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1978
- The last time Margaret Matheson was at the BBC she made all hell break loose. In 1978, as producer of the Play for Today series, she was responsible for Roy Minton's Scum, about life in a borstal, which was banned by the corporation amid a huge media outcry.
www.independent.co.uk/news/media/rebel-without-cause-to-complain-the-new-boss-of-bbc-s-screen-one-has-learnt-to-treat-controversy-with-care-says-sue-summers-1447262.htmlRebel without cause to complain: The new boss of BBC's Screen ...
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In 1932, Hilda Matheson left the BBC. For five years she had held the highly influential position of Director of Talks, but she was not a member of John Reith’s Control Board, his inner core of...
- Reithian Values
- Divorce Scandal
- Pioneers Forced Out
- Bias, Resignations and Reformers Exiled
- Rex Lambert: Paranormal Investigator
- Norman Collins and The Creation of ITV
- Hugh Carleton Greene and The Culture Wars
- Nonconformity in The Age of Social Media
The man behind many of these very public arguments during the BBC’s first two decades was its chief executive, John Reith; an imposing figure who dominated the Corporation and seldom tolerated dissent or opposition. Reith has often been celebrated as the original mind behind “public broadcasting”, establishing a “Reithian” approach – centring on th...
But before any of these projects were complete, in 1929 Eckersley was named in a divorce case. Reith believed this would damage the reputation of the BBC, and he gave Eckersley no option but to resign. Reith was a strange man, authoritarian in his approach to management, hostile to criticism, and tortured by self-doubt. Reading his diaries in manus...
Some of the people who left the BBC over the years that followed went of their own accord, unwilling to work in the sort of place that the BBC was becoming. As Fielden, the aforementioned talks producer, recalled in his memoirs: Fielden went off to help establish broadcasting in India, then part of the British empire, where he felt similarly frustr...
However, bringing controversy to the microphone was a risky business when the BBC held a monopoly over all broadcasting in Britain. Who should be allowed to talk, and how could some sort of balance between differing opinions be struck? Establishing what was to become an enduring pattern, those on all sides of politics began to complain that the BBC...
One of the other notable nonconformists to leave Reith’s BBC was Richard “Rex” Lambert, editor of the Listener, the BBC’s “magazine for intelligent listeners”. In his spare time, Lambert was an aficionado of the paranormal, and he investigated the celebrated case of Gef the talking mongoose. Gef, supposedly either a spirit or an extraordinarily cle...
The 1930s were described by Maurice Gorham(who started his BBC career at the Radio Times and ended it as head of the television service) as “the great Stuffed Shirt era, marked internally by paternalism run riot, bureaucracy of the most hierarchical type, an administration system that made productive work harder instead of easier, and a tendency to...
Once commercial broadcasting was established in Britain, things were never the same again for the BBC. During the 1950s, it struggled to compete with ITV for viewers. That changed after 1960, when a new director general was appointed, Hugh Carleton Greene (brother of the novelist Graham Greene). He was a bit of a nonconformist himself, with a reput...
Corporate mismanagement has done serious damage to the BBC’s reputation over the last two decades, fuelling calls for a fundamental reform of British broadcasting and the abolition of the television licence fee. In the midst of all this, the BBC continues to struggle to contain its dissident voices. Its current royal charter mandates it to act as a...
- Simon Potter
In January, 1932, Matheson left the BBC and began working as the radio critic at The Observer, which was owned at the time by the Astor family.
May 2, 2016 · Hilda Matheson was the only woman to have been head-hunted by John Reith. In 1926 he persuaded her to leave her job as political secretary to Nancy Astor MP to take up the post of director of...
Apr 29, 2016 · Matheson and Adams were both mature women when they came to the BBC in 1926 and 1930 respectively. Matheson’s varied pre-BBC career included a post-university stint as part-time secretary to H.A.L. Fisher and war-time work that encompassed, from 1916, the Registry of the Special Intelligence Directorate (the precursor to MI5).
Dec 20, 2017 · Despite the furore, Matheson went back to her fixed-term contract at the BBC, although not before receiving a stiff memo from Alasdair Milne, then the Corporation’s Director General.
