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In 1975, Cicely Saunders published a chapter based on a talk commissioned by the Religious Department of the BBC's European Services and which was broadcast in Germany on ‘The Day of the Dead’. It draws on both professional and personal experiences of loss and observes in the introduction: ‘From the moment when a little hoard of flints was placed in the grave of early man, the human race has laid down its dead in grief. And it has done so with the hope that somehow this was not the end, and that somewhere those flints would be needed’. Dying may be hard, but it is a process which can be marked by great achievement in which body and mind, though linked, are secondary to the spirit.

Sport in Britain, especially elite sport, has been transformed over the period since 1960, increasingly taking on the appearance and attributes of big business. This chapter discusses three important aspects of this transformation. Firstly, the institutions governing British sport, most of them dating from the era of amateur hegemony, which began in the mid 19th century, were subject to a long drawn-out process of modernization, starting in the early 1960s when the distinction between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’ was abandoned in English cricket and ending with the arrival of ‘open’ rugby union in 1995. Secondly, as the constraints on commercialism dating from the amateur era were progressively abandoned, sport and business became more closely related as companies began to view sports sponsorship as a cost-effective way of raising consumer awareness of the goods and services that they offered. It is argued that the demands of building relationships with sponsors helped to change the way that sports businesses were run, as the stadium gradually made way for the ‘tradium’. Thirdly, it is clear that business sponsorship, the effectiveness of which was determined by the level of television exposure, helped to push sport into an ever-closer relationship with the media, especially television. The part played by the media, especially BSkyB, in bringing about structural changes in English football and rugby league since the 1990s are explored against this backdrop.

For lowbrow comedy, children's science fiction, and experimental Third Programme broadcasts, the gradual addition of electronic noise in sound effects technicians' arsenal in the 1950s offered new sonic options to BBC producers. At first, the mere presence of “electronic sound” was a novelty, but soon, as these sounds began to appear in programming with greater frequency, several producers within the Drama Department began to explore Continental musical techniques. This chapter tells this history and discusses how this curiosity led to the first deliberate domestic productions using concrete techniques. It also introduces a radio‐specific adaptation of Michel Chion's concept of the acousmêtre, traditionally any sound in a film for which the source is invisible, as a way of understanding the appeal of electronic sound in both science fiction and Theatre of the Absurd productions, including Samuel Beckett's All That Fall (1957), the success of which precipitated the opening of the Radiophonic Workshop a year later.

Opening with a discussion of the material problems encountered by the Workshop's supporters after its initial proposal, this chapter primarily concerns the aggressive but ultimately futile attempts by the BBC's Music Department to prevent the studio's creation. Frightened of an academic studio under the BBC banner, and determined to protect the “rational development of music” in Britain, department heads proposed a series of often‐ridiculous alternatives to a full‐fledged electronic music studio. Ultimately, those in opposition to the studio were successful in shaping a great deal of the final studio's makeup, largely forbidding the use of the studio by outside composers and initially limiting the output of the Workshop to electronic “sound effects” for dramatic productions. The chapter then examines the studio's tiny budget, offers detailed discussion of the equipment it acquired, and explores its early compositions.

This chapter explores the unique form of British modernism that influenced the shift in the Radiophonic Workshop's output from abstract avant‐garde radio drama to electronic tonal music. Moving roughly chronologically through the major commissions of the Workshop in its first years, this chapter traces this shift, first in radio and then in television. As “sound engineers” give way to “composers” within the studio, so too does the fear from within the Music Department transform into tolerance as they realize how little the two departments overlap. The primary focus of this chapter, however, is the works; detailed attention is paid to the composition, construction, reception, and interpretation of specific commissions, and to their significance for contemporary audiences. The chapter concludes by arguing that the need for electronic music taps into a deep‐seated insecurity within Britain about the country's political, artistic, and financial position in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1965 the first synthesizers arrived at the Workshop. Chapter 4 discusses the impact of their arrival, with a detailed discussion both of the features of these early synthesizers and of the ways they were used by composers such as Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. It also discusses how, for the first time, “nonspecialist” composers like Dudley Simpson were allowed to use the facilities of the Workshop in their BBC commissions. One of the fundamental shifts in composition resulting from the use of synthesizers rather than tape techniques was the move away from abstract sounds toward fixed pitches, resulting in even more tonally centered works. Pieces no longer blurred the boundaries of sound effect and music, tending instead to imitate traditionally composed tonal music in an electronic idiom.

Throughout the 1970s, synthesizers continually dropped in price while improving in design and ease of use; consequently, electronic music was no longer only within the financial range of universities and government‐funded institutions such as the BBC. In particular, the success of popular artists such as Pink Floyd (who earlier had actually used the equipment at the Workshop), Vangelis, and Jean‐Michel Jarre forced the composers at the Radiophonic Workshop to adapt their compositional style. Especially with the addition of pop musician Paddy Kingsland, the general tone of the Workshop's output changed: a distinctly commercial pop sound was combined with a tech‐heavy emphasis on electronic production.

In the 1980s, the Workshop composed hundreds of pop electronic incidental scores for successful, influential television programs such as Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the ongoing BBC Schools production Look and Read. And with the adoption of the Mac computer, the Workshop became one of the most sophisticated MIDI‐controlled studios in Europe. Ultimately, however, as popular music continued to adopt electronic techniques, the lack of a unique sound at the Workshop led to its gradual decline, and the BBC's decision that all departments must be self‐sufficient led to the Workshop's closure in 1998.

This chapter discusses the information provided by the Hutton Report and the Butler Report concerning the bases of the British government's decision to join the U.S. in overturning Saddam Hussein for his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It suggests that nothing revealed in the reports could bring an agreement to whether British Prime Minister Tony Blair was right in his decision, but those who have read the reports could surely conclude that the government, the intelligence services, and the BBC fell short of what have been expected of them at a time when Britain was on the brink of being taken into a war. It discusses the similarities between the Iraq War and the Suez Canal conflict.

This chapter examines the issues of accuracy and trust involved in the Hutton Report. It explains that Lord Hutton's interpretation of the events surrounding the death of David Kelly led him to focus on a range of accusations and counter-accusations. The British government and the BBC had accused one another of inaccuracy and of making partly untruthful claims. This chapter suggests that though many of the documents disclosed in the Hutton Report rely on procedures that help secure accuracy, some of the people quoted in the report made claims that turned out to be inaccurate and they also dispensed with procedures that are important for securing accuracy.

This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about Proverb, which was cocommissioned by the BBC Proms as part of their 100th Anniversary season in 1995 and by the Early Music Festival of Utrecht. The idea for Proverb was originally suggested by Paul Hillier, who thought of a primarily vocal piece with six voices and two percussion. What resulted was a piece for three sopranos, two tenors, two vibraphones, and two electric organs, with a short text from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since Paul Hillier is well known as a conductor and singer of early music and since Reich shares an interest in this period of Western music, he looked once again at the works of Perotin for guidance and inspiration.

Julian Medford Budden (1924–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the finest scholar of nineteenth-century Italian opera of his generation. He will be remembered for his achievements as a producer at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), for his broadcasts and reviews, and above all for his books on Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. Indeed, his passing leaves a huge gap in the field of opera studies. Budden was born in Hoylake, near Liverpool, on April 9, 1924, the only child of Lionel Budden and Maud Budden. In 1951 he started at the BBC, where he remained for his entire working life. Budden's first post was as a clerk and script editor; he then rose through the ranks to become a producer, Chief Producer of Opera, and finally External Services Music Organizer. Two aspects of Budden's background were likely to have been fundamental to his scholarly achievement: his exposure to Classics at Oxford University and his career in BBC Radio.