sci-fi series Doctor Who.

26:53Who? Exactly. A show that I've never watched. No, me either. But I know people love it. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's been a cult classic for, man, coming up on 75 years? Yeah. 70 years? 60-something? That's a long time for a cult classic to be around, you know? Yeah. Think about it. Freaks and Geeks was one season. Yeah, good point. There was also one that I'd like to see. I hadn't heard of it yet, but apparently it was enormous, and I can understand why. It was Kenneth Clark's Civilization from 1969. Yeah, I want to see that, too. This apparently was like the first prestige series that they ever came out with.