Crossing the Ether: British Public Service Radio and Commercial Competition, 1922–1945 (review)

Founded in 1922 and reorganized on a state-owned, nonprofit footing in 1927, the British Broadcasting Corporation was intended to wield what its first director general John Reith candidly termed “the brute force of monopoly,” the better to exercise stewardship over listeners’ minds and souls. Before long, however, the BBC faced competition from commercially sponsored English-language programs recorded in Britain and broadcast from private stations across the Channel. The history of these commercial interlopers has not been overlooked in previous scholarship, but it has always been presented as aminor sideshow to the saga of the BBC and never recounted in such eye-opening detail—cultural, technical, and economic.

Seán Street, the author of this intensively researched and lucidly written monograph, is the director of the Centre for Media Studies at Bournemouth Media School and a broadcaster with experience in both public-service and commercial British radio. His loyalties clearly belong to the private sector, a stance that may disorient readers habituated to the reflexive anticommercialism of much American radio scholarship. Still, as the following passage demonstrates, Street feels that there are limits to the responsible deprecation of the BBC: “While the BBC’s attitude to more ‘popular’ entertainment often misjudged the mood and appetite of its working-class audience, to call the Corporation—as [the late historian Arthur] Marwick does—‘tight-lipped, prissy propagator of basic assumptions, mirror of myths, dominated by the upper-class,’ is, while not wholly untrue, something of an oversimplification” (p. 70). Notwithstanding, Street builds the accustomed case against the Reith-era BBC, to wit, that it was censorious, paternalistic, and blithely disconnected from working-class taste.

All of these traits were reflected in the BBC’s sabbatarianism, which limited Sunday programming to brief offerings of sacred music and high-minded religious discourse. Reith, the son of a minister, has sometimes been held individually responsible for this unpopular policy, but Street persuasively places the director general’s “almost superstitious” reverence for the day of rest squarely within the norms of his era, faith, and class (pp. 139, 59).

“Reith Sunday” was, at any rate, a gift from the gods to stations such as Radio Normandy, Radio Luxembourg, EAQ Madrid, and Radio Méditer-rannée, whose wavelengths could be hired by anyone interested in reaching British consumers. A lion’s share of the hiring was done by the International Broadcasting Company and the J. Walter Thompson Organization. The former was a London-based advertising agency-cum-production facility founded by the eccentric millionaire Captain Leonard F. Plugge, whom Street christens “the true founding father of British commercial radio” (p. 53). The latter was the British subsidiary of the Madison Avenue advertising agency at the forefront of commercializing the American airwaves. Obliged to record their programs and ship them abroad for broadcast, the two agencies were pioneers of both technical and cultural innovation in program production, and they exerted far more influence on the BBC’s own evolution than has previously been acknowledged (especially by the BBC itself, whose public position was that the commercial stations were beneath its notice).

As suggested by the role of the Thompson Organization, the story Street tells is riven with transatlantic currents, and on this level Crossing the Ether merits the attention of students of American broadcasting history as much as British. It is regrettable, therefore, that Street, for all his herculean archival labors, has not kept up with recent secondary literature on the origins of American commercial broadcasting, even to the extent of trotting out the exploded factoid that it was born at AT&T’s New York station WEAF in 1923 (pp. 78–79). A wider canvass of new scholarship could have enabled Street to draw out underlying likenesses of two nations typically seen as antithetical in their relationships to broadcasting. The middle and upper classes of both embraced radio as an engine of uplift...