Books
Out of the box
Geoffrey Cox
Facing the Nation: Television and Politics,1936-76 Grace Wyndham Goldie (Bodley Head £7.50) Grace Wyndham Goldie is one of the halfdozen most significant talents to have shaped British television. Soon after the war She pioneered television journalism in programmes like Foreign Correspondent, with Christopher Mayhew, and Viewfinder, with Aldan Crawley. She managed this despite indifference, amounting to opposition, from the Director-General of the day, Sir William ,Haley, and from a News Division muscle0oUnd by its radio prestige. It was Mrs Goldie, too, who developed the durable rcutorama, and the less durable but brilliant Mnight of the Baverstock days. And when That Was The Week That Was emerged from the Tonight stable, and bolted, she was the senior executive given the job of trying to corral it.
In all these programmes Grace Wyndham Goldie moved boldly into the highly sensitive domain of television and politics. She Mounted the first general election results Programme on television in 1950, and worked skilfully to get politicians to realise that television could—if they chose—be a source of strength rather than of danger to Parliamentary democracy. She has drawn on the experience to write this study of television and politics. It is a book of major significance, since books from within BBC television are rare. And this is the first to combine experience of the studio floor with the wider perspective of ‘uPPer management. It is, fortunately, large'Y autobiographical, autobiographical, and contains some 'ryePlaceable scenes of television in the making. Anthony Eden is depicted climbing in the heat of an August evening up three flights 9f concrete stairs, lit only by naked hanging bulbs, to the small, sweltering announcer's studio which was all the BBC could make available to a Prime Minister addressing the nation about Suez. Churchill, watching in Owning Street a programme mounted for his eightieth birthday, 'sank into an arm!-hair like an ancient tortoise withdrawing into itself.' He seemed to gaze blankly at the screen until he 'suddenly came to life like a statue from the stone age taking on humanity, and started to speak to camera 'spontaneously, clearly, masterfully.' Mrs Goldie quotes Jane Austen to illustrate the advantage conferred, particularly ;t1 the early days, on a Chancellor who could ,oroadcast on the Budget from his office, backed by the whole apparatus of power, Which created a sense of ease and authority,' rld the Opposition leader making his way DY hired car to a draughty studio at Lime
Grove. 'Emma said to Mr Knightly that she could tell the difference between the bearing of those who had arrived in a carriage from those who arrived on foot.'
The book is a quarry of information about the realities of broadcasting—realities which will provide important help in judging the Annan recommendations. 'Within the BBC the power of the producer is enormous,' she writes. This is because the work of originating programmes is his responsibility, but 'the problem of how to relate the creativity of the producers to the ultimate editorial responsibility of the BBC was central to all its work.' Her solution is that producers 'should want to be fair and impartial rather than that they should have those obligations thrust upon them, and that also they should not wish to use their privileged position to persuade others to accept their own views in matters of controversy.'
She provides a striking example of what can happen when producers do not share this view, in her account of the convoluted tangle into which the BBC hierarchy got itself over the satirical series, That Was The Week That Was. Attempts to get a grip on the freelance producer of TW3 became so involved and hectic as to reach the borders of farce. Even the Board of Governors took a hand. A senior executive was told to make clear to the producer that the Board's plans for That Was The Week That Was were not 'suggestions for improving the programme. They were instructions which will have to be obeyed.' Everyone, it seemed, had a direct line to the producer. The Director-General talked personally to him ; so did Alasdair Milne, who had specific responsibility for the programme; so did Grace Wyndham Goldie, who was brought in to help patrol the rehearsals on Saturday afternoons in an endeavour to find out what was going to be said in the BBC's name that night.
All this in the end proved ineffective, and the programme was killed. TW3 became, in Mrs Goldie's view, 'unintentionally, an endeavour to discover whether a group of creative people could work outside the normal framework of BBC editorial control and
yet observe, of their own free will, the obligations imposed upon broadcasting organisations by Parliament. The experiment failed.' This seems hard on the producers, since the basic question which TW3 posed was wider. It was whether a programme of satire, devised and launched by a broadcasting organisation, can be reconciled with the obligation placed on such organisations not to editorialise, not to put forward their own comments. Satire, after all, is nothing if not comment. TW3 stemmed, not from the BBC's Light Entertainment Department, but from BBC Current Affairs. Its constant ridicule of political leaders amounted in the end to a significant political statement. This was bound to be taken— particularly by those mocked—as an expression of the persona of the BBC.
Grace Wyndham Goldie's account of TW3 will win much notice. It would be a pity if this distracted attention from her wider purpose, which is to examine the interaction of television and politics. This she does with originality and insight, although, perhaps because of her autobiographical approach, there are some gaps. She does not, for instance, deal with the Rochdale by-election in 1958, when Granada and ITN swept aside the taboo which had until then prevented the coverage of election campaigns. She does not probe the part which the news bulletin interview, in the hands of men like Robin Day and George Ffitch, played in establishing the broadcaster's right to challenge the politicians. Nevertheless her own experience is so wide, and her perceptions so acute, that the result is a classic of television scholarship.
Mrs Goldie's central theme is how, within a democracy, to allow a Government—and an Opposition—proper access to the air, without reducing broadcasting to an instrument of government. She suggests that any special access should be defined in advance, and the exercise of it proclaimed on each occasion. All other access by those with political power must be on the same basis as everyone else's—that is, on the terms established by the broadcasters, acting in the public interest.
Mrs Goldie ends on a sombre note, finding herself 'a Cassandra crying doom.' She believes freedom of broadcasting, and so freedom itself, to be endangered from two sides. She fears that Conservative pressure for more commercialism could bring the excesses which mar American election broadcasting. But she sees an even graver threat from recent Labour Party plans for the media : 'Those who drew up these plans were apparently less concerned with television's ability to extend experience than in ways in which it could be used to ensure the creation and perpetuation of social systems of which the Labour Party approved.'
For more than two decades the quicksilver, neat figure of Grace Wyndham Goldie, decisive and candid, combining fairness with fearlessness, embodied the best in British broadcasting. With this book she has put that experience in a form which will endure,
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