Connected Histories of the BBC

A partnership project led by the University of Sussex

We have: Made an online catalogue from seven oral history collections about the BBC Collected wonderful and challenging stories for the BBC Centenary website Written about the people who made the BBC.

Our catalogue contains hundreds of oral history interviews.

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Interview with Professor David Hendy

“The thing that is most exciting about oral history is that even though you have other resources to go on when telling history: archives, written records, memoirs and so on, oral history gets us straight to the personalities. And a lot of history is of course about policies, and about institutions, and about structures but it is also about people”.

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Interview with Olive Shapley

“I was standing on the station platform one day, I cannot remember which station, and there was a great advertisement for Cleethorpes – a great big colourful advertisement of a laughing happy family with their buckets and spades and you know. There they were having the time of their lives looking well fed and tanned. And on the other platform opposite were the real Mancunians, you know, who might never get to Cleethorpes. And it was a time of great distress up here much more than it was in the South. And I felt I wanted to reflect this in some way. And I remember going to County Durham for the first time and seeing miners sitting on their hunkers on the corners of streets and thinking you know BBC should be doing something about this”.

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Interview with Tony Laryea

“The BBC was sort of establishment and there were loads of unrepresented or misrepresented ideas and communities out there. There was, there were women’s groups, there were sexual minorities, there were libertarians, trade unionists, people whose voices weren’t being heard and so on. So we made these programmes – we made a programme with transsexuals. We made a programme with the Chiswick’s Women’s Aid. Night Cleaners. We made a programme with the Responsible Society”.

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Interview with Sir David Attenborough

“We got a call that we had to go to Number 10 immediately because the Prime Minister wished to speak to the nation. And I had to produce the broadcast. And it was in the middle of the Suez Crisis. And I made my way upstairs and found my astonishment and indeed horror that the Prime Minister was in bed. And at the back of the bed there was a line on the shelf. There was a line of bottles, of tablets. And he was extremely ill – he was taking tablets as we were there”.

Collage of interviewees

Interview with Eugeniusz Smolar

“And it was done in the BBC proper manner: this is what Solidarity says, this is what political opposition says, this is what the government says, this is what the state of economy is because it is important. This is relation with the outside world whether the Soviet Union or the West. And at the end the Church”.

Interview with Lorna Clarke

“How will you do it and how does that work when, for example, you are Radio 2 and you have very well paid established presenters who are male, already employed and delivering big audiences, how do you, how can you, pay an equally experienced female presenter less”?

100 Voices That Made the BBC

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Interviewer, “Was there a sense of being some kind of an elite body at Alexandra Palace”?

Sir James Redmond, “Oh yes. Yes we were quite convinced that we were the elite of broadcasting. We probably weren’t but we knew more than anyone else because nobody knew anything at all. Yes we were very proud”.

David Hendy has written The BBC: A People’s History

Image of the cover of The BBC: A People’s History

We have also held public events at which listeners and viewers shared their memories of the BBC.

Collage of interviewees

Interview with Joan Stevens

“Then we started having an afternoon programme of bands on the radio and so I’d make an excuse so that I didn’t have to go to Sunday School”.

Interview with Barry Gooders

“I think I heard the declaration of war”.

Interview with Joy Rigby

“I was listening to just, you know, it’s almost like I need to know what’s going on and want to hear”.

Interview with John Henty

“Of course, I’ve been listening to Children’s Hour which was the programme between five and six o’clock”.

Interview with Elaine Denison

“In our household we watched more BBC than we did the other channel”.

Interview with Becky Grisedale-Sherry

“It was funny to think about how they tackled social issues like drug use and bullying and that sort of thing”.

Connected Histories of the BBC was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Project partners included the BBC, the Science Museum Group, the British Entertainment History Project, and Mass Observation.