The establishment of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on 1 January 1927 is an event that can be viewed in two ways. Read forwards it serves as the start of a storied history of non-commercial, public-oriented operations by an organization that would become a national institution. Yet this beginning also represented the culmination of an era in British broadcasting, one in which three decades of technological, organizational, and political developments climaxed in the creation of a single body charged with transmitting media to the British Isles. It is this latter perspective which is the focus of the first volume of Asa Briggs’s history of British broadcasting. In it he describes the beginning of the broadcasting industry in Great Britain and how it evolved into a public institution created to provide news and entertainment for the listening population.

One of Briggs’s achievements is to convey the sense of adventure that drove the development of broadcast technology. While the use of electromagnetic waves for communication was theorized by James Clerk-Maxwell as early as 1864, Briggs dates the beginning of broadcasting history in Britain to the first wireless patent filed by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896. Initially used as a form of communication, wireless technology advanced rapidly in the years prior to the First World War as new innovations made it possible to receive radio waves at ever-greater distances than before. War provided further stimulus, as governments poured money into the wireless industry in their efforts to employ the militarily useful technology in order to achieve victory.

As a result, by the end of the war Britain possessed both a well-developed wireless industry and a much larger pool of people experienced with the technology. Nor were they alone, as enthusiasts in the United States also explored the possible applications of radio. America soon took the lead, with the establishment of the first broadcasting stations in 1920 heralding the start of a chaotic “radio boom” that served as a negative example for Britons who crossed the Atlantic to study the American example. With the Marconi Company and numerous amateurs increasingly clogging Britain’s airwaves with experimental broadcasts, the British government sought to impose some sort of order before things got too far out of hand.

The result was the formation in 1922 of the British Broadcasting Company. Created by a consortium of wireless equipment manufacturers and licensed by the Post Office, the new organization possessed a monopoly on broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Unlike the commercially-funded example of American broadcasting, the new company received the majority of its revenue from a licensing fee charged to radio owners. Raising and managing this fee was just one of the many difficulties facing the new organization, as its managers had to provide content in the face of opposition from typically hostile news organizations and entertainment providers, both of which feared losing business to the new medium. Briggs emphasizes the pioneering nature of these efforts, as many of the approaches that would become indelibly associated with British broadcasting were established during this period, often without any prior examples to serve as a guide. Their success was reflected by the rapid growth of wireless listening during this period, as well as the interest expressed by other nations in emulating the British example. Yet the company’s managing director, John Reith, was convinced that such an important service should be both a public institution and independent of direct government control. With the wireless companies keen to divest themselves of the expensive business of broadcasting and the power of broadcasting demonstrated during the 1926 General Strike, the government agreed to legislation which would transform the British Broadcasting Company into a Crown-chartered corporation serving the national interest.

Briggs bases his history of British broadcasting primarily on the BBC’s voluminous archives, which he supplements with contemporary accounts and other government records. This is both the book’s greatest strength and its primary flaw, for while this provides for a comprehensive account of broadcasting in Britain it makes the book first and foremost an institutional history of the formation of the BBC. Its chapters are filled with detailed coverage of the laborious process by which the broadcasting organization evolved into the public corporation with which the world is familiar today, which frequently crowds out descriptions of the content broadcast or its reception by its audience and leaves out altogether any consideration of the broader impact of broadcasting on the country during this period. It makes for a book that can often be frustratingly narrow in its focus, though one that remains the cornerstone for any understanding of the history of the BBC or of broadcasting in Britain more generally. ( )