This year the BBC is celebrating their 100^th anniversary. On November 14^th, 1922, they began their first daily radio broadcasts. At the time Robert Keable was in Australia, on his way to Tahiti, so he would have to wait over a year before he could have a listen. A year later, at the same time as Robert was heading back to England, the Radio Times was launched. On his return to England Robert was commissioned to write two articles for the new magazine, for which he was paid £26.10s.0d, the equivalent of almost £2,000 at today’s prices. His remit was to give his impressions of the radio and, typical of the BBC, he was asked to criticise not praise.

A Wanderer on Wireless

His first article came out in June 1924. He began by explaining how he had immediately noticed, on his return to England, change.

When I left England last, the first broadcasting station in the British Isles had, I think, just been opened, and the first thing I noticed when I returned was the aerials of the small houses whose back gardens run down to the main line into Victoria Station had the clothes-props pretty well beat.

He confessed he missed the experimental stage ‘of cheap crystal sets and scullery taps’ and immediately he returned home he had purchased a ‘four-valve set’ to instal in his father’s vicarage, which, he had been promised, could receive signals from as far away as the Eiffel Tower. As he wrote:

I left a village in which the morning paper constituted our touch with the outside world, and I returned to one in which the grandfather clock is corrected every night by Big Ben. (And that’s more than you would think. It’s no use, now, being late for church, and saying: ‘Vicar’s clock’s wrong. ‘E were five minutes too soon s’mornin’.’

The reception on his father’s wireless was not good.

We occasionally get: Wirrh, wirrh, bang, tap-tap, tap, wirrh Birmingham (for thirty seconds) wirrh, tap-tap, tap-tap, bang London – ‘Confound it, there’s London talking again!’ – wirrh, tap-tap, and so on. Once is a while, as a great treat, there is an incredible elfin music, far off, but quite clear, very lovely, very other-worldly, and that is Paris. But usually it sounds as if half the British Navy were shouting morse at each other in the Chanel, and the other half foundering in a thunderstorm. And we never get anywhere else.

Robert admitted the fault could be his incompetence or problems with the set, but suggested:

              The BBC has got to reckon on having fools like ourselves with them till the crack of Doom.

Even if the BBC could cure the sound problem Robert believed it would be incapable of being all things for all men and women. He clearly had not envisioned a world of multi stations that seems so normal today. His explanation of the problem gives us an interesting insight into how he saw the divisions in society:

The man who reads the Daily Herald won’t thank you for the Morning Post. The serious folk who go to the theatre to see Shakespeare or a problem play don’t care about Stop Flirting. [A play by Vivian Reynolds]. The people who can dance all night for weeks on end to Bananas and the like don’t like classical music. The man who reads his evening paper in the train home every evening won’t want a news bulletin. The public that wants to hear about the Stellar Nebulae and the chances of splitting electrons isn’t really interested in Pip, Squeak, and Wilfred.

A couple of reviews

The Radio Times had asked Robert to review some of the programmes from the previous week and he was far from complementary. The broadcasting of the Empire Commemoration at Wembley he thought was a mistake. The cheers of the crowd didn’t make up for not seeing the Prince of Wales, and he believed ‘a small choir in the studio …is more impressive than the massed bands in Wembley’.

Another mistake, he thought, was the reading of extracts of Shakespeare plays. How surprised he would be today by the audio book market. Back then, he believed:

The number of people who can’t read for themselves if they want to, must be very limited, and the people who can and want to read, perhaps with a glossary handy, certainly the whole play.

Ultimately however Robert was full of praise for the BBC:

Wireless must be doing more to give us a good standard of general knowledge and sympathy than anything else in the Three Kingdoms. It is making silly people serious and serious people silly, and I don’t know which is the more valuable. … it has taken folk into theatres who even in our time thought them strongholds of the devil, and folk into churches who thought them lunatic asylums. And that comes as near the achievement of the impossible as anything I know.

Programme Faults – A Suggestion

In his second article, published the following week, Robert looked at the future of the BBC. He put his finger on a key question that the BBC has been struggling with throughout the last 100 years.

Does the BBC propose to cater for or to create public taste and opinion. … it is evident that the BBC of the future could persuade us that some nation was out for our blood and run us into another war more easily than any group of politicians or any newspaper syndicate.

And his suggestions? Keep away from big speeches and be more personal. Use one-to-one interviews and put questions from listeners directly to celebrities and politicians. Have singers singing in the studio, and poet’s reciting their poems from armchairs. Send out foreign correspondents to tell us first-hand what is happening in the world. Keep news bulletins to the minimum. Only broadcast comedians who are funny to someone listening on their own. And Women’s Hour should scrap fashion talks.

Much of what he suggested has been followed including his call for the BBC to make its own programs. It is interesting how even less than two years into the life of the BBC men like Robert were warning that it should not over-stretch itself.  As he put it:

When, if ever, is the BBC going to realize that it has bitten off more than it can chew? Ought the BBC at any point to say to itself: ‘Thus far, but no further’?