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The BBC: A Century on Air
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11/99
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About This Book
The first in-depth history of the iconic radio and TV network that has shaped our past and present.Doctor Who; tennis from Wimbledon; the Beatles and the Stones; the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and the funeral of Diana, Princess of for one hundred years, the British Broadcasting Corporation has been the preeminent broadcaster in the UK and around the world, a constant source of information, comfort, and entertainment through both war and peace, feast and famine.The BBC has broadcast to over two hundred countries and in more than forty languages. Its history is a broad cultural panorama of the twentieth century itself, often, although not always, delivered in a mellifluous Oxford accent. With special access to the BBC's archives, historian David Hendy presents a dazzling portrait of a unique institution whose cultural influence is greater than any other media organization. Mixing politics, espionage, the arts, social change, and everyday life, The BBC is a vivid social history of the organization that has provided both background commentary and screen-grabbing headlines—woven so deeply into the culture and politics of the past century that almost none of us has been left untouched by it.
Reviews
"Much of this history has been told before but never in such well-researched depth and sparkling detail."
"this book is full of the odour of ancient memoranda and committee minutes."
"an entertaining if uneven history ..."
"[a] conscientious but rather pedestrian history."
"There is also perhaps an understandable bias of interest in the past, with two-thirds of the book devoted to the first half of the BBC's existence, inevitably leading to later compression ..."
"He is so eager to show us the depth of the opposition to the corporation under Margaret Thatcher, and to run us through the scandals that have beset the BBC in recent years, that the granular texture of the earlier part of the book is somewhat smoothed out."
"Even so, it's a shame that he rarely pauses to think, and never draws comparisons with the BBC's commercial rivals or with broadcasters overseas."
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