When Evelyn Waugh was divorcing his first wife Evelyn Gardner in 1929, the name of Sir John Heygate was cited in the court proceedings, Gardner having left Waugh for the young baronet. At the time, Heygate was employed by the BBC, and was required to resign, on the grounds that his involvement in the divorce might damage the reputation of the fledgling Corporation. To most modern people, this incident will seem at best quaint, and at worst morally outrageous. Conceivably they are right.
But the distaste for adultery does reflect a deep and admirable sense of purpose and worthiness that characterised the BBC from its very earliest days. “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation”, the official motto adopted in 1927, is not a direct quotation from the Bible, but it certainly sounds like one, given its sonorous rhythm and grand idealism (maybe that is why it is so rarely heard nowadays). The idea was that the new technologies of radio — and later television — could be used to spread knowledge, understanding and virtue across Britain and the wider world, unsullied by vulgar commercial considerations. John Reith, the first Director-General, famously disliked the advertising-led free-for-all of interwar American radio.
There are a few remaining outposts of the old ideals; islands of intellectual and spiritual uplift in a vast ocean of trivia and dross
One need not be a thoroughgoing reactionary to entertain the thought that, at the age of 103, the BBC has drifted rather a long way from that original “high moral tone” and the mission to disseminate, as Reith put it, “all that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement”. Serious factual programming, meticulous unbiased reporting, high culture; all are notable mainly by their absence in current BBC schedules. The corporation remains intensely moralistic in many ways, but the taboos it upholds would be incomprehensible to Lord Reith.
There are a few remaining outposts of the old ideals; islands of intellectual and spiritual uplift in a vast ocean of trivia and dross. Radio 3’s Choral Evensong and Private Passions both fall into this category, as does Radio 4’s Poetry Please. BBC TV turns out the odd decent documentary, and its dramatic output still manages to explore the human condition in a beautiful and profound way, once in a while. Detectorists, for example, is one of the finest comedy-dramas made this century. But perhaps the outstanding example of pure public service broadcasting is In Our Time, a fixture of Thursday mornings on Radio 4 for 27 years, in which three academics discuss their subject for forty-five minutes, with Melvyn Bragg on hand to prod, interject and keep them on topic. It was one of the first BBC radio shows to be made available as a podcast — this was very helpful for those of us who usually had somewhere else to be at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning, and hardly surprising, because it was really a podcast avant la lettre, with its simple format of host plus experts. The subjects covered are self-consciously eclectic; recent instalments have covered Dragons, The Evolution Of Lungs, Moliere, and Pollination. I have a distinct memory, from many years ago, of gradually waking from a deep alcohol-induced sleep to realise that I was listening to a delightful woman from Oxford talk about The Fisher King, a mysterious figure from medieval mythology, and hence that I was catastrophically late for work.
Last week, Lord Bragg announced his retirement from the programme, after well over 1000 episodes. He will turn 86 next month, so it is an understandable decision, but also a rather sad one, because Bragg and In Our Time are a match made in heaven, and it will be interesting to see if the BBC replace him with an equally engaging and appropriate host. As noted above, In Our Time is one of the few survivors from another age of broadcasting — indeed, from another age of British life — when it was taken for granted that there was such a thing as high culture, and that self-improvement through the acquisition of serious knowledge was both a worthwhile and praiseworthy exercise, and something like a moral duty.
Similarly, Bragg is another product of that old dispensation: a working-class boy from an obscure town in Cumberland, who made his way to Oxford and the BBC, helped by grammar school teachers who nurtured his talent with a knowledge-rich curriculum and high academic standards. The post-war social mobility from which Bragg benefited so richly — the opening-up and expansion of the professions and the universities — was grounded in the same optimistic and high-minded attitude that gave rise to the BBC a generation before. It is an authentic elitism, focused on making widely available the very best of human ingenuity and creativity.
In Our Time is the autodidact’s friend. If you listened to every episode, and retained even a small proportion of the information, you would have a better all-round grasp of science, mathematics, history, literature, and geography than the vast majority of people, including extremely well-credentialed products of elite institutions. Nor would it take a huge amount of time — if you managed three episodes a day, you could get through the entire archive in a year, well under 1000 hours. By way of contrast, the average British pupil will spend over 10,000 hours in lessons during their school career.
In Our Time is a remarkable achievement, an oasis of thought and learning
The show has its minor irritations, to be sure. Bragg’s questions can be tortuous, and he is occasionally brusque with digressive or long-winded guests, leading to awkwardness. Sometimes the discussions reflect the blind spots of contemporary academia, with palpable discomfort when guests run up against modern taboos around race, sex, gender and so on. The episode on TS Eliot’s Four Quartets notably neglected the Christian background of the poems.
These are little more than quibbles, however. In Our Time is a remarkable achievement, an oasis of thought and learning in a desert of social media squabbles, IQ-shredding short-form video and destroyed attention spans. Sitting round the table with Melvyn and his guests, we can escape the tyranny of the immediate and relevant, and orient our minds to higher things. As The New Yorker said in 2017, the programme is “aligned with the eternal rather than the temporal”.
