Churchill, the BBC and the battle for impartiality

When I was a kid I worked out something crucial — if I pretended to be interested in the news, I could stay up later.

As a child I wasn’t really that into sweets or treats, I had some interest in friends, I was moderately interested in school, but my true love was television. My dad didn’t like us watching Neighbours or Home and Away, but my sister and I loved them and would take turns at the window at the time he usually came home, allowing the other to watch TV without fear of discovery. I would spend two and a half hours a week watching a window in order to spend two and a half hours a week watching Australians. 

To maximise viewing time later in the evening, I would shower in the advert breaks of whatever was on at 8pm. The secret is to put shampoo on your hair when still dry, not worry too much about washing it out, and to be brave enough to cope with the social stigma of dandruff. But what I really wanted to do was get past 9pm. Which was when my bedtime was. 

So I started, as a 10-year-old, feigning interest in the television news. 

Churchill believed the BBC should support the government. John Reith, general manager, believed the BBC should show balance

It worked. My parents are obsessed with social issues, both spending their lives campaigning for various causes: my dad was chair of his union, my mum went to jail for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. So they were charmed by their child’s fascination with something so important and couldn’t see that I was, in fact, a dirty little liar. 

The strategy worked so well that, on the nights when my parents wanted to watch whatever drama was on ITV at 9pm, they’d let me stay up later still to watch the ITV News at Ten. 

I got to watch The Chief, The Governor, Prime Suspect, Cracker. It was a beautiful time. 

But this also meant I watched a lot of news from quite a young age. And fell in love with that, too. In fact, I fell so deep I ended up doing a degree in politics. 

Neither politics, nor watching the news nightly, has especially helped my career up until now. In fact, I think I’d have been a better writer for the first television show I wrote for, Skins, if I’d shown slightly more interest in friends; if I’d gone out more, and worked out how people who aren’t solely interested in watching Lynda La Plante’s latest masterpiece have fun. 

Then, about five years ago, while failing to sleep — I’m a terrible insomniac — I was listening to the audiobook of Andrew Marr’s A History of Modern Britain. When I’m wakeful I need something to really concentrate on — something really good — otherwise my brain starts working. I was drifting off quite nicely until Marr started talking about a battle between John Reith and Winston Churchill. A battle over what news the BBC should carry during the General Strike of 1926. A battle about impartiality. 

Churchill, then chancellor of the exchequer, believed the BBC should support the government. Reith, general manager of the infant broadcaster, believed the BBC should show balance. But finding that balance, deciding whose voices should be heard on the BBC and who should be denied, was incredibly difficult. 

It felt like this was a little corner of history that explained so well where we are; that it was full of a strange sort of light. It felt like maybe something that would help me understand, and help an audience understand, where television is in this country. 

The more I dug, the more there was. Accounts of the time from Reith himself, accounts from those closest to him. But the best of all was the BBC Archive, which housed the original scripts from broadcasts reaching back to the inception of the BBC in 1922. Exactly what Reith and company had said. Exactly what was on at all other times. Suddenly I had the backbone of what became my play. 

Up until the General Strike, the BBC had a limited role in news broadcasting. The newspaper owners were adamant that if the news was available for free on the radio, then no one would buy their papers, so the BBC was only allowed to broadcast news after 7pm. But with transport and printworkers out on strike, the newspapers could barely be printed. The BBC was granted the opportunity to give bulletins at regular intervals during the day. 

The question was what the bulletins would consist of. Who’d be given coverage, and who wouldn’t. 

Churchill, like many in the government, was petrified that this labour instability would lead to revolution. This wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Soviet Russia was nine years old, looking to expand and investing money in the UK’s Communist party. The General Strike was a trade dispute, begun in solidarity with the coal-mining industry, but he believed more was at risk.

Working under the aegis of prime minister Stanley Baldwin, he launched a government newspaper, The British Gazette. His aim was to propagate the government line and strike back against the strikers. When attacked for it in the Commons, he said: “I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.” He didn’t feel it was partisan to believe that the government’s side needed priority over the unions.

His sights increasingly became trained on the BBC. 

Reith was only three and a half years into his post when the General Strike happened. Prior to joining the BBC, he’d not even known what broadcasting was. He’d created something electric in no time at all. Taken a small entity into national domination. Radio was exploding all over the world, but Reith managed to make something quite particular happen in the UK. With master engineer Peter Eckersley at his side, and Arthur Burrows controlling programming, he’d brought Shakespeare to the masses, overseen the creation of Children’s Hour and Women’s Hour, and taken the BBC on outside broadcasts to record orchestras and capture things as simple as a nightingale singing in someone’s garden. All for a yearly price every household could afford to pay.

Suddenly, the General Strike made his position of enormous responsibility even more enormously responsible. 

Would he side with Churchill and become the government’s mouthpiece? Or would he listen to the cries of the unions and challenge the government, at the possible expense of the future of the BBC? 

Impartiality is a living beast. It’s an incredibly complicated beast. Witness the journalist Emily Maitlis’s fascinating MacTaggart lecture at last year’s Edinburgh International Television Festival, in which she talked about failures of impartiality, in particular the “both sideism” that she feels has afflicted her industry.

Impartiality is not always easily visible. It is a constant challenge. It cannot be inputted on a computer, and it isn’t a science. Impartiality requires thinking, requires someone deciding what impartiality is. It is a judgment, as is everything else, an assessment as to all arguments. Perhaps you cannot really be impartial, you can simply make your best judgment as to what impartiality might be. Which makes those who take such decisions hugely important. 

Impartiality is an incredibly complicated beast. Witness journalist Emily Maitlis’s MacTaggart lecture, in which she talked about the ‘both side-ism’ she feels has afflicted her industry

I appeared on the BBC’s Question Time last year, partly because I was asked, partly because I wanted to understand how it worked. I got very nervous and lost about my body weight in sweat. But it was fascinating to meet the brilliant minds behind this audience-led politics show, and they were all brilliant, working with you to discover how to get the best out of you, trying to create good, balanced television.

Do they always manage that balance? Of course not. Twitter is outraged every week, but it was really interesting to see what they were trying to do. It was really interesting to see their personalities at work.

Maitlis said in her speech: “We show our impartiality when we report without fear or favour, when we are not scared to hold power to account, even when it feels uncomfortable to do so.” 

Reith was in a position of great discomfort. He didn’t know what role the BBC should play — whether it should calm the population or excite it. He didn’t know what line to take on government “suggestions” as to who should be invited on to his radio broadcasts and who not. And, crucially, he didn’t know how established he was. The BBC at that time was the British Broadcasting Company. The Crawford Committee had recommended it become a public corporation, but this was yet to occur. Reith knew the thin ice he was walking on — government takeover of the airwaves to his left, a commercialised future for the BBC to his right.

Reith had a great belief in the democracy of radio, in the fact that, as he put it, first class and third received exactly the same service from the BBC, something he saw lacking in the rest of life. But this democracy only had meaning if what he was producing was democratic. We get inside his troubled brain, his own torment, as we watch him try to navigate through the crisis. As he has to decide how to fight for the BBC’s future. His actions during the strike create a legacy for today. 

It is impossible perhaps to separate the choices made for the sake of impartiality from the person making those choices. You certainly cannot separate Reith the person from Reith the director-general, just as I can’t separate my choices as a writer from the 10-year-old on the sofa with his radical parents. In crisis we go to our darkest places. What Reith produces that year is a choice made by his personality according to his complexity.

I love the BBC, both for what it is and for what it can be. My play, When Winston Went to War with the Wireless, is a love note to it. But it is not without its questions. As news cycles have come and gone, we’ve thought repeatedly: “Oh no, we’ve missed our moment” — if only we were on then, or then. Gary Lineker, the football presenter taken off air in March for criticising the government’s refugee policy, has brought the question back into the spotlight at the vital time, but the truth is, the question is never far away: what should the BBC be? What does impartiality actually mean? And who gets to decide? 

‘When Winston Went to War with the Wireless’ is playing at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until July 29 

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