Tony Hall’s scheme for the BBC’s future has been widely disdained as a willful desire to put the clock back to the days of ‘Auntie’ BBC, but Brian Winston argues it is more like a return to the brilliant deal that acquired the Proms in the ’20s

Winston, Brian

English

University of Lincoln Institutional Repository

Introducing Tony Hall’s cunning plan: The BB(&A)CPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)Introducing Tony Hall’s cunning plan: The BB(&A)C      Introducing Tony Hall’s cunning plan: The BB(&A)C      Brian Winston [1] 31 March 2014    Subjects:BBC and the arts establishment [2]the concept of ‘culture' [3]the Proms [4]      [5]   [6]          Tony Hall’s scheme for the BBC’s future has been widely disdained as a willful desire to put the clock back to the days of‘Auntie’ BBC, but Brian Winston argues it is more like a return to the brilliant deal that acquired the Proms in the ’20s.  It would be an error to read Director General Tony Hall’s ‘grand design’ for the BBC -- the treatieswith the country’s elite arts institutions -- as a sterile failure of vision, a flaccid desire to return to thebroadcasting verities of the schedule of half a century ago.Certainly, the programme highlighted in Hall’s plans as exemplifying where he is taking the BBC, Civilisation: A Personal View, speaks to the qualities that caused the BBC of that time to be thoughtof as ‘Auntie’. It was exquisitely produced, languid, unenlightening, unchallenging and dripping classprivilege by reinforcing its dictatorial taste-making propensities. At the time some (well, the presentwriter) thought it a desperately uninteresting ‘impersonal’ view, hopelessly irrelevant to thethen-and-now. In fact, produced in 1969, as much as anything, it signaled a Thermidor in therevolution led by Hugh Carlton-Greene, Hall’s 1960s predecessor, which had, perhaps for the firsttime, tackled and overturned the Corporation’s historic problem with the popular. It symbolised arestatement of the BBC’s core value as a protector of that limited vision of culture produced, as wehad been taught by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, by the haut-bourgeoisie in Paris andLondon between 1780 and 1820 (well, more or less). This is what had been under attack fromCarlton-Greene throughout his tenure in the 1960s. He had unleashed the dogs of satire, forexample, and the grittinesses of Z-Cars but Civilisation revealed the cage was still actually in place.One saw (as Civilisation’s presenter Sir Kenneth Clark would say) in his impersonal account exactlywhat one knew to be one’s culture and the BBC’s role in glorifying it.But Hall’s prodding of this ghost is far from dismissible as the actions of man who cannot see beyondhis own opera-house. It is, in fact, brilliant as it contains the seeds of the BBC’s second century.Times are hard and likely to continue so. Biblical injunctions about not living by bread alone loosewhat little force they have when the government declares that, overall, bread is in short supply. Inthe face of this, augmented by the ingrained philistinism of one’s old Etonian leaders, there is clearlogic in positioning the BBC overtly as the spider in the centre of the country’s arts infrastructure.The template is not Sir Kenneth Clark’s efforts, it’s Sir Henry Wood’s.Even as the BBC was coming into existence (as a corporation, not a company) in 1927, John Reith,the first director general rescued the Promenade Concerts that had been a feature of London’smusical life since 1895. How that came about perfectly illustrates why Tony Hall’s deals with theNational Theatre, the Tate, the Hay Festival, the Royal Academy and Glyndebourne represent notmerely a good idea, but the only way to go.Starting in February 1895, the Proms were a commercial venture, the brain-child of an impresario,Page 1 of 3Introducing Tony Hall’s cunning plan: The BB(&A)CPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)Robert Newman, to fill the new Queen’s Hall. He had, of course, a high-minded purpose. As heexplained to the musician, Henry Wood: 'I am going to run nightly concerts to train the public in easystages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical andmodern music'. From the off, though, ‘popular’ equalled one night of Wagner and one of Beethoven.‘Modern music’, aka “Novelties” were then contemporary works by Ravel, Vaughan-Williams, etc.Wood became the hall’s resident symphony orchestra’s permanent conductor; but Newman and theProms did not prosper. In 1915, the hall, the band and the brand were taken over the musicpublishers Chappel. Obviously, they sought to benefit from show-casing the scores they were readyto sell. Still the market did not quite work and by the mid-1920s the Proms were again in financialtrouble. Chappel were threatening to withdraw support when Reith stepped in. The series continuedin the hall and on the radio under Sir Henry’s baton. By 1930, the concerts had removed to theAlbert Hall and it was the BBC Symphony Orchestra which gave them. In effect, Reith had used thehypothecated tax that is the license fee to rescue a valued cultural institution from the market.And is not this a jolly good plan to protect and sustain any and all the institutional bearers of our‘civilisation’ 90 years on?When Tony Hall laid out his stall last Autumn there was much about the wonders of the refinedi-Player – an entertainment platform so advanced it seemed it would even find your socks and makeyou tea. But the programming he had in mind for it, Shakespeare and opera, in essence and bycontrast, were not just predictable but curiously out-dated. As the ex-head of Covent Garden,though, his vision of content was scarce surprising. Here was no Carlton-Greene determined toprotect the Corporation from the limitations of its own comfort zone. Nor was this a managerialistBirt saving the BBC via the tired and inappropriate nostrums of a business school. Instead, Hallpresented himself as a technicist seized with a white-hot vision of a brave new BBC world. And thisiThingy would deliver as never before…. Shakespeare and opera.But now all this starts to make sense. Hall seems to be mounting a strategic withdrawal of the BBCfrom the terrain of the popular where it has only flickeringly prospered. We are here being returnednot to the ’60s but the ’30s when the pesky need to please the commoners was contained by therhetoric of educating the masses. Obviously, the old danger persists: a failure to deliver significantratings strengthens the hand of all who would do the BBC down. But perhaps the long term viewought to acknowledge the logic of the license cannot be sustained among the multiple platforms ofthe digital age for ever. If the tabloid press cannot hold the attention of its readership (and, palpably,it can’t) maybe the BBC should give up trying to be ‘popular’ (or, better, populist), too. Perhaps thesafest route is to turn the BBC into the BB&AC – the British Broadcasting and Arts Corporation, theorganisation through which the unwilling 21st state is persuaded to support, one way or another, the‘culture’ of the middle classes. However funded, it would be the gate-keeper, subventing, supportingand distributing largess across the entire sector.After all, the Proms are alive and well and I might have been bored silly by Sir Kenneth but millionsloved it.If you want to keep OurBeeb debating the BBC, please chip in [7] what you can afford. $(document).ready(function(){ $("div#contentgrid").removeClass('grid-8');$("div#contentgrid").addClass('grid-6'); });     About the authorBrian Winston is the editor of OurBeeb and lincoln chair at the university of Lincoln. He is the authorof numerous books on the media, has run media studies departments at universities in the UK andthe USA, and, in 1985, won an Emmy award.         [8]  This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. If youPage 2 of 3Introducing Tony Hall’s cunning plan: The BB(&A)CPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)have any queries about republishing please contact us [9]. Please check individual images forlicensing details.         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Introducing Tony Hall's cunning plan: The BB(&A)C

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