The Reith Lectures continue, too, and the BBC modestly bills this year’s subject, artificial intelligence, as “The Biggest Event In Human History”. Like a Waitrose bag for life, this is a signifier of their own good taste and superior moral virtues. But today, blissfully ignorant of history, self-proclaimed “Reithians” wear their label with pride in their Twitter bios. In an age when so many historical figures have been cancelled, it’s curious that the first director general of the BBC has so far escaped the mob’s attention. “Almost everything I had done has been destroyed – the wrecking of a life’s work,” he sobbed to Parliament in 1962.
Reith fought the end of the BBC monopoly with everything he could muster, and was still regretting the creation of ITV years later. If he had, the corporation’s golden age of the 1970s, on which its laurels rest, would never have happened.
Lord Reith usually got his way, but not every time.
Regarding jazz music as “hot” and a “filthy product of modernity”, the Scot ensured it was banned from the airwaves. Reith’s biographer daughter later confirmed her father had revered the Fuhrer. For you, Herr von Ribbentrop, I would gladly fly the swastika from the top of Bush House, John Reith promised the departing German Ambassador in 1938, at a gala BBC event.Ī year later, after appeasement collapsed in shame as the tanks rolled into Prague, the BBC’s first boss was still praising Hitler’s “magnificent efficiency”. For once, the dour director-general of the BBC was effusive with his praise.
0 kommentar(er)
