60 years of BBC2. Some notes from the left

60 years of BBC2. Some notes from the left

It is 60 years on 20^th April since BBC2 first went on air, or rather didn’t because of a power cut. Actual broadcasts started the following day.

In 1967 it became the first UK channel to broadcast in colour.

The world of media and broadcasting has moved on so much in the intervening period that it is hard to know how to assess and position  the anniversary historically, although BBC2 is broadcasting a special 60 years programme.

In the beginning of course there was just the one BBC channel broadcasting from Alexandra Palace in North London. In 1955 commercial competition arrived in the shape of ITV and the BBC responded on the night with the death of Grace Archer in a barn fire in the Archers on radio’s Home Service [now Radio 4].

Much of the left was unhappy about commercial TV and its influence on the BBC. The need to attract large audiences with popular programming- to make advertising pay-undermined what was felt to be an essential role of TV. Namely to educate and to promote democratic discussion and debate.

The Pilkington Report, influenced by the late Richard Hoggart, argued for more serious TV fare and one result was BBC2.

It is worth recalling, and this now seems almost incredible, that in the early 1960s owning a TV was something only a few hundred thousand people did. It was expensive and many rented their set instead.

Of those who did own a set it is probably reasonable to suggest that not too many were left-wing activists, who then- as now- probably did not have much time to watch it or money to afford to have it anyway.

Even so it was the left that had set the original framework for BBC2. Its remit, as later Channel 4 and then BBC4, was to provide minority programming.

In particular in the early years it had a Community Unit which produced Open Door programmes designed to encourage people who were not professional broadcasters to put their point across on TV.

When the Wilson Labour Government set up the Open University in the late 1960s it was BBC2 which showed the programmes that went with the various courses.

It is quite difficult to find left-wing opinion on how good, or otherwise, the early years of BBC2 actually were. However Raymond Williams, the literary theorist and writer, did produce a regular TV column for the BBC magazine The Listener [long since departed]in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

His monthly commentaries found him, more often than not, noting and mostly praising a play or piece of reporting that had appeared on BBC2. BBC1 programmes sometimes get a mention but ITV hardly ever does.

While even today BBC2 is not exactly in the centre mainstream of TV it has long since ceased to be a channel for minority interests. It became arguably a channel for programmes that might not attract a mass audience but were still expected to have a broad appeal. The left departed for Channel 4, and when the same thing happened to that, to BBC4

In historical perspective the arrival of BBC2 might be seen as a success for the left in gaining access to the new medium of TV for ideas and arguments outside of a narrow and often conservative consensus. That it was launched in the radical 1960s probably also helped.

The times as ever are a changin’. With a plethora of TV channels, the internet and social media the medium for entertainment, education and debate is changing quickly. The left, or at least some of it, was able to grasp the importance of TV in the early 1960s, and is grappling with new media again now.