In this talk, Prof. Simon Potter looked back over hundred years to ask whether the BBC is really the 'voice of Britain', exploring its role in changing wider culture and society and promoting particular versions of British national identity, both at home and overseas. He drew from his latest book "This is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain, 1922-2022" (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2022) where he looks at that history in terms of people and programmes, and also explores the BBC as an institution. He examined the role of politicians and civil servants in shaping and guiding the
work of the BBC, and the impact of successive technological innovations, from radio, to television, to the new digital age. The talk shows how the BBC has changed over the last century, adapting to dramatic shifts in its political, social, and cultural environment. He argued that the BBC was initially constituted as a monopoly, controlling all broadcasting in Britain, including an Empire Service for white listeners in Britain’s colonies. It went on to provide services for audiences at home and overseas throughout the Second World War and into the Cold War, seeking to ‘inform, educate, and entertain’, roughly in that order of priority.
Professor Simon Potter is Reader in Modern History at the University of Bristol and led a Leverhulme Trust International Research Network 'Connecting the Wireless World: Writing Global Radio History' (2016-2019) bringing together a group of scholars from around the world to think about global perspectives on the history of international broadcasting.
Chair: Dr Graciela Iglesias-Rogers (University of Winchester).
The Q&A session has been edited out at the request of the speaker.
