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The chapter is concerned with the development of the BBC as a public corporation. The first Director-General of the BBC, Sir John Reith, told staff that ‘there is more in the BBC than just broadcasting’. It was made clear to them that public service in a public corporation was something very different from public service in the Civil Service. The BBC as an organization made its goal to be free of politics and, as far as possible, to be free of red tape. It needed a spirit of enterprise as well as a sense of duty coupled with the qualities of individualism and enterprise. The organizational set-up of the BBC became so successful that it was adopted by other organizations also in other countries.

During the inter-war years, BBC officers sought to encourage the spread overseas of the British approach to broadcasting, and prevent the American model of commercial network broadcasting from being adopted around the British world. This chapter examines the nature of those two models, and how hybrid versions were devised in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. The chapter also looks at how the BBC sought to apply key ideas about public-service broadcasting, first developed for use at home, to its overseas operations. The role of John Reith, the BBC's first director-general, is discussed. The chapter surveys how broadcasting was organized around the British Empire during the 1920s. It analyses in detail the BBC's plans of 1929 for an empire broadcasting service, and the reasons why the Imperial Conference of 1930 refused to provide funding.

This chapter provides information regarding the BBC during the time leading up to the Second World War. The first Director-General, Sir John Reith, left the BBC in June 1938 and the Ullswater Committee recommended in its report, which shortly followed this, full governmental control over the organization in times of crisis. Questions relating to the BBC's policies in time of war, behind the scene politics, censorship arrangements, and security concerns are also discussed. The Memorandum on Protection Against Air Attack stated that the BBC should continue its broadcasting services even in any future emergency due to its impact on public opinion. In July 1938 the technical subcommittee accepted the BBC's modified plan to limit home broadcasting to two groups of medium-wave transmitters.

The BBC’s leading figure, John Reith, formulated a vision of broadcasting that was underpinned by the idea that the medium of radio and its programme content could give the nation access to sublime earthly and cosmic silences. In a new reading of the well-known live nightingale transmissions that from 1924 became an annual event every May, the paradox of a silent broadcasting system is explored. Reith, who described the nightingale’s song as a silence that the busy world craved, also saw it as symbolic of the culturally unifying force that his public service broadcasting should be, with an emotional appeal to every citizen. More than this, Reith mixed scientific and mystical ideas to articulate his belief that radio waves connected all humans to the perfect stillness of the heavens and the grand scheme of nature, presided over by a silent God.

In January 1927 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) assumed the responsibilities of the four-year-old British Broadcasting Company. This chapter discusses the personalities and their performance and the official policies of the BBC in its initial period. Sir John Reith as the first Director-General of the BBC played an important role in its success. The wireless was adopted as a crucial component of the institutional apparatus of the BBC. The BBC created a niche image for itself during the 1930s as a great British institution. The chapter also briefly covers wireless and television sets of this contemporaneous time. Moreover, it also provides an introduction to the other chapters in the book.

Addressing the under-discussed area of Scottish Great War prose, this chapter argues that Scots with first-hand wartime experience did generate accounts comparable with those emerging in other countries throughout the 1920s, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929). Rennie highlights John Reith’s Wearing Spurs (1966), David Rorie’s A Medico’s Luck in the War (1929), George Blake’s The Path of Glory (1929), and Edward Gaitens’s Dance of the Apprentices (1948) as notable examples – stylistically and thematically – of Scottish writers engaging with the topics of militaristic bureaucracy, the general physical discomfort of army life, and graphic wounding. Furthermore, this chapter challenges the notion that Scottish writing was dominated by North Britons, arguing these works present specifically Scottish war experience not necessarily subsumed within a wider British identity.

This chapter argues for a historicized model of the “radiogenic”, positing that the very contradictions and cultural tensions that surrounded the developing image of wireless under the aegis of the BBC had formal literary impact and helped to shape the period's distinctive generic experiments. If the BBC was, as John Reith claimed, immune by nature of its peculiar monopoly status from the imputation of commercially “debasing the currency” of broadcasting, it was all the more vulnerable to being judged by the face on its coinage.

The early BBC was meant to entertain and to educate the masses, according to John Reith, its first managing director. This led, in 1926, to the establishment of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, comprising members of Britain’s social elite (Robert Bridges, Logan Pearsall Smith, G. Bernard Shaw, Daniel Jones, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and Arthur Lloyd James), with a remit, initially, of advising its broadcasters and, soon after, also the BBC’s audience on ‘correct’ pronunciation, principally via the Radio Times. The Committee established itself as the absolute authority for regulating a uniform pronunciation both for announcers and the audience. Eventually this led to a ‘listening BBC’, which nonetheless vetted and approved the language that was being transmitted; and to the publication of the widely successful booklet series Broadcast English. However, communicating a standard via the medium of radio cannot be successful, because changes in pronunciation require interaction with interlocutors.

During the 1930s, in fulfilment of its adult education obligations as a public service monopoly organisation, the fledgling British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired more than a hundred domestic radio programmes which addressed the relations of science and society. This chapter examines governance challenges confronting the Corporation in these ambitious programmes, with a focus on three controversial science-related topics of particular salience to this turbulent decade: religion, eugenics and war. Having elected to disseminate the diverse, contentious, and often conflicting views held by the scientific community on these crucial issues, the BBC encountered a succession of difficulties arising from varied political stances amongst its speakers, other scientists, and its own staff alike. Nonetheless, through an array of effective governance mechanisms, the BBC helped to sustain modern science’s widely-accepted high stature, and uphold scientists’ reputation as leading contributors to Britain’s public good.

Historians often use the outbreak of war to mark breaks in historical development, but Eliot's radio work suggests the extent to which even the cataclysm of war should be understood in terms of longer historical duration. At precisely the same time Horkheimer and Adorno, responding to the ways that National Socialism had seized German radio, were developing a hermeneutics of suspicion, Eliot continued to understand both radio and the culture to which he saw it as servant in idealist terms. For all the differences between John Reith and Eliot, they shared the conviction that the ideals of “culture” could and must remain untainted by politics. This chapter suggests that this development in Eliot's cultural-critical position could only have happened using the medium and genre of the radio talk.

Chapter 2 discusses significant contexts in which radio programmes drawing on ancient Greece may productively be considered. Factors such as John Reith’s formative idea to broadcast the nation’s cultural wealth, the marginalization of ancient Greek in university curricula, and the concurrent project to establish English literature as the foundation stone of British national culture supported radio’s achievement of an unprecedented public identity for ancient Greece beyond schools and universities—a radical, if subtle, political act in relation to the prior educational and cultural status of classics within Britain. The different priorities of BBC Radio’s Drama and Features departments are outlined. Overwhelmingly, however, the personal preferences of radio practitioners, and their creative collaboration with freelance workers such as scholars, translators, writers, and composers, were crucial in giving shape and intention to programmes. Such collaborations on programmes forged strong relationships between radio and other intellectual and creative professions.