The Emotional Life of the Early BBC
Speaker: Professor David Hendy
6.30pm, Wednesday 1 June
Chowen Lecture Theatre, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Sussex BN1 9PX
Professor Hendy has been commissioned to write a new official history of the BBC for its Centenary in 2022. He wants to begin this task by asking a fundamental question about the Corporation’s origins. Might the BBC be understood as the creation of a group of men and women driven less by a clear vision of broadcasting policy than by a complex set of private moods and emotions? When it began in 1922, these first broadcasters represented a generation shaped by the experience of the Great War – and all the psychic ripples in its aftermath. They brought to their new workplace a rich brew of personal prejudices, psychic wounds, and cultural anxieties. In so doing they made their new employer in their own image – a place, as one insider put it, that felt like ‘one third boarding school, one-third Chelsea party, one-third crusade’ – a ‘safe port in a stormy sea’. Here was, in other words, a distinctive ‘emotional community’ – a unique working atmosphere that, by the eve of the Second World War, had helped make the BBC the iconic cultural institution that it was. In trying to reconstruct the ‘emotional life’ of the Corporation’s pioneering personalities, this lecture suggests a focus on feelings might be fundamental to our broader understanding of how British broadcasting discovered its character and purpose in the twentieth century.
Chowen Lecture Theatre
Brighton and Sussex Medical School
University of Sussex Campus
Brighton
BN1 9PX
This is a free, open lecture – everyone is welcome, but numbers are limited.
Refreshments provided.