BBC Science: A Question of Control

Several times in the BBC’s history, from 1928 to around 1963, the world of professional science has attempted to influence, and even control, the BBC’s practices regarding science coverage. The main scientific lobbyists of the BBC were the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, together with less prominent individuals and organisations. The proposals made by these bodies and individuals were consistent over several decades and from organisation to organisation, and involved the institutional world of science being given more control over the BBC’s science output. These proposals (which were unsuccessful) were a threat to the BBC’s autonomy. The paper examines the background of these scientific interventions and the BBC’s constitutional status as an autonomous organisation. It finds that there was a high degree of symmetry between the BBC’s role as a public service broadcaster and the scientists’ roles as disseminators of scientific knowledge. The paper concludes by framing the scientists’ interventions, and the BBC’s response, in the light of scholarship relating to the construction of social structure through social interaction. Introduction A little discussed aspect of BBC history relates to several attempts by the institutional world of science to assume a measure of control over the BBC’s science output during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. In fact, not only are these episodes virtually unknown, but science broadcasting itself has hardly been researched. The standard histories of 2 British broadcasting by Asa Briggs, 1 Burton Paulu, 2 and Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff 3 have almost nothing to say on the subject. In this paper there is not space to discuss the interventions by the scientific world more fully, except to say that they were somewhat formulaic, typically consisted of delegations of scientists from a scientific body (such as the British Association for the Advancement of Science) calling on the BBC’s Director General and proposing the all the BBC’s science production be unified in a single department, with a scientist at its head and with a panel of scientists as advisors. The full story of these interventions is contained in archive documents held at the BBC, and told in my own doctoral thesis, Jones (2010). To understand the significance of these interventions, what the scientists were trying to do this, and why their interventions were contentious, we need to look a little at the history of the BBC.