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Looking beyond the walled garden(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) 'There were no sealed orders to open. The commission was of the scantiest nature. Very few knew what broadcasting meant; none knew what it might become." So John Reith recalled the first 18 months of his life as the general manager of the brand-new British Broadcasting Company. What Reith did recognise, instinctively and immediately, was the magnitude of his responsibility. "There was something big, even colossal, conveyed in the nature of the contract which had been undertaken." Reith and his "bohemian flock" (as the head of variety, Eric Maschwitz, described the band of early colleagues) were out to invent the future. Reith, that monstrous, tyrannical, tortured man, set his furious gaze at the new technological world of wireless telegraphy and saw that it could be, should be, placed in the service of society as a whole. The job was to "establish a certain number of broadcasting stations and transmit therefrom, at certain times, programmes composed of whatever a programme can be composed", he wrote, but he knew that was only the most mechanistic and banal way of describing the task and the opportunity. What Reith saw was that he had in his hands an instrument that could inform, educate and entertain - not just the privileged but everyone. In 1922, only a handful of wireless pioneers had their own sets. Peter Eckersley, the first chief engineer of the BBC, had yet to stud the landscape with the transmitters that would allow the service to fan out to all parts of the UK. And yet Reith saw that broadcasting could one day have a number of extraordinary qualities. First, that the licence fee - often now characterised as an unpleasant piece of regressive taxation - was in fact a passport to equality. No one would be able to pay more and get a better BBC; there would be no first, second or third class. Broadcasting was superabundant: you could never be denied it because you were at the back of the queue; there would always be sufficient for everyone. "The same music rings as sweetly in mansion as in cottage . . . There is nothing in it which is exclusive to those who pay more, or who are considered in one way or another more worthy of attention," wrote Reith in Broadcast Over Britain (1924). Second, everyone would be able to access the BBC in private. Your tastes, your culture, your enthusiasms, your politics - all of these could be developed without the eye of anyone upon you. If you closed the door, no one, not the busybodies down the road, nor the religious authorities, nor the government could track what you were listening to. (It is no coincidence that during the Third Reich, communal television viewing in Fernsehstuben public "television parlours", was encouraged: private tastes and ideas are dangerous to a certain kind of regime.) "An event, be it speech, or music, or play, or ceremony is certainly broadcast for any and all to receive, but it seems to be personal to the individual hearer, and is brought to his very room," wrote Reith of the simultaneously public and private quality of broadcasting. Third, Reith was convinced that broadcasting, with this peculiar capability of reaching everyone, should also provide for everyone. Using the privilege brought by the income from the licence fee, it should serve the thinly scattered few as well as the many. "With us, 'minorities' are very important sections of the community, and a 'limited appeal' may still involve many hundreds of thousands," he wrote. In the 1920s, the BBC had no past, only a future. It had plenty of difficulties to negotiate - then as now, a hostile and protective press, a government to convince of its ideas, enormous practical and technical hurdles. But compared with the present time, when the BBC is both beloved institution and political and cultural battleground, it was free: a startup with an inventive young team, idealistic and experimental. Maschwitz recalled of the company's early headquarters: "Savoy Hill was like a small, excited club whose members came in to work in the early morning and stayed on until Big Ben chimed midnight - for the good reason that there was always something interesting afoot." The first chapter of Reith's book, Broadcast Over Britain, is called Uncharted Seas, and that was what there was: a vast and empty ocean of possibility. The first BBC director of programmes Arthur Burrows, in The Story of Broadcasting, also published in 1924, used the same metaphor. "What lies ahead in that uncharted sea, the future? Broadcasting today, despite its appeal to the public imagination, is really only in the position of the prehistoric fisherman who put out a few hundred yards from shore in his frail coracle or dug-out . . . We may be certain, therefore, that the work of the past few years . . . is but shallow-water fishing in relation to ocean navigation." There is a quality of inventiveness, ingenuity and resourcefulness that has run through the BBC. That no engineer now sits on the executive board would have surprised Eckersley - for him the BBC was as importantly an engineering company as a broadcaster, and he and his successors had the institutional clout to match. He himself foresaw multichannel cable TV (and air conditioning and double glazing) in 1941. "I have a dream about the future. I see the interior of a living room. The wide windows are double panes of glass, fixed and immovable. The conditioned air is fresh and warm . . . flush against the wall there is a translucent screen with numbered strips of lettering running across it . . . These are the titles describing the many different 'broadcasting' programmes which can be heard by just pressing the corresponding button," he wrote. John Birt (pictured right) had a similar moment of vatic clarity in a speech in 1999, shortly before departing as director general. In years to come, he said, "you will carry with you wherever you go a mobile device to gain instant access to the many bounties of this world . . . it will enable to us to call up programmes and services on demand, at a moment of our choosing . . . anyone will be able to make and to publish their own programmes . . . In a total digital world, no one will wait about for a programme of their choice to be transmitted. They will want all programmes on demand at a time of their choosing. They will want services that focus on their personal passions, perspectives and needs. And they will want those services to be available on all media, wherever they are - at home; in the workplace; or on the move." It was a pretty accurate piece of prophecy, bearing in mind that he was speaking six years before YouTube was activated in February 2005, and eight years before the release of the iPhone in June 2007 and the launch of iPlayer that December. (The last was the product, so BBC folk memory goes, of a drunken night out in 2003 after a digital worker got into trouble posting an inappropriate photograph of the model Katie Price on the BBC Three website. Requiring a redemptive idea to stave off disgrace, he and colleagues came up with the notion of a video-on-demand service for the channel. Four years and 86 internal meetings later, the iPlayer was born.) What are the ideas that will sustain the BBC in the years to come? Birt's vision of services customised for individuals is yet to be fully realised - but according to Tony Hall, the current director general, it is just round the corner. Within the next 18 to 36 months, the BBC, as accessed through the web, will understand and reflect your innermost desires and delights, and will offer you more and more, across all its genres, based on your past preferences. Importantly, it will do this disinterestedly: it will not try to sell you other services, or pass on details of your private predilections to any third party. It is an intriguing conceptual change, as the BBC has always, hitherto, speculatively dangled offerings at us based not on the history of our preferences, but rather on the sheer largeness and variety of the world; that is the trick of the "hammock", whereby a skilled scheduler might sneak an unlikely programme into the evening's lineup between two hits, and intrigue us with something that no algorithm could ever predict. The BBC - if you want it to - will also connect you to others who share those interests, according to Hall, and build digital communities of viewers. We were talking by the set of EastEnders - that oddly unscruffy patch of London lovingly made at the BBC's studios in Elstree, north of London. "It goes back to the licence-fee payers being our owners. There's a community around Springwatch of over 400,000 people and they are knowledgeable, and they care, and they're passionate," he explained, by way of example. The BBC is coming late to this kind of game. If you want to talk with others about The Great British Bake Off or the Archers, Twitter is already established as the place to do it, or live blogs. Indeed, earlier online communities - such as the Radio 3 and Archers message boards, whose users were often deeply critical of BBC policy - were closed down by the BBC, with specific suggestions from administrators that the discussion should migrate to Twitter and Facebook. But the BBC is now in a different mood, ready to open a channel for direct communication with audiences and to reduce the importance of the mediation of the public's responses. The BBC has traditionally been something of a fortress, a citadel; you have been either within it or outside. Hall is determined to change that. The corporation must and will become "porous", he said. The BBC will, in the future, send its audiences out of the castle precincts and towards the work of other organisations whose values it shares. "We should be a gateway to other people who think like us, to other people who are funded like us, to other people who have the same mission as us," he said. "I hope that eventually, if you want to know about Shakespeare, we will give you our content, and we will give you content from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Why wouldn't we act as a curator and send you to places that we think have good quality content?" The BBC will, he said, share its resources and work with organisations outside, too: "If you're paid for by everybody it's your job to be porous. That doesn't mean you lower standards - no, no, no. You are elitist about your standards, but you should be porous in terms of the people that you're inviting in to share our space." There are already concerns within the cultural world that the BBC's vision of artistic organisations worth working with is narrow, and that working with the BBC is, in the words of one curator, "an absolute nightmare . . . they turn up mob-handed and they want to own everything". When I put this to Hall he simply nodded. So how can that change? "I want managers - and this is a change in culture - I want managers to feel valued. I think we've dumped on managers in the BBC and in our culture broadly, and not seen that management is an art, management is about enabling, about giving confidence, about ensuring people are doing the very best work of their lives. That's what managers are there to do." When he worked at the Royal Opera House, he used to long for the BBC to "make their minds up and take a decision". His recent appointments - Bob Shannon as head of music, Jonty Claypole as head of arts - are to cut through the BBC paralysis and tear down the walls of the citadel. It remains to be seen whether they will succeed. Hall's BBC, he said, needs to give people "the ability to fail". Part of the idea behind the proposed migration of BBC Three online is to allow formats and programmes to loosen up: there may be chances, for example, for comics to test out short chunks of material to see whether they fly. What has struck him, he said, about his visits to Silicon Valley, is "the sense that we're going to try ideas - and if they don't work, we'll go somewhere else. I urge people in the BBC to do this: I say 'You will have failures, and if you are going to fail, fail fast, but don't be embarrassed about it.'" He added: "We must be the risk capital for the UK. We have got to be the people who have enough confidence to be able to say that we are going to back things that may not work. The national discourse is difficult on failure, but actually, we should be bold enough to say, 'That didn't work, but good luck to those people who tried, and now let's move on and try something else.'" This rhetoric of a porous BBC hints at a profound change in the corporation's status. Twenty years ago, it could be a fortress because the world of broadcasting in Britain was organised to accommodate it. The BBC stood high and proud, dear for her reputation through the world. Her dominance - notwithstanding, of course, competition with ITV and, later, Channel 4 - was uncontested. But what about a BBC that is operating on the web: a global, commercialised space that is minimally regulated, dominated by the economic models of the west coast of the US, large enough for anyone to publish their material on it, and formally organised so as to enable the circulation and sharing of material in unprecedented ways? The BBC's research and development department in west London contains an area known as the Blue Room, a space in which the latest tech and gadgets are laid out ready for curious employees to discover. Here, for example, demonstrators will show an Oculus Rift: an item of snorkel-like headgear that will enable you to experience a 360 degree virtual-reality space. It was originally financed on Kickstarter, was bought by Facebook, and is now nudging its way towards the open market. I placed the equipment on my head and suddenly I was "in" a Tuscan villa, rendered in detailed if slightly clunky computer-game-style graphics. I wandered jerkily through it, out into its walled garden with cypress trees and the view of the hills beyond. It made me nauseous all afternoon. But it is also clearly a thing of immense, if somewhat uncanny, possibility; and not just for gaming. The BBC has already been experimenting with filming musicians from the BBC Philharmonic in 360 degrees; imagine being able to "walk among" the musicians, hearing the balance of the music change as you move. Ralph Rivera, the director of BBC future media, had joked to me about the BBC's building a Holodeck - the virtual-reality space that, in Star Trek, Starfleet personnel enter for recreation (or, more, perhaps more accurately, to explore the ontological problems posed by the scriptwriters). But it wasn't quite a joke: he was thinking about a future in which storytelling could be made absolutely enveloping and deeply immersive. The Blue Room also contained examples of lightfield cameras, which allow photographs to be refocused and perspective changed, creating what might be thought of as a 3D image. Matthew Postgate, controller of R&D, gave me an example of the kind of early thinking the BBC is doing with such technologies: "We had an experiment in which we filmed a basketball match in one of our research studios. It was filmed from different angles, and had microphones all around it. We changed that into a software model, so we took that bit of video and essentially made it into the kind of environment that you'd find in a computer game, and because it's in software you can choose any camera angle you want and in real time. Equally, because it's in software, conceivably you could be incorporating that with a game and be 'playing' alongside those players." These are visions of a future BBC in which storytelling exits the flat surface of the screen and embraces and envelops the audience - an audience that may be increasingly active in moulding the story itself. But the Blue Room also contains something of perhaps more immediate concern to the corporation. One section of it is got up to resemble a teenager's bedroom - bunk beds, football posters, the usual detritus. A real 14-year-old's activities on his computer were tracked after he came in from school one night, and you can watch the way he used his screen - he mucked around on Facebook, watched football highlights on YouTube, Skyped his friends, did a spot of homework using Wikipedia. He did not at any point access BBC material. According to the BBC, 16- to 24-year-olds consume less television (ITV and Channel 4, too) than their older counterparts. BBC1, for example, has a reach of 59.2% in this age group, as opposed to 77.6% for the general population (these figures relate to watching on television; they do not include viewing on computers, tablets or phones). This may or may not be a matter of concern - BBC research also shows that this age group has always consumed much less television than the general population; in fact, 18-year-olds are consuming a shade more TV (again, on an actual set - data-gathering lags behind new modes of viewing) than those aged 23 or 28. Radio 1, directly out to serve a youth audience, has seen its listenership rise over the past decade, according to its controller, Ben Cooper - from 10.5 million to under 9.5 million in 2003. But listeners spend significantly less time with the material: six hours 34 minutes a week, rather than 10 hours a week in 2006. The habits of these digital natives raise questions for the BBC, as they do for all broadcasters. Are these young people harbingers of a future in which linear television eventually withers away? How important will curatorship, scheduling and the identity of individual channels continue to be? (BBC Three's proposed move online will make an interesting test case here.) Will younger audiences migrate back to more traditional modes of consumption as they get older, or is the game up for all that? Should the BBC be following its audiences out into the big wide world of the web, or trying to usher them back into what Cooper calls "the walled garden" of the BBC? Cooper believes that for Radio 1, part of the answer has to be to follow the audience, to scatter its offerings in the places where people will find them. And so Radio 1 has its own YouTube channel with 1.3 million subscribers, a third of them between 13 and 17. On the channel you can find videos of performances and interviews: a paradoxical idea, perhaps, for a radio station, but a recognition of the visual, video-rich world that teenagers inhabit. (All the studios in Radio 1, in its loft-like eyrie above New Broadcasting House, are fitted with cameras.) He has hired YouTube stars Dan and Phil as DJs - each had built up vast followings on their own YouTube channels - to tempt younger people to the BBC network. The strategy at Radio 1, Cooper said, in conscious echo of the tricolon "inform, educate and entertain", is "listen, watch, share". It is, perhaps, a small way of acknowledging that the BBC, once the great distributor of material (you pressed the first button on the television and out poured BBC1, as if through a well-plumbed pipe) is now part of a world in which material is dragged hither and thither by the riptides, eddies and flows of the internet. Cooper would like to add the word "create" to that trio, he said - and develop more ways of acting as a platform for his audience's talent and ingeniousness. A start has been made with BBC Introducing - a website to which unsigned musicians can upload their music and perhaps have it chosen for broadcast. Once the BBC was a giant. It still is, if you look at it in terms of its institutional size and its reach among British audiences. But if you look at it from another angle, it is shrinking, fast. The online world is borderless and global, one in which the BBC is beginning to look rather small. According to James Purnell, the BBC's director of strategy and digital: "At the time of the last charter review we were the same size as Apple. Apple's now 20 times bigger than the BBC. We were roughly the same size as Sky, they're now twice the size of us. BT wasn't in this market, but it is now, and BT is five times the size of BBC. We were 40% of the broadcasting market in the UK. We're now down to 25%." What does Reith's thinking look like in this context? Online, our lives and our routes to BBC material increasingly pass through the great ecosystems built by American conglomerates. Instead of pouring its programmes through pipes that it had either invented or whose development it had aided, the BBC is obliged "to play out its digital innovations in spaces that are essentially defined by Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple," in the words of Matt Locke, once head of innovation at BBC new media and now running his own company, Storythings. For some, this is an inevitability, and the BBC has inherent qualities that will protect it and its audience. According to Rivera, "Fragmentation is our friend, because we are the signal in the noise. The more that's out there, the more that there is a need to go to places you trust that have high quality. And I believe when you have more choice there'll be more flight to quality, because you don't have to accept mediocre or poor things." But maybe it does matter. If my life with the BBC has hitherto been about privacy - no one able to track my habits and predilections, no one able to sell me anything based on my desires - then perhaps it does make a difference if my path to BBC material online is both forged and tracked by these US corporate giants, and increasingly the BBC has to operate in ecosystems designed by those with profit-making motives far removed from their own founding civic principles. If the BBC was not set up to be, precisely, radio or television or online, but, rather, at a more essential level a great public space through whose generous and lofty halls we could all walk together as equals, outside the world of commerce, then maybe the BBC does have some kind of responsibility - "big, even colossal", in the words of Reith. Some within the BBC believe that the future has already slipped out of the corporation's grasp: that it should have been at the forefront of guaranteeing access to public service material online; it should have been inventing ways to protect security and privacy of personal data; it should have made its own browser, and its own Cloud-style storage. That there were more abstract, more searching questions to be asked - both by the corporation and the government - about how the BBC could fulfil a public service destiny in the digital age. Hall's slant on such questions is to stress the importance of something that is "owned here; is for Britain; and respects and reflects British values and the excitement of being British". In a world in which Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter are dwarfing the BBC, defending the shrinking British redoubt is more important than ever. The history of the BBC is, of course, not just the history of the institution and its output; it is the history of how its audience has received it. Locke spoke to me of what he called "patterns of attention". Talking to him made me think about how our ways of paying attention to the BBC have changed over the past 92 years. In the 1930 BBC Handbook, advice was given on how best to appreciate the wireless. "Listen as carefully at home as you do in a theatre or concert hall. You can't get the best out of a programme if your mind is wandering, or if you are playing bridge or reading. Give it your full attention. Try turning out the lights so that your eye is not caught by familiar objects in the room. Your imagination will be twice as vivid." Sir David Attenborough told me of his early years in television in the 1950s, when the evening "programme" (then meaning not an individual show, but, as it were, the whole evening's playbill) was organised in the expectation that you would sit down and watch "the lot". "And so consequently the schedule was like making a meal, starting with something little, a little frippery, an hors d'oeuvres and maybe an indication of what might be coming in the evening; and then you had the main course, which was a play or something serious; and then to end it all, you had a religious blessing - certainly on a Sunday." In those early days viewers were perfectly prepared to telephone the programme makers while a show was still going out to demand, if they thought it was dragging, that they "get on with it". All of this has changed, of course: radio has become something we might listen to while driving or cooking or working. We do not automatically gather before the television from 7.30 to 10.30pm, fearful that if we don't watch the whole lot we aren't getting our money's worth. If we do sit down in front of it at an appointed moment, and most of us still do, we might be tweeting about it at the same time, or following a live blog, involved in a discussion about it that goes far beyond our own living room. Television now seems at its most powerful, in fact, when we sit down to watch live events whose outcome we will observe in real time, such as a football match - looping back, in a sense, to the qualities early identified as the form's most exciting characteristics. As early as 1923, in the Radio Times of 19 October, an article talked about the coming technology of television. "The transmission of sound by wireless, only a few years ago a scientist's dream, is now an everyday fact," it proclaimed. "An even more marvellous thing will soon by possible . . . Mr Jones will be able to sit comfortably in his own parlour on Derby Day and watch his favourite romping home - last! . . . No more special trains for the Cup Tie need be run! The match will be watched by the various supporters in the television apparatus." How will we pay attention in the future? What part will the BBC play in our lives? Will the tread of the new giants - BT and Netflix and Amazon - crush the BBC underfoot? Will the government support or punish the BBC, simultaneously overmighty and shrinking as it is? Will the BBC itself successfully remake its public service mission for an internet age? Like the early pioneers of the BBC we stand at a great junction in the ages of communication. The BBC's first director of talks, Hilda Matheson, talked about the generation beneath her much as those of us above a certain age describe, with a certain wonderment, "digital natives". "The child born at the same time as broadcasting takes it so much for granted that he can scarcely think of a pre-broadcasting age," she wrote. "He is apt to think of it as having always existed, as much 'always' in his world as motorcars, gramophones and aeroplanes." Matheson and the other early pioneers saw no end to the possibilities of broadcasting. They were utopian in their fantasies. It is their optimism and fearlessness that our BBC needs now. Ninety years ago, Arthur Burrows asked: "What surprises may be in store on the other side of silence? How far will our present knowledge of music prepare us for an appreciation of nature's eternal harmonies - the seasonal cadences of the rising and falling sap, the music of the growing grass and the love songs of butterflies?" John Birt's vision of TV services customised for individuals is yet to be fully realised - but it is just round the corner In a world in which Facebook and Twitter are dwarfing the BBC, defending it is more important than ever ? ? Like the early pioneers of the BBC we stand at a great junction in the ages of communication Tomorrow Part 9: Charlotte Higgins looks at the BBC today Captions: ? Early face The quality of the images in 30-line definition on TV pioneer John Logie Baird's early sets in 1930 ? Familiar face TV naturalist and presenter Sir David Attenborough ancient and modern - in a snapshot from the BBC's iPlayer website and (below) in 1956 Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Changing face BBC logos - the Batwing version of 1953 (left); the first colour mirror ball globe logo in 1967 (right); and the reinvented hot air balloon globe, which was launched in 1997 A worker on the BBC transmitter mast at Langham Place, London, in 1931 Photograph: Imagno/Austrian Archives (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |