Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
That's right. You got a quick announcement.
Huh, I do huh?
I think so.
Well, if you're talking about our new playlist that's coming out that one, that's right. Yeah, we have a new playlist coming out, right, Chuck.
Yeah, this holiday season, I think coming out very soon. Actually, we have the Twelve Days of Holiday Toys because we've got lots of great toy episodes over the years and we've compiled them together for the whole family to enjoy.
That's right, we love those toy episodes. I think it comes out on December twelfth.
Right, I think so. And that's what I mean in real time. This's probably are not real time, but in real podcast time this week.
I think I think so too. And what do you have to do to get these episodes? You may ask nothing. You don't have to lift a single finger. We're going to put them in the feed like we have been and hope you enjoy them.
Yeah, totally. And I have another announcement for this BBC episode.
Okay, is that how you say it the beb Yeah, I've heard that too.
What do you say?
That's how I was going to say it?
The whole episodes this one even more so than a lot of our others that are you know, you could potentially do one hundred episodes on. This is like serious overview territory. When you're talking about something as far reaching and long standing and sort of legendary culturally as the BBC is, I don't want our our listeners across the pond to be like, guys, you're gonna give us, you know, forty five minutes on the BBC.
That's exactly what we're going to do, and it's with love. Yeah, and big thanks to our man in Britain Kyle, for wrangling this huge, massive topic into something pretty pretty good and understandable.
Yeah, because I gotta say I love the BBC. Always have. Yeah, since I was a little kid watching really yeah, watching their content on public television. Uh huh, you know, everything from Flying Circus to Benny Hill to Faulty Towers and then having a British roommate in college. He would tell me about the east Enders and you know, all the all the you know, stuff that he grew up with, and it's just been near and dere. I read the BBC news all the time. It's just, you know, I love it.
I definitely watched Benny Hill a lot when I was a kid too, so I guess I didn't realize it was BBC content, But it totally was, wasn't it.
Yeah, you just thought it was some guy who talked funny from Indiana, right, who liked bear breasts.
Yes, he was really into boobs, man, he was. If there was ever a person into boobs, it was Benny Hill.
Yeah, twelve year old chuck.
So yeah, that's cool. I guess I've loved the BBC longer than I thought too, So this is it's a hat tip, I guess, also a big thanks to the BBC and also deeply critical of it.
Yeah, to this one hundred and three year old institution.
Yeah, just in time for it one hundred and third birthday. So let's get started. You mentioned that it's called BIB. I had not heard that before, but apparently it's quite accurate. And the BIB you can liken it in the US to MPR, where there's a lot of you know, accusations of it being left leaning bias, and then people on the left are like, no, it's right bias. It does its best to stay middle ground if possible. It has to do with public funding, but in a much different way.
It's a it's a venerable institution, but like way more venerable than MPR. Public broadcasting is here in the United States. It is a big chunk of British culture. And in that sense, I get the sense that even people who are like to hell with BBC still feel some sort of like pride in the BBC in its existence.
Yeah, and you know that is all as we have learned by design. That was no accident. It is the world's largest broadcaster, has twenty one thousand plus employees, and nobody knows it's the it's the oldest national broadcaster, and nobody knows how many programs they put out. Kyle said between ten and twenty million. So that's that's a lot of stuff. And that's also a big cushion.
It really is as a margin. Yeah, that's called hedging.
Yeah, and that includes I think, you know, everything radio. And because as we'll see, their little fingies are in all the Figi puddings.
Yeah, and I mean, if you live in the UK, there's some way, shape or form that you're taking in BBC content almost certainly because they dominate or they they did at one point dominate radio, dominate television, now that they blaze the trail onto the Internet as far as news sites go, they have a huge web presence and
then in the like across the world as well. They have what's called the World Service where you can watch BBC news all over the world, so it's appropriately named, and they say that they have an audience of almost half a billion people around the world, and.
I believe it.
I believe it too. I know probably two hundred and fifty million people who watch the BBC myself.
Because should we go back to the beginning.
Yeah, let's go with the beginning, all right.
So we got to go I said it was one hundred and three years old. So if you carry the one, you subtract that nineteen twenty two is where we're going
in our British wayback machine. Mind the gap, which you know runs on coal and shepherd's pie and October eighteen, nineteen twenty two is where we're going because that is where the British Broadcasting Company was formed before they became the corporation as a partnership between what they called the post Office, which at the time was basically there they ran the telegraph service over there, and the Marconi Company,
who said, I got a lot of radios. I'd like to assail, but you got nothing to put on the radio.
Oh, we haven't heard that in a while.
It's been a minute.
So yeah. Remember in our AM radio episode we talked about the Marconi Company setting up companies all over the world. Yeah, this is a good example of that. And the British government was like, hey, how about this. We will make sure you have zero competition. That will give you a monopoly, but you got to make some pretty good content here. We want to hear good stuff. Right now, all we hear is and we want to hear better stuff than that. Yeah,
And so the Marconi Company set us up. They established this this station, like you said, in nineteen twenty two, and I guess five years later the British government was like, this is ours now, this is a state owned monopoly. I don't know what happened to the Marconi Company, but it sounds like they got hung out to dry. I guess is the nicest way I can put it.
Yeah, I bet they did. Okay, So that was twenty seven when it became the Broadcasting Corporation and very you know, kind of right out of the gate, they were like, here's what we're gonna do. We're not gonna it's gonna be this weird hybrid of culture and entertainment kind of ran through run through the government, but supposedly the government doesn't intervene too much. It's kind of hard to reckon how that all works, and sometimes it works really well.
Sometimes there's been a lot of controversy. But what they did decide early on is we're not going to advertise we're not going to tax people outwardly. At least, we're going to have what's called a license fee, which is this to us in the United States, a very strange sort of arrangement wherein households pay a certain amount of money starting in nineteen twenty three with ten shillings a
year to fund the BBC. And that's like your household license to listen to and then later watch stuff on television and listen on the radio, like.
You have to have a license to watch TV in the UK, is what you're saying.
Yeah, but they don't say, all right, now here's the codes to turn it on. I mean, I guess, is it just like an honor system?
That's what Kyle. So we had to follow up with Kyle or like, we do not get this license thing because it's just you Brits just take it as like it's just the most normal thing in the world. It's not. So it turns out that it does seem to be on an honor system, and that most people follow that in part because most people have honor. But also there's apparently a very real threat that the BBC will send out some government goons to show up at your door step and be like, hey, are you do you have
a TV license? And I guess some people think that it's it's incumbent upon them to open their door and let the person in to see that they have a TV and they can't produce a license and you can get fined one thousand dollars.
And apparently they have trucks.
They say pounds thank you, which is more than one thousand dollars. You should have also said the goon squad, I should have let me just retake this whole Let's just start at the beginning again.
You have to put on your newsboy cap and get out your cup of tea to really get in the zone, you know.
Really my Lipton's BlackBerry tea. Yeah, but apparently they will come to your house. So think about this, right. If you are not in the UK and you subscribe to Netflix and you get Netflix because you're using a friend's password, imagine if Netflix showed up on your doorstep and said are you getting Netflix for free?
Yeah?
And you say no, and they say prove it, let me in, let me go, let me go check and see if you have Netflix, because we know you don't have your own account. That's essentially what they do with that.
Yeah. I believe the Color TV license for twenty twenty five is one hundred and seventy four pounds fifty twenty two point eight million people pay this about twelve percent, don't They just sort of evade that cost for a total of about three point eight billion pounds that goes to the BBC and the government. But this license expires in twenty twenty seven, and there's a lot of himming and howeing going on over what's going to happen next.
Yeah. Over the course of its history, these ten year charters that they get that get renewed and reviewed. Usually the government wants something in return, or at the very least rakes them over the coals publicly. But it does seem from what I was reading that this does seem like to be a particularly dire situation for the BBC in their charter.
Yeah, for sure.
So there's a lot of people who are like, no, let's get rid of the ABC altogether, or let's let them compete in the free market. They can sell ads. It's an unfair, aggressive tax where the poorest people have to pay the most percentage of their income for it, whether they want to or not, just to watch TV. There's a lot of competing ideas for what to do, and the BBC's like, how about this, let's just not change anything and increase the license fee a little bit.
And they're getting crickets back right now.
Yeah, they're getting crickets. So time will tell. In twenty twenty seven, will report back what happened, right, Yeah, yeah, a little follow up, But let's go back to the beginning, because they had a guiding light at the beginning which I was talking about, which was after the World War One,
the Great war. They really said, let's let's start this thing to embody what it means to be a Britain and to sort of get our common culture out there to the world through you know, sports obviously would come along, and music and interviews and documentaries and plays and things at the time. And there were three dudes early on that were the I guess the founders. Cecil Lewis, who was a fighter pilot, former fighter pilot.
Man, you were nailing the British pronunciations here.
He might have gone by Cecil, I don't know, a broadcaster named Arthur Burrows. And their first director General, who was the person in charge of the whole thing. His name was John I think, right.
I'm going with Wreath.
You're going with Wreath and the director General is in charge. But they also there's also a government board of governors that they work with or maybe answer to.
Right. And one of the things about the BBC, one of the reasons it's so venerated, it was a huge trailblazer thanks to these three guys in their vision. I saw that John Reith was described by the New World Encyclopedia as a man of high intelligence, great ambition, and rigid moral views and just like out of the gate, they set the standard for broadcasting, for broadcast journey for what it meant to kind of create a common culture. Remember in our Saturday Morning Cartoon episode we talked about
how Saturday Morning Cartoons played like a bardic function. Yeah, it gives a common culture to a bunch of people. That was like part of their goal was to create a common British culture and that happened right after World War One. At the time, nobody had anything in common, so it was a good thing that the BBC came along.
Yeah, and this was in the infancy of radio at the time and such that Kyle dug up this kind of fun thing. I guess there was a sign in some of the recording studios and broadcasting studios where it said you will all caps deafen thousands. So people didn't know what they were doing, so they really had to kind of figure this whole thing out. It was a very intimidating thing, you know, early on to sit in front of a microphone when no one had done that
kind of thing before. And even Arthur Burrows as a broadcaster, he said broadcasting to millions was awful and they were worried about getting you know, quote some madman on the microphone who could do a lot of damage. So it was a it was a pretty intimidating thing at first when they were getting their feet wet.
Yeah, And so for people outside of Britain too, the BBC was it. They were the only radio station, not because there were there was no competition. They had a monopoly for years and years and years. They had a monopoly on radio and then television. So just bear that in mind. So it was really incumbent upon these guys, and they realized their responsibility to be the provider of mass communication for their entire nation, and they took that
responsibility seriously. And they started the whole thing out on November fourteenth, nineteen twenty two, with the call sign TWOLO that was their broadcast license from the Marconi Company, and Arthur Burrows said, Hello, Hello, this is too low the London station of the British Broadcasting Company call too WELLO calling, and that was my Arthur Burroughs.
It's pretty good. Keep in mind everyone, he was very nervous on the first day. That's why Josh sounded liked that. Then he went on to just sort of get the content underway. He did a one minute weather and news bulletin and this is adorable. Then he repeated it slower so people could take notes to I guess, read back to their family. And from the get go they didn't call it BBC English at the time. What it was called was received pronunciation. But it was this sort of
accent that they all agreed would be the accent. They didn't like regional accents coming on and everyone sort of doing their own thing. They opted for this middle class southern English that like at the Eton School, where it was just sort of the same.
Yeah, apparently have been generating among aristocrats since like the
eighteenth century. And at that same time there were colonists who were setting up the call colonies in North America who had separated from that, and so there are in some ways a lot more similarities to how Americans talk today to how people in Shakespeare's time would have spoken than the people in Great Britain today and the UK have with the people in Shakespeare's time, especially hard ours like Shakespeare would have been like what is a car
or the h's instead of Henry Higgins, right, you would say Henry Higgins. That's how Americans say it. So those two big differences. That's how Brits used to speak before, like I guess about the eighteen hundreds.
Yeah, and so they you know, they got the ball rolling very fast on all kinds of content. In the nineteen twenties, they had something called the Children's Hour, They started playing live concerts at some of London's you know, venerated halls. In nineteen twenty seven, they started sports broadcasting with the FA Cup Final, which the very first ever
live commentary for any event, not just sports. And by the end of the nineteen twenties, by the end of that first decade, really just eight years, they had two million license holders. Those were households, so they had a lot more than that as active listeners, and they were a venerated, respected institution kind of right out of the.
Gate, yes, But before that they ran into their first major headbut with government. And I say, we take a break and come back and talk about.
That about chew chill.
That's right, We'll be right back, so, Chuck. We talked about them headbutting with government and the first time it ever happened was with the nineteen twenty six general strike, which is when a bunch of people go on strike from all different kinds of professions, and they were doing
this in sympathy with coal miners. I think more than a million coal miners were having their wages reduced, and so a bunch of different people from different professions went on strike, and that included print workers at the newspapers. So the newspapers effectively shut down except for the British Gazette, which was a government owned newspaper. And the government owned newspapers like this strike sucks and everybody who likes it sucks too. But that left the BBC is the only
form of mass communication reporting on this stuff. And apparently Winston Churchill was not very happy with the idea that the BBC, the government owned monopoly, was not just being like this strike sucks and anybody likes it sucks. They were reporting neutrally on it.
Yeah, he was Finance Minister at the time, but he had a lot of sway, obviously, and he was like, hey, I think we should declare an emergency and take over the BBC. And the Director General resisted. Reith did and he said, no, we're not gonna let that happen. But they it seems like they were strong armed into not airing the other side as much. One example is when they had Prime Minister Stanley bald went on at one
point and this was at Rice's house. They were broadcasting out of the leader of the opposition, Ramsey McDonald was like, well, I'd get to come on now, too, right, and the government refused that. So they remained, you know, through the rest of the strike somewhat impartial. They didn't let McDonald on, but they did block Churchill basically from being on the BBC until he resigned in nineteen thirty eight. So they were like, you're never coming on here.
No, that's quite a coup actually, because Churchill talk and give speeches, so throughout the forties or the beginning of the forties through World War Two, they managed to hang on and keep reporting as best as possible. The radio definitely did. It became a government propagand it's outlet. Some of the European powers that had been overrun by the Nazis and it made their way to the UK used the BBC to broadcast to their people back home, or I think the Polish army in exile, a Polish government
in exile sent coded messages to Polish resistance forces. It still kept going. Apparently their studio was bombed in nineteen forty and it took out a lot of the top few floors, but luckily they were broadcasting out of the basement still, and I guess the guy who was reading the news at the time dusted the script off and kept reading. You heard kind of a boom in the background, but the news reader basically didn't miss a beat.
Yeah, they kept going because they had that charge to do so. In the nineteen thirties is when TV came along. So at the beginning there was a Scotsman named John Logi Baird. This was in nineteen twenty six where he had this really archaic at you know, I guess it was pretty advanced for the time, but archaic now a mechanical system where they had rotating discs scanning and displaying images. And so they said, all right, that's good enough for now.
It's nineteen thirty two. No one will know that this isn't very good.
I can't imagine.
They put out a very experimental thirty line service to demonstrate that it didn't look so great. But it didn't take very long before they had Marconi came along again and said that he had a better system along with EMI, and in nineteen thirty six they had the first high def television service launched from Alexandra Palace in North London. And at the time, high deaf meant two hundred and forty lines of resolution or more.
Yeah, which is nuts because TV high def today has something like two hundred and fifty. Yeah, at least at least so the BBC TV so BBC Radio continued broadcasting throughout the war, but BBC Television shutdown because apparently there was a lot of concern that the signal could be used to lock on as a target and bomb Alexandra Palace,
where they were broadcasting from. So they're like, well, we don't want to risk that, we'll just stop broadcasting, and they did for seven years, from nineteen thirty nine and nineteen forty six.
Yeah, right after they got this new thing in their households. Yeah, they were like all right for seven years. Can you imagine being a child? No, I mean there was the most kids content at the time, but still anything on a TV screen, imagine was hard to lose after you tasted it.
I know. And it was around for three years, so that was enough time to get people pretty strong out on TV.
Right, Yeah, you know, huh.
So, remember, these guys are figuring this stuff out as they go along, Like the BBC were trailblazers in just about everything they ever dipped their toe into. And one of the ways that they did figure stuff out was basically being dropped into the middle of it. And a really good example of that came in the fifties in nineteen fifty three when Queen Elizabeth the Second the sequel,
when she was coronated. But basically the BBC was like, this is one of the biggest things we've ever covered, if not the biggest thing we've ever covered so far. So we're gonna we're just gonna throw everything we can at it. So they started developing new technology, They figured out new ways of broadcasting. They figured out like rolling news coverage from you know, station to station, and it was quite successful from what I understand too. Plus also a lot of people bought TV sets as a result.
Yeah, so they could see that thing.
Yeah, so they could see what Queen Elizabeth looked like.
Finally, yeah, they told us on the radio, we could see what she looked like on TV. So went out and bought one.
She's got pretty nice hair. She's wearing a tiara. I think those are white gloves or else. She's quite pale. I can't see from here is that a corgie?
So you mentioned the monopoly. That monopoly was eventually broken in nineteen fifty five when ITV into independent television was launched, the oldest commercial network in Britain. And then eventually in nineteen eighty two Channel four would come along and you know, all of a sudden, programming started to get somewhat interesting in like the nineteen fifties, because you started to get a lot more. You know, it wasn't just let's do the coronation or this concert from Royal Albert Hall or
something like that. They started to get into comedy and sort of true entertainment, for better or for worse. One example of for worse was a show called The Black and White Minstrel Show in nineteen fifty seven. They had sixteen million viewers for that show and it ran from nineteen fifty seven to nineteen seventy eight. A super super super racist minstrel show. We will say from nineteen sixty two.
Starting in nineteen sixty two that the chief accountant of the VBSA was like, this is a disgrace and like really racist, and so it took another sixteen years for BBC one to say, yeah, maybe you're right.
Yeah. That chief accountant's name was Barry Thorn, and he was quite vociferous about getting this thing off the air. And one of his memos that he sent, he got a reply from one of the higher ups that said, for heaven's sake, shut up. They just buried their heads in the sand. They would not accept that this was an offensive, racist show. And I read like even in nineteen fifty seven, this was offensive and racist, let alone
nineteen seventy eight. And if you go and watch it, it is jaw droppingly racist.
Like, yeah, they're just not good.
It isn't It's like Lawrence Welk terrible. That's essentially it was. Imagine Lawrence welkword. Every man is in blackface for no reason whatsoever. There's no context to it. They're just in blackface doing all these different things and doing all these different song performances. It's it's insane, Like you should definitely go check it out, Like if you're not just like completely staggered by it, I will be surprised.
Yeah, there may be. You know, check in with yourself.
That's a good litmus test watching the Black and White Minstrel Show and seeing what you think of it.
Yeah, that should be the test moving forward.
I think it's so nuts, dude, just.
Hook people up to a machine. Yep, it's nineteen sixties. Now we're really flying through the decades. BBC two has come along in nineteen sixty four, and Color TV with a U comes along in nineteen sixty seven, and this is when some of the legendary shows over there of all time came about in the sixties, not the least of which, from nineteen sixty three was the sci fi series Doctor Who Who exactly, a show that I've never watched me, but I know people love it.
Oh yeah, I mean it's been a cult classic for seventy five years. Yeah, seventy years sixty something. That's a long time for a cult classic to be around, you know. Yeah, think about it. Freaks and Geeks was one season.
Yeah, good point.
There was also one that I'd like to see. I hadn't heard of it yet, but apparently it was enormous and I can understand why. It's Kenneth Clark's Civilization For me nine, this apparently was like the first Prestige series that they ever came out with, and it was basically like Kenneth Clark going over the Dark Ages up to the twentieth century and talking about the philosophy of different eras and what was going on and how things developed
and how people got along and interacted. It sounds really amazing.
Yeah, for sure, I want to see that too. Maybe we should get an Eyeplayer. We'll get to what that is later, okay, or sign up for Eyeplayer. I don't think it's an object right, No, it's not. Satire came along in nineteen sixty two with David Frost. That was the week that was. I can only think that John Oliver's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is just the title itself might be a slight nod. Yeah, that was the week that was.
I mean, he's always struck me as pretty British, so I'm sure he's aware of that show.
And that was, of course the great David Frost.
Yeah, yeah, the one who got Nixon to basically admit that he was a crook.
Yeah, that's the dude.
There's another that was in nineteen seventy seven on CBS.
I'm sure BBC was quite jealous Frost Nixon.
Yeah or else they didn't care because it was Nixon and he's American.
That's right. But we also got Monty Path's Flying Circus in Benny Hill in the late sixties.
That's right. And then also the Foresight Saga, which I hadn't heard of, but apparently it has quite a bit of similarity to Dalton Abbey and they're about to reboot it for the third time. So I guess Dalton Abbey fans can move over to the Foresight Saga.
I think that's already out. Actually, oh my god, the new one?
Is it really?
Yeah? I mean it's been around since sixty seven. I think there's a new six part series that's also that's also out. If not now, then maybe coming into the holidays, because it's definitely this year.
Okay, cool?
Yeah?
Are you into Downton Abby? I don't remember.
I love Dunton, Abby. I'll watch it all good. Yeah, it's not taxing on the brain or anything. It's just it's exactly what it should be, which is that just real easy to watch upstairs downstairs? Soapi drama?
Nice?
Yeah?
I like it okay. And then also what came along in the sixties in nineteen sixty four was the music show Top of the Pops. We've talked about that a few times. You know, remember Queen made their Bohemian Rhapsody video to get out of having the lip sync on Top of the Pops.
Yeah, I mean legendary show hosted by noted awful person Jimmy Sabil, who we're going to talk about later.
Yeah, for sure. Imagine if we just didn't mention him. Right, So we you said we were blazing through the de We're about to blaze so fast. We're going to combine the seventies and eighties together because a couple of really big things happened in well, starting in the late seventies and early eighties. The first thing was nineteen seventy nine when Life on Earth premiered, and that is David Attenborough's first really big, massive wildlife documentary series. It took three
years to make. They went to over one hundred locations, had a one million pound price tag and I was like, wow, that's got to be a lot. That's only five million pounds today. So imagine getting this groundbreaking series for a mere five million pounds. That's quite a deal. But this this thing just completely changed wildlife documentaries. Every wildlife documentary you see traces itself in its style back to life on Earth.
Yeah, you know, we can't go over all these shows, and I know people are going to be like, what about One Foot in the Grave and my favorite show? But we should mention my favorites, one of which was Faulty Towers. That was another that post college, when I was living in New Jersey with my British friend from college. He introduced me to Faulty Towers and The black Adder and they were just a couple of the best shows ever.
I mean it was a comedy that I hadn't seen before and just really really great stuff.
Yeah. For some reason, I got introduced to Faulty Towers before I ever watched Flying Circus too, so I was like, Oh, that's the guy from Faulty Towers.
Oh really, m hm, Oh that's funny.
And you mentioned the Goon Squad. I remember we talked about them when we did an episode on I guess Monty Python. Did we ever do an episode of My Python? Because they came up we did?
Okay, I think that was one of our La podfasts.
It was totally yeah. Yeah, so they were deeply influenced by The The Goon Show. Yeah I say Goon Squad, didn't I.
Yeah, yeah, I think I said Goon Squad earlier, so I think I probably influenced that.
Thank you, thanks for my fault jumping on that grenade for me. But it's The Goon Show and it was one of the first absurdist comedies that really influenced shows to come, like Monty Python, but it was just on the radio, which makes it even more creative if you ask me.
Yeah, amazing. Spike Milligan created it and it's probably most notable these days for where Peter Seller's got his start. He was in the first couple of series what we call Seasons, along with Harry Seacombe, and I believe Michael Benteen took over Peter Sellers. And like I said, there's so many shows to mention, but we can't not mention east Enders because my former roommate Justin talked about it a lot. He was from East London and it was It's one of the biggest shows in the history of the BBC.
It's basically like the British version of friends.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm not going to comment on.
That, but that was the TV show and still is. East Enders is still on correct, I don't.
Know, is it.
I'm pretty sure it is.
That would be surprise me. It started in nineteen eighty five and was a really big hit out of the gate, and it's you know, it's melodrama. Kyle points out that it hits all the sort of stereotypical like soap opera archetypes, but they've also through the years, like I think most good shows, I've gotten some applause for tackling things like some of the realities of the East End of London through history.
Yeah, like HIV, unemployment, just stuff that you don't always see on the TV. It was kind of groundbreaking in that sense for sure. Don't call it a soap opera though, Chuck. If you want to go soap opera is you got to get back to the radio and just find the Archers, which is the world's longest running soap opera. They have over twenty thousand episodes, so almost as many as we
can now, and it's set out in rural England. Apparently it's great, or it has been from time to time, so I've never heard of it and never heard it, but I may pick up an Archer's habit. I'm not sure then, yeah, or you.
Could just watch Archer instead on FX.
It's great. It's basically the same thing.
The radio was still going on. You know, I know we're talking a lot about TV, but you mentioned the Archers. The quality of radios. You know, if you listen to our AM Radio episode, everything just on. It kind of started getting better technologically in the sixties and seventies. They
were more ubiquitous, so it reached more ears. But you know, this touches on a lot of our episodes because if you listen to our Pirate Radio episode, you'll know that pirate radio was a legitimate threat to the BBC Radio Radio Caroline and Radio London. It wasn't just you know, like a few hundred people listening like they were playing popular music and sort of dominating that scene in the mid to late sixties, and the BBC is like, we got a better Yeah.
The reason why there were pirate radio stations is again because it was illegal to run a radio station because BBC had the monopoly on it. So they were like, well, like like you said, we need to keep up, so they launched Radio one in nineteen sixty seven. Apparently it's the most listened to radio station in the entire world for no small reason, in part to Pete Tong and his Essential Selection show that ran in the nineties. Did you ever listen to that?
I know the name, but I don't know if I ever listened to that.
It was like DJ sets that he hosted. They were really good. It was a good show.
Yeah. Well, they eventually would end that monopoly five years later in nineteen seventy two on the radio when they passed legislation that commercial radio could be a thing. And that's when the LBC, the London Broadcasting Company, was the first one to hit the legitimate airwaves. Is not pirate radio, And apparently it was. You know, things moved along okay through the seventies and eighties, but it was really a nineteen nineties where local independent radio like super took off over there.
Yeah. I think by that time. By nineteen ninety five, the BBC had a smaller audience than some of its competitors for the very first time. Yeah, but the BBC plotted along. Don't feel bad for them, as we'll see they know how to pick themselves up and dust themselves off and say what's next for the BBC? I say, we take a break and we come back and find out what's next.
Chuck, let's do it all right, We're back and we promised what's next for the BBC? And what was next? Was Margaret Thatcher saying I hate you BBC. Yeah, she was elected in nineteen seventy nine, had a strong I guess, aversion to the BBC and their privileged status right out of the gate. She wanted she was all about the free market. She was like, nap, this should be in
the free market with everyone else. The editorial editorializing should align with the national interest of basically what I think is a national interest.
That's right.
And there were a number of things that happened in the nineteen eighties that I guess you could call them either missteps or just honest broadcasting that Thatcher did not like.
No, especially covering the Falklands War or the troubles in Northern Ireland. They weren't just like screw Northern Ireland, screw the IRA or screw the Argentinians like they like you said, reported fairly and in some cases we're accused of treachery. Apparently Peter Snow on Newsnight called the troops the British when they were invading the Falklands rather than our troops, and he was accused of treachery. And they once interviewed IRA member for a I think a Panorama episode. Yeah.
Panorama's kind of like Frontline from what I can tell, It's like a hard hit investigative documentary show. And you just couldn't do that. You couldn't talk to the IRA, you couldn't give them any kind of airtime, you couldn't air their viewpoints, and they tried to in the mid eighties with that Panorama episode, but I guess I never saw the light a day because of the government.
Yeah, and that the whole situation would eventually lead to the oulster of the Director General at the time, Alistair Milne. And you know, he was everything I read about him said that he was doing a pretty good job. But it was you know, Thatcher was in power. She wanted him out and in nineteen eighty seven he was basically kind of strong earned doubt and Thatcher's you know, choice person, Marmaduke Hussey was installed and you know, just to be more government friendly.
Yeah, apparently, I was reading about Marmaduke Hussey. He was described in his obituary as cleverer than he looked, but almost certainly not as clever as he thought. He said that when he was appointed to the BBC, he was so unfamiliar with it that he and his wife had to look up the address and the phone book to see where he should be going. So he was not like an obvious choice, and he was clearly the choice that was like, this guy's going to listen to everything I want, thought Thatcher.
Yeah. Well, and I read some about what Melne thought of like kind of the board after that and the management after that, and he was like, it's just it's a bunch of amateurs, people that don't know what they're doing, like beyond the fact that they're just cronies for Thatcher, like they're not good at this job.
Yeah, yeah, apparently he Hussey was known to this point for having almost run the Daily Mail into the ground and then almost run the Telegraph into the ground too, so he was definitely not an obvious choice.
Like I said, yeah, fast forward a lot, actually, if you want to go all the way up to Tony Blair in the twenty first century. One of their big first sort of controversies of that era was the Iraq Dossier.
And May two thousand and three there was a defense correspondent named Andrew Gilligan who got on Radio four and alleged that the Iraq WMD dossier had been quote sexed up, something that everyone understands as being the truth now, and Blair's press chief, Alistair Campbell, went on the counter and a big feud sort of erupted between the BBC and the government and director general there, Greg Dyke was well, I guess he was sacked as well while he resigned but kind of another strong arm.
Yeah, that was a huge, huge deal. And one of the most shocking things that came out of all of this is that Andrew Gilligan's source on this matter was a guy named David Kelly, who was a UN weapons expert, so he really knew what he was talking about, but he had been an anonymous whistleblower up to this point.
It leaked out somehow that he was the source. Yeah, this huge government contray that basically said the UK faked all of the stuff that helped America invade Iraq, and David Kelly was found dead, apparently by suicide in the woods by his house. Yeah, it's very sad too. Apparently there's a certain amount of people who are like, I don't think he took his life.
Yeah. As soon as I read that, I was like, I mean there was an investigation apparently, and the government was cleared of wrongdoing.
But you know, yeah, but I mean that'd be pretty vindictive if you think about it, Like, I can really buy the government killing this guy to silence and before he can share this information, but to do it in retribution seems even Wow.
Yeah, for sure. The late nineties come along and the digital revolution is upon us, and Director of General at that time John Burt, started BBC Online. He had visited the States and kind of realized that that was the future,
and it really took off. They had at the time just sort of a piecemeal network of web pages, and in nineteen ninety seven they really kicked it off in ernest with BBC Online with a general election and a rolling news website for the first time was established after the death of Princess Diana, so it was hotly trafficked obviously.
Yeah, apparently nineteen million people watched her funeral, the largest ever broadcast for them. And one of the things that came out of this, and again this was really forward thinking. We're talking nineteen ninety seven and they're like, we're going to put a substantial amount of money in creating our
web presence. One of the things that came out of it was that iPlayer you were mentioning, yeah, Yeah, which was launched in two thousand and seven and initially it was like did you miss EastEnders this week, Well, come watch it on iPlayer, And this was not a thing at the time, like this was a really groundbreaking thing for the BBC to come up with.
Yeah, there was a lot of lobbying by rivals, like commercial rivals, so they had a lot of constraints at first that you know, hey you can watch the Senators. It was just for seven days at first, but it was free. Kyle said it was very easy to use. I cannot attest to that, but Kyle said it was.
And by twenty twelve, eye Player was voted the UK's best brand and that was when they had the London Olympics going on, and that's a great time to have something like Eyeplayer so you can catch the Olympics if
you're not watching it live. But then Netflix would come along in twenty twelve overseas and they were free from those regulations and they could mine all the top shows they wanted that they could, you know, cut deals with and all of a sudden, I think the BBC had a restriction on their best shows for like seven years. So Netflix really put a herding on Eyeplayer for a while.
Yeah. I guess their audience share in the UK went from forty percent to fifteen percent once Netflix showed up and I saw the adolescent. This is the most watched show in the UK, I believe in history. It's pretty good. And I guess the BBC's like, we can't, we can't compete with this, like our Eeplayer. Even the Netflix chief executive said the Eyeplayer really blazed the trail for video on demand. Yeah, but they're like we can't, we can't
keep up with this. And it doesn't really matter because everybody loves Eyeplayer, and I guess you would not necessarily choose between Netflix and Eyeplayer. Maybe some do. I'm not quite sure what the competition problem is.
Yeah, I'm with you, because it's.
Not like BBC's like, give me some money for Eyeplayer, like that's included in your license that you pay every year. Maybe they just don't like to look bad.
Well, I mean, you don't want a dying product on your company, you know.
Yeah, I don't think it is dying. But yeah, Netflix took a huge bite out of it.
Yeah, for sure. But BBC is still around. BBC one still reaches millions of people on just on the t Radio four reaches about ten million people weekly. The sort of knock against or the crack against BBC, I guess crack in the American sense, not the Irish sense. I guess you would say the knock over there is that it's like for you know, for the senior set, like you know, there are people that watch the BBC or in their sixties and you know it's sort of not
not the way forward it was our past. Yeah that's right, Chuck, you play funeral music.
Or something so well, I don't know yet that actually remains to be seen. I don't. I can't imagine that the BBC is going to just be done away with, but it is quite possible that they're going to face some some real change changes because in the twenty tens, the BBC it was just missed up and scandal and problem after problem. Apparently they worked on one hundred million pound digital media initiative where they were going to come up with a great archive that's going to be super searchable,
and it just went nowhere. So they just wasted you know, I think ninety seven million pounds on it, and Brits were outraged, which shows you, you know, that sense of ownership that the average British person has for the BBC, whereas like, if you found out, you know, Nickelodeon spent one hundred million dollars in a failed initiative, even though you're paying through your cable subscription in part for Nickelodeon, you wouldn't it would It would matter not. It's like Nickelodeon,
do whatever you want with the money. But Brits feel like that about the BBC. That's the impression I have from that response.
Yeah, well, yeah, it's tied. Nickelodeon's not tied to the government. I think that's one of the big differences.
Okay. Sure.
In twenty seventeen, the Conservative government said hey, we need to start publishing these salaries and they revealed a gender a pretty substantial gender pay gap, and people were also not happy that dear arding executives got big payoffs and I was like, ooh, what's big. Yeah. Deputy Deputy Director General Mark Bifer got a nine hundred and forty nine thousand pound payment in twenty eleven, and David Zaslov said, hold my pint, guys, right, he made fifty two million
bucks last year. Yeah, And they said, oh no, no, no, you can't make that much money, and so they're cutting it back to like thirty something million this year.
That's funny. There's like that's too much money. Sorry, you don't get that much. And he's like, okay, how much do I get?
Thirty something?
Yeah, I guess I can make do. There was then like all sorts of terrible sex scandals too. Jimmy Seville kicked it all off when he died in twenty eleven, and the a floodgate opened where people just started coming forward being like, he sexually abused me in the sixties, he sexually abused me in the seventies, eighties, nineties, two thousands. He apparently had possibly hundreds of victims, a lot of them chilled, some of them under like age sixteen, a
pretty substantial number. And it turned out that a lot of people in the BBC were well aware of this and essentially spent their time covering this up because Jimmy Seville was just so revered in such a VIP that he was treated with that much deference and like your career would end if you went had to head with him or even thought about it out loud.
Yeah, that's how much power he had as the host of Top of the Pops. Very sad.
Yeah, imagine like Dick Clark doing that. You can't you can't do it.
In twenty twenty three, just a couple of years ago, Hugh Edwards, who was the lead presenter BBC News at ten for twenty years since two thousand and three, played guilty to sex offenses as well, and a Master Chef host Greg Wallace this year was sacked after dozens of sexual misconduct allegations were upheld. So yeah, they had a long run of bad headlines leading all the way up into like very very recently with the Trump administration.
Right, Yeah, there's a current scandal going on where Panorama again, their investigative documentary series. They just released an episode, I think it's the most recent one as of today, on Trump and the technocrats and in it, they spliced together his speech that he gave on January sixth, which makes it look like he directly called for violence, and the I guess BBC was like, we regret this error. And Trump's response was that he was going to sue for
no less than one billion dollars. Yeah, that's the first part of it. The second part is that at the same time this is like, these are just body blows coming one after the other.
Yeah.
An internal memo is leak that was basically said, I think outright that the BBC is two left wing biased and gave examples of it. That memo got and it's like, okay, not only do the conservatives think that the it's left wing biased, you think that it's left wing bias BBC, or that you're left wing biased. So this is what's going on as they're negotiating the charter that renews in twenty twenty seven.
Yeah, so the stage is set for, you know, a pretty big battle is brewing on what that charter is going to or what that yeah license fee is going to look like and if it's even you know, like we mentioned, people are calling it a regressive tax. I believe that the BBC used to cover or the government used to cover it for people over seventy. Now the BBC is responsible for that. But yeah, I mean it's gonna be really interesting to see how it all plays out.
Yeah. I fear for the BBC a little bit.
I love you BBC. Get your act together, is what I say.
Sure, why not you got anything else about the BBC or the biblic or the BEB.
I got nothing else.
Okay I don't either, which means everybody, it's time for listener mail.
We got lots of good pop chart response one of our more beloved episodes of Late and a lot of people said eat them frozen, and here's one. Hey guys, longtime listener from Santa Rosa, California. You guys have been the soundtrack to so many moments of my life and it brought so much joy and moments and times to tell fun facts. So thank you. The recent pop tart episode, I was waiting to see if you had mentioned the ultimate all caps way to enjoy pop tarts, and that
is frozen. However you did mention it, and Chuck shuddered with what seemed to be terror at the thought. I don't remember doing that, but I guess I did. Okay, strongly urge you to both try it. It's the pop chart, you know, in love, but in frozen treat form. Do your taste buds of favor and go pop a couple in the freezer, then pop them in your mouths. And that is from Matt f and Matt you'll be glad to know, because they're urging of another listener who said
cut those crust off first. I went and got a couple of those brown sugar simons. I cut the crust off, put them back in the package, and I threw him in the freezer, and I'll enjoy them at some point this week.
Oh you haven't enjoyed them yet.
No, no, no, I just put him in this afternoon, and so I'm gonna before we record it. And I'm not an afternoon pop charter.
Okay, you're a morning guy or evening.
Oh late night, my friend.
Okay, so you need to report back.
Okay, Yeah, this means I can't butter them, but I'm willing to forgo that.
Yeah, you could use cold pats of butter, that would be good.
Or ooh, do you know I could do is melt some butter and just dip that frozen in there bite by bite.
Oh yeah, it's kind of like a reverse fried Snickers.
Yeah, I'll report back.
Okay, we'll see Okay, And who is that from?
That was from Matt F.
Thanks a lot, Matt F. That was a great email and we'll let you know what Chuck thinks. And in the meantime, if you want to be like Matt F and send us a great email, you can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.