Read Online This New Noise by Charlotte Higgins - Free Book Online

and theatre owners. Michael Grade ran BBC1 in the 1980s and eventually became the BBC’s chairman (2004–6). Lew, Leslie and Bernie were born the Winogradskys, sons of a family that had emigrated from Ukraine in 1905 to two rooms over a shoe shop in the East End of London. Lewstarted out dancing the charleston in East Ham, becoming an agent for music-hall and variety acts when his knees started to give out when he was twenty-seven; he rose to become a mogul of commercial television. The Grade family story – a remarkable ascent from Brick Lane to presiding over the BBC within two generations – is in itself a metaphor of the manner in which popular British entertainment shifted from the stage to the small screen, and a reminder of how powerful the impresarios of popular entertainment were within the BBC, especially one that was competing with ITV for eyes on screen.
    When the writer Dennis Potter was asked about television for The New Priesthood (1970), a volume on television co-edited by Joan Bakewell, he told her, ‘The main criticism with television is that it just seems an endlessly grinding thing – a burning monk, an advertisement, and Harold Wilson, and a pop show, and Jimmy Savile, all seem the same sort of experience.’ But, on the other hand, compared with the ‘middle-class privilege of the theatre, only television is classless, multiple, and, of course, people will switch on and people will choose. It’s the biggest platform in the world’s history, and writers who don’t want to kick and elbow their way onto it must be disowning something in themselves.’ The BBC, he said, ‘does genuinely give one the chance to create … I think it’s a federation, really, of various pressure groups. The Wednesday Play as a unit became, as it were, its own little force within this huge stadium called the BBC.’
    In the 1960s, the Wednesday Play put out Ken Loach films such as Cathy Come Home and Potter’s own Vote , Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton. It was a purple patch in the BBC’s cultural history: a time when the right people and conditions for making great art collided. Stephen Frears, now best known for feature films, directed in the BBC in the 1970s, often working on Alan Bennett’s TV plays, starting with A Day Out (1972). He was operating in Loach’s slipstream. Loach had, he said, ‘just invented television films. I mean he literally invented them.’
    Absorbing the influence of the Italian neo-realists and Czech cinema, ‘he had stumbled on a whole new story of Britain which had never really been told’, added Frears. ‘The BBC had a great subject: working-class, post-war Britain was being revealed.’ Frears, a bearlike, crumpled man whom I met at his regular cafe in Notting Hill, said, ‘I tell you what: it’s really the growth of management you should be writing about. One man ran the drama department. You fitted into a process that was a perfectly intelligent process, and you were working with the best writers, it seemed to me, in the country. I could see if you weren’t one of the writers they were interested in you wouldn’t agree with me but – Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, Adrian Mitchell. What are you supposed to do? Complain?’ Bright people were lurking down every corridor ‘and it sort of rubbed off on you. It was a very creative time.’
    It is dangerous to look back to the BBC’s past and identify golden ages (and a flick through back issues of the Radio Times puts paid to such notions: there has always been plenty of forgettable or mediocre programming among the wonderful stuff). In truth, there have been moments when artists and the times aligned andgreat things were created: one thinks of Monty Python and its successors, or the emergence of the alternative comedians of the 1980s such as French and Saunders, Rory Bremner and Victoria Wood, figures whom the then head of light entertainment, Jim Moir, deliberately sought out to give comedy on BBC2 a different flavour from that of