The BBC: A People's History by David Hendy

Profile, 2022

Why?

I’m fascinated by the history of media - not just as nostalgia, but because every great media shift exposes how technology, culture and power really work together.

I suspect that the BBC will eventually be viewed as a distinctly 20th-century institution: one of those vast post-war, mid-century projects designed to impose order, coherence and shared values after the devastation of the world wars. Alongside welfare states, national grids and public housing, it belongs to the same civilisational moment.

And yet, I also suspect that we are now witnessing its long decline as we move from the age of broadcast (one-to-many) into the creator economy (many-to-many). In this new world, the traditional public-service broadcast brief feels fundamentally less relevant than it once did.

That context made this book especially resonant. I’m currently involved in a new digital publishing venture, building premium factual content for the twenty-first century, and it was irresistible to compare our challenges with those faced by the BBC’s founders a century earlier.

Enjoyment factor

Despite coming in at nearly 600 pages, this is a genuinely pacy, gripping read. Hendy structures the book around the first-hand experience of audiences and staff rather than purely institutional history, which gives it real narrative momentum.

What struck me most was how familiar the struggles felt. The early BBC pioneers - Arthur Burrows, John Reith and Cecil Lewis - were trying to make sense of a world shattered by the First World War, using a baffling new technology that few people truly understood. Their confusion about what broadcasting was for mirrors today’s media landscape almost perfectly.

They faced technological uncertainty, moral panic about new media, political pressure; a quandary about how to fund the content, and existential questions about trust.

None of this is new.

It left me thinking ...

Ultimately, technology always drives media. And media, in turn, reshapes society. The pattern repeats relentlessly.

The printing press enabled the Reformation and the mass spread of political ideas; radio rewired national identity; television reorganised family life and politics - and the internet is now dismantling all inherited media structures simultaneously.

Arthur Burrows originally developed the concept of “broadcast” after working with Marconi wireless technology during the First World War to help the government intercept enemy transmissions. Astonishingly, the consumer use-case was not immediately obvious.

No one really knew what people would do with this technology beyond addressing very specific needs. The BBC itself wasn’t born as a grand public-service ideal. It was initially conceived as a practical solution to a simple problem: people had bought radio sets, and the airwaves needed filling. Public-service broadcasting emerged later, almost accidentally.

Then the Second World War transformed everything. The BBC became indispensable: at home, as a source of reassurance and national morale; abroad, through its foreign-language services; as a propaganda tool, and even as a covert channel for coded resistance messages.

None of this had been imagined in 1922, when it was founded largely to fill airtime with light entertainment.

The parallel with today is striking. Digital platforms, too, were not built to carry the political, cultural and psychological load they now bear. Social media did not set out to become the nervous system of democracy - yet that is effectively what it has become.

As Hendy makes clear, the BBC was never a static institution. It was endlessly contested, improvised, resisted and reinvented - but, as with all advances in the history of media - usually in response to technology first, and politics second.

If the BBC does fade as a central cultural force, it won’t be because it “failed.” It will be because the technological conditions that made it possible no longer exist.

That's sobering, but it's also exciting for anyone building media businesses today. There's a clear opportunity for what's next.