Britain’s BBC turns 100 years old

Radio makers started iconic service a century ago

Today's expression: Band together
Explore more: Lesson #516
October 31, 2022:

The British Broadcasting Corporation turns 100 years old this month. The BBC started as a way for radio makers to convince people to buy a "wireless." Today, it supplies news, entertainment, and education to hundreds of millions of people every week.

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This month, the BBC turns 100 years old

Lesson summary

Hi there, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English lesson number 516 for October 31, 2022. Happy Halloween. JR is the producer and he has uploaded this full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/516.

A few weeks ago, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II , I said there was nothing more English than the Queen of England. But there is one institution that might give the royal family a run for its money in its quintessential Englishness, and that is the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC is Britain’s national broadcaster and this month, it celebrates its 100th year of existence.

In the second half of today’s lesson, I’ll show you what it means to “band together.” And we have a quote of the week from an actress that I used to watch many years ago. Let’s get going.

Britain’s BBC turns 100

In the early days of broadcasting, radio manufacturers faced a tricky problem: they wanted to sell radios, but there wasn’t much programming for consumers to listen to. So in Britain, the makers of radios banded together to create a private company to supply British listeners with content. They called it the British Broadcasting Company, or the BBC. Just a few years later, the “Company” became the British Broadcasting Corporation. It got a royal charter, meaning it became a public entity with a government-guaranteed monopoly.

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, there was no template for what a broadcaster should offer: the whole idea of broadcasting was new. Today’s mixture of talk, news, music, and entertainment simply didn’t exist. The BBC’s first director was thirty-four years old, and he shaped the early experience of listening to the radio in Britain.

News, so central to the BBC today, was sometimes an afterthought. London had a competitive morning and afternoon newspaper market. The BBC agreed not to compete with the afternoon papers, so it didn’t broadcast any news before seven o’clock in the evening. In fact , on one day in 1930, the BBC announced that there simply wasn’t any news that day. Imagine!

Early BBC programming was like a pyramid. At the bottom, there was a broad base of content that was lower-quality but “popular” content. It was designed to attract the masses . And at the top, there was the “higher-quality” cultural content like classical music and opera.

You would not use that pyramid metaphor to describe the BBC today; maybe you would call it a spider web. What started as a network of radio stations has become a modern media behemoth. Today , the BBC runs eight television stations and 50 radio stations in Britain. It has a huge web site and multiple apps. It broadcasts internationally in over 40 languages.

The corporation also produces educational programming used in school. And you, as an English learner, might be familiar with the BBC’s language education programs too. In total, over 400 million people access BBC content every week—six times the population of Britain itself.

In addition to all that, the BBC has also provided Britain with cultural clout and influence in the world. The BBC acts as a massive cultural ambassador to people around the world who would otherwise not know about the U.K. or the English-speaking world—or they would only know what their governments tell them.

But the BBC is coming under fire from multiple directions. First, there are the people who complain that the BBC produces way too much content that is not, really, a public service. So the British publish should not be paying for cooking shows, expensive dramas, or trashy reality TV, they say.

Second, there are the streamers. The BBC produces dramas and content. But the public often prefers the content on streamers like Netflix and HBO Max. The BBC’s streaming platform has not been able to keep pace with the big international players. And the public paying for lower-quality shows feels like they’re not getting their money’s worth.

And finally, some politicians believe the BBC’s news is biased against them. They argue that the BBC budget should be cut, that executives should be replaced to give them more favorable coverage, or that the BBC should be privatized or even abolished.

A big part of the controversy today is the BBC’s funding model. The BBC makes money by selling its shows to foreign broadcasters. It also sells advertising on some channels. But the vast majority of its £5 billion budget comes from the license fee.

The license fee is essentially a tax on every household with a television. If you don’t have a television, you don’t pay. But if you have a TV, which almost everyone does, you have to pay £159 per year, whether you consume BBC content or not. The fee has risen over the years, but the license has been in place since 1923. This universal fee was justified by near-universal use: over 90 percent of British adults watch BBC television every week.

But today, with more and more people watching streaming services instead of BBC content, the argument to charge every household a fee is less strong. The BBC’s current charter goes through 2027 and the government has ordered a review of the business model. Whatever the result, the BBC’s second century is sure to be different from its first.

A slow and fast version?

Here’s a funny fact. The first BBC broadcast on November 14, 1922 was the news and the weather. Broadcaster Arthur Burrows read two version of it: first, a fast version, and then a slow version for people taking notes. What a great idea!

That reminds me that you can listen to Plain English in both a fast and a slow version. If you find that you’re getting comfortable understanding everything in the slower version, then it might be time to switch to listening to the faster version.

The faster version is not just mechanically sped up. It’s a fresh recording. So I read every lesson twice into this microphone. The first time, I go nice and slow, with some nice spacing in between the words, so it’s easier to understand every word. And the second time, I read it at full speed, just the same speed I’d use when talking to friends in English.

That fast version is part of the Plain English Plus+ membership. You can get it on your podcast apps with a password, or you can listen right on the web site.

So if this sounds like something you can use to upgrade your English, then come join us at PlainEnglish.com/Plus .

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Expression: Band together