This is the first part of a five-volume history of broadcasting in the UK. Together the volumes give an authoritative account of the rise of broadcasting in this country. Though naturally largely concerned with the BBC it does give a general history of broadcasting, not simply an institutional history of the BBC. The Birth of Broadcasting covers early amateur experiments in wireless telephony in America and in England, the pioneer days at Writtle in Essex and elsewhere, and the coming of organized broadcasting and its rapid growth during the first four years of the BBC's existence as a private Company before it became a public Corporation in January 1927. Briggs describes how and why the Company was formed, the scope of its activities and the reasons which led to its conversion from a business enterprise into a national institution. The issues raised between 1923 and 1927 remain pertinent today. The hard bargaining between the Post Office, private wireless interests, and the emergent British Broadcsting Company is discussed in illuminating details, together with the remarkable opposition with which the Company had to contend in its early days. Many sections of the opposition, including a powerful section of the press, seemed able to conceive of broadcasting only as competing with their own interests, never as complementing or enlarging them. One of the main themes of this volume is that of the gradual forging of the instruments of public control, and particular attention is paid to the Crawford Report (1926) from which the Corporation arose. During this period all the characteristics of the Corporation first appeared - particularly its reputation for publc service and impartiality. Briggs also examines the background of wireless as an invention and considers its impact on society. He has much to say about personalities and programmes as well as policies.

This is the second part of a projected four-volume history of broadcasting in the United Kingdom. This volume covers the period from the beginning of 1927, when the BBC ceased to be a private company and became a public corporation, up to the outbreak of war in 1939. The acceptance of wireless as a part of the homely background of life and the acceptance of the BBC as the \`natural' institution for controlling it distinguish this period from that covered in the earlier volume. From 1927 to 1939 the system of public control which had evolved from the early struggles was never seriously in jeopardy and the one big official inquiry, the Ullswater Report, favoured no major constitutional changes. The main theme of the second volume, therefore, may be called the extension and the enrichment of the activity of broadcasting. Different chapters deal with the programmes and programme-makers; the listeners and the ways in which their needs were (or were not) met as the system expanded; public attitudes to the BBC and the increasing complexity of its control and organization; the coming of television and the early experiments of Baird and others; and the retirement of Sir John Reith - not only the end of a regime but the end of an era. The volume ends with preparations for war.

This is the third part of a five-volume history of broadcasting in the UK, giving an authoritative account of the rise of broadcasting in this country. This volume covering the period from 1939 to 1945, is concerned not only with the impact of the Second World War on the structure, organization, and programmes of the BBC, itself a fascinating subject; it also deals directly with the role of the BBC outside as well as inside Britain within the context of the general political and military history of the war; an exciting, complicated, sometimes controversial role, strangely neglected by historians.

This is the last volume of an authoritative and comprehensive five-volume history which charts the development of broadcasting in the United Kingdom, by one of Britain's leading historians. Competition covers a period of twenty years, from 1955 to 1974, a crisis year in British social and political history, when there were two general elections. An early chapter is devoted to another crisis year, 1956, the year of Suez and Hungary. During these years, which saw a huge increase in the volume of news and political broadcasting, developments carefully charted in this volume, the BBC was in a competitive situation. Yet relations between the BBC and ITA changed significantly while the BBC faced the programming challenge posed by the new commercial television companies. The volume compares in detail the BBC's programmes with those of its rivals in the still controversial context of the 1960s. A chapter on the Pilkington Committee, which has not hitherto been examined in perspective, is followed by a full account of the contribution to broadcasting of Hugh Greene, the man whom Mary Whitehouse described as being \`responsible for the moral collapse which characterized the sixties and seventies'. Greene's relationship with Charles Hill, who became Chairman of the BBC in a surprise move of 1967, is examined in-depth. So, too, is one of the biggest controversies within the BBC, that surrounding Broadcasting in the Seventies. After chapters dealing with education, including the founding of the Open University, and technology, Asa Briggs evaluates the state of the BBC at the time of its Golden Jubilee in 1972, and ends with the first meetings of the Annan Committee, charged with determining its future. Every person concerned with the future of broadcasting at the turn of the century will find invaluable information and arguments in this volume.

This compelling account of a turbulent period in the history of the BBC opens at a time of national decline under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, and ends during Margaret Thatcher's iconoclastic Conservative premiership. The intervening years saw mass unemployment, trade union strikes and war in Northern Ireland and the Falklands - as well as legendary BBC programmes such as Live Aid, Fawlty Towers and Dad's Army, The Singing Detective and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and David Attenborough's Life on Earth . Comprehensively revised and expanded for this new edition, Jean Seaton's perceptive study presents an absorbing analysis of an institution that both reflects Britain and has helped to define it.