the BBC and the powers that be outside’.64
A good illustration of this is from January 1970, around the time of Burns’s study, when Charles Curran, the new director general, summoned a group of BBC journalists and producers for a meeting at his office. Curran had succeeded the liberal Hugh Greene the previous year, and his instincts were more conservative. He opened the meeting by referring to the perception that BBC journalists had adopted an anti-Establishment line, and that they reserved their most severe questions for people associated with authority. The journalists and producers countered that it was their job to remain sceptical of authority, but always free from personal bias. Curran, however, concluded the meeting by explaining that while he acknowledged it was part of a BBC journalist’s role to put critical questions to authority, it was nevertheless part of his job as director general to see that authority was treated fairly.65
Another revealing incident from that same period is a 1975 dinner meeting between the then BBC chair Michael Swann and the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. Over dinner, the two men discussed the influence of sixties radicalism at the BBC. A memo of the conversation states:
Talking about the ‘hippie’ influences at the BBC, Sir Michael Swann said that, while he would not pretend that the BBC was completely clear of problems of this kind, it was a picnic compared with Edinburgh University [where he had been vice chancellor]. Nonetheless he thought too many young producers approached every programme they did from the starting point of an attitude about the subject which could be summed up as: ‘You are a shit’. It was an attitude which he and others in the management of the BBC (Sir Michael Swann particularly mentioned Huw Wheldon) deplored, and they would be using their influences as opportunity offered to try to counter it.66
That the prime minister sympathised with these efforts is evident from another file recording a meeting between Swann and Wilson two years earlier, the minutes of which noted that ‘discussion about the authority of the Governors, the [director general] and senior staff seemed to cheer [Wilson] up no end’.67
Both these incidents illustrate the close relations between the BBC hierarchy and the political elite. This has shaped editorial policies and practices, making the BBC much more amenable to elites than democratic and egalitarian movements. BBC journalists may have, to differing degrees, advanced more substantive notions of independence, and even absorbed elements of oppositional politics into their professional ideology. But they remain answerable to their superiors who, like many of them, are often drawn from the same social strata as politicians and state officials and are, moreover, responsible for maintaining good relations with senior politicians and other elites who ultimately determine the BBC’s future.
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