Churchill Unleashed: The BBC’s Unseen Battle for Fairness Revealed!

When I was a kid, I worked out something crucial: If I pretended to be interested in the news, I could stay up later.

As a child I didn’t really like sweets or treats, I had some interest in friends, I was moderately interested in school, but my true love was television. My father didn’t like us watching Neighborhood OR At home and away from home, but my sister and I loved them and would take turns at the window at the time he usually came home, allowing the other to watch TV without fear of being discovered. I spent two and a half hours a week looking at a window to spend two and a half hours a week looking at Australians.

To maximize viewing time later in the evening, I showered into the commercial breaks of whatever was on the air at 8pm. The secret is to put shampoo on your hair while it’s still dry, not worry too much about washing it out, and have the courage to face the social stigma of dandruff. But what I really wanted to do was get past 9pm. That was the time I went to bed.

So I started, at the age of 10, to feign interest in the news.

Churchill believed the BBC should back the government. John Reith, director general, believed the BBC should show poise

It worked. My parents are obsessed with social issues, both spend their lives campaigning for various causes: my father was president of his union, my mother went to prison for campaigning for nuclear disarmament. So they were fascinated by their child’s fascination with something so important and couldn’t see that I was, in fact, a dirty little liar.

The strategy worked so well that, on nights when my parents wanted to watch whatever drama was on ITV at 9pm, they’d let me stay up late to watch the ITV News at ten.

I have to watch The boss, The governor, Principal suspect, Cracker. It was a beautiful time.

But this also meant that I watched a lot of news from an early age. And I fell in love with it too. In fact, I fell so deep that I ended up majoring in politics.

Neither politics nor watching the news every night has particularly helped my career so far. In fact, I think I would have been a better writer for the first TV show I wrote for, Skins, if I showed a little more interest in friends; if I had gone out more and understood how people enjoy themselves who are not only interested in watching Lynda La Plante’s latest masterpiece.

Then, about five years ago, while I couldn’t sleep – I’m a terrible insomniac – I was listening to Andrew Marr’s audio book A history of modern Britain. When I’m awake I need something to really focus on, something really good, or else my brain starts working. I was drifting pretty well until Marr started talking about a battle between John Reith and Winston Churchill. A battle over what news the BBC should carry during the 1926 general strike. A battle over impartiality.

Churchill, then Chancellor of the Treasury, believed the BBC should back the government. Reith, managing director of the fledgling broadcaster, believed the BBC needed to show poise. But finding that balance, deciding which voices should be heard on the BBC and who should be denied, has been incredibly difficult.

It felt like this was a little piece of history that explained so well where we are; which was filled with a strange kind of light. It seemed like maybe something that would help me understand and help an audience understand where television is in this country.

The more I dug, the more there was. Accounts of the time from Reith himself, accounts by those closest to him. But best of all was the BBC archive, which housed the original scripts of broadcasts dating back to the BBC’s inception in 1922. Exactly what Reith and company had said. Exactly what it was at all other times. Suddenly I had the backbone of what became my game.

Until the general strike, the BBC had a limited role in news broadcasting. Newspaper owners were adamant that if news were available free on radio, no one would buy their papers, so the BBC was only allowed to broadcast news after 7.00pm. But with transport and press workers on strike, the newspapers could barely be printed. The BBC was afforded the opportunity to broadcast bulletins at regular intervals throughout the day.

The question was what bulletins consisted of. Who would be given coverage and who would not.

Churchill, like many members of the government, was terrified that this job instability would lead to revolution. This was not entirely unreasonable. Soviet Russia was nine years old, looking to expand and investing money in the Communist Party of the United Kingdom. The general strike was a trade dispute, begun in solidarity with the coal mining industry, but he believed more was at risk.

Working under the aegis of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, he launched a government newspaper, The British Gazette. Its aim was to propagate the government line and strike back against the strikers. When he was attacked over this in the House of Commons, he said: ‘I absolutely refuse to be impartial between firefighters and fire.’ He did not think it was partisan to believe that the government side needed priority over the unions.

His eyes increasingly focused on the BBC.

Reith was only three and a half years in office when the general strike occurred. Before joining the BBC, he didn’t even know what broadcasting was. He had created something electric in no time. He brought a small entity into national dominance. Radio was exploding all over the world, but Reith managed to make something very unique happen in the UK. With chief engineer Peter Eckersley at his side and Arthur Burrows overseeing the programming, he had brought Shakespeare to the masses, supervised the creation of Children’s time AND Ladies time, and brought the BBC into outside broadcasts to record orchestras and capture things as simple as a nightingale singing in someone’s garden. All at an annual price that every family could afford to pay.

Suddenly, the General Strike made his position of enormous responsibility even more enormously responsible.

Would he side with Churchill and become the government spokesman? Or would he heed the cries of the unions and challenge the government, possibly to the detriment of the BBC’s future?

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Impartiality is a living beast. It’s an incredibly complicated beast. Witness journalist Emily Maitlis’ fascinating MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival last year, in which she spoke about the failings of impartiality, particularly the ‘both sides’ she says has plagued her industry.

Impartiality is not always easily visible. It’s a constant challenge. It can’t be entered on a computer and it’s not a science. Impartiality requires thinking, it requires someone to decide what impartiality is. It is a judgment, like everything else, an assessment on all matters. Maybe you can’t really be impartial, you can just make your best judgment on what impartiality might be. Which makes those who make those decisions extremely important.

Impartiality is an incredibly complicated beast. Witness reporter Emily Maitlis’ MacTaggart lecture, where she spoke about the “double sided” she believes has plagued her industry

I have appeared on the BBC Question Time last year, partly because I was asked, partly because I wanted to understand how it worked. I became very nervous and lost about my body weight in sweat. But it was fascinating to meet the brilliant minds behind this audience-driven political show, and they were all brilliant, working with you to discover how to get the best out of you, trying to make good, balanced television.

Do they always manage that balance? Obviously not. Twitter is outraged every week, but it was really interesting to see what they were trying to do. It was really interesting to see their personalities at work.

Maitlis said in his speech: “We show our impartiality when we report without fear or favour, when we are not afraid to hold power to account, even when it feels uncomfortable to do so.”

Reith was in a very uncomfortable position. He didn’t know what role the BBC should play, whether to calm or excite the population. He didn’t know what line to take on government “suggestions” about who should be invited to his radio broadcasts and who shouldn’t. And most importantly, he didn’t know how much it was claimed. The BBC at that time was the British Broadcasting Company. The Crawford Committee had recommended that it become a public body, but this was yet to happen. Reith knew the thin ice he was treading on: government takeover of the airwaves to his left, a commercialized future for the BBC to his right.

Reith believed strongly in the democracy of radio, in the fact that, as he put it, first and third class received exactly the same service from the BBC, something he saw lacking in the rest of his life. But this democracy only made sense if what it produced was democratic. We enter his troubled brain, his own torment of him, as we watch him as he tries to overcome the crisis. Because he has to decide how to fight for the future of the BBC. His actions during the strike create a legacy for today.

It is perhaps impossible to separate choices made for the sake of fairness from the person making those choices. You certainly can’t separate Reith the person from Reith the CEO, just as I can’t separate my writer choices from the 10-year-old on the couch with his radical parents. In crisis we go to our darkest places. What Reith produces that year is a choice made by his personality based on his complexity.

I love the BBC, both for what it is and for what it can be. my game, When Winston went to war with Wireless, it’s a love note. But it’s not without her questions. As the news cycles came and went, we thought over and over, “Oh no, we missed our moment” — if only we were in that moment, or then. Gary Lineker, the football presenter who went on air in March for criticizing the government’s refugee policy, has brought the matter back into the spotlight at the crucial moment, but the truth is that the question is never far away: what should the BBC be? ? What does impartiality actually mean? And who decides?

‘When Winston Went to War with the Wireless’ runs at London’s Donmar Warehouse until 29 July

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