When Britons turned on their radios on 1 January 1927, they heard the first day of broadcasting by the newly-formed British Broadcasting Corporation. Yet for most of these listeners the event was far from remarkable. Having taken over from the British Broadcasting Company formed less than five years previously, to people tuning in the new BBC was indistinguishable from the old one, Indeed the most recognizable change was in the title of the organization’s leader, the 37-year-old John Reith, who went from being Managing Director of the old company to Director-General of the new corporation. It was a distinction that was probably lost on the few listeners aware of it.

Nevertheless, the date proved a momentous one in British history. As Asa Briggs demonstrates, the BBC soon became an indelible part of British life, as millions of Britons tuned in daily for the steady stream of music, news and variety shows that the broadcaster offered. His book, the second volume in his series chronicling the history of British broadcasting, describes the pivotal fourteen years that followed this event, during which time many of the policies and practices were established that would make the BBC a national icon and a global institution.

Briggs does this through a thematic approach. Over the course of a half-dozen large chapters, he details the BBC’s programming, their audiences, their organization, their expansion into television broadcasting, and their response to the increasingly fraught international situation at the end of the period covered by the volume. He basis his examination on an unfettered access to the BBC’s archives, which he supplements with published works and interviews with many of the principal figures from the era. As with Briggs’s first volume, the result is an institutional history of the BBC that describes the growth of the organization from a top-down perspective.

The growth of the BBC during this period was nothing short of spectacular. During these years the radio audience expanded dramatically, and with it the demands on programmers to provide them with content. Much of this was guided by Reith, who saw broadcasting as a way of educating and uplifting the population. This resulted in programs of a high intellectual quality, but also opened the door for continental competitors such as Radio Luxembourg and Radio Normandie who served a diet predominantly of light entertainment. Briggs’s examination of these broadcasters is far less thorough than his coverage of the BBC, though, as there is no examination of their internal workings and their content is only mentioned in the most general terms. In some respects this is understandable and probably unavoidable, but it reinforces the sense of the book as less a history of British broadcasting than one of its main broadcaster.

This is reinforced by the comprehensiveness of Briggs’s coverage of BBC operations. While centered in London, regional operations produced their own share of content, while the BBC sought to extend their presence throughout the empire as well. Here the broadcaster found itself treading warily into the increasingly antagonistic environment of international politics, one in which their competition was not commercially-oriented competitors, but the propaganda ministries of such powers as Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. After 1935 the BBC found itself increasingly at the forefront of the British effort to counteract their campaigns, which influenced the development of overseas broadcasting operations. In this sense, the BBC found itself in an underfunded conflict against fascism years before Britain declared war against Germany in 1939, one it sought to win through its exemplification of “British” values.

Briggs recounts the history of the BBC during these years sympathetically but not uncritically. Throughout it he manages to convey the pioneering spirit that persisted despite the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the organization. This especially comes through in his thorough coverage of the prewar efforts to introduce television, for which great things were expected before the outbreak of war brought a halt to its broadcasts. Nevertheless, the comprehensiveness of his coverage of the BBC only reinforces the institutional focus of his book, to the detriment of other aspects of the history of broadcasting. Topics such as programming and the radio audience are approached only from this perspective, with almost no attempt to describe the programs themselves or assess what people thought of the BBC beyond newspaper coverage and the nascent listener evaluations. Such efforts are understandably difficult given the dearth of program recordings and other materials, but historians such as Simon Potter have since demonstrated how much more there is to learn about British broadcasting during these years. That these works have been built off of Briggs’s efforts in this book is a testament to its indispensability, yet its enormous value should not obscure the limitations of its focus or how much more there is to be learned about its subject. ( )