BBC History Update: Marking our centenary, plus this year's exhibitions

Head of BBC History Robert Seatter introduces the first steps in our plans to mark the centenary of the BBC, and highlights exhibitions that are being mounted across the country in 2016.

14 November 2022: still six years away, but already I’m focused on the BBC's centenary moment.

Back in 1922 when it all began, John Reith, the then first ever general manger of the British Broadcasting Company, wrote in his diary, 'I hadn’t the remotest idea what broadcasting was'. Not that surprising then, as nobody did.

Now of course, broadcasting is the story of all our lives, helping to create our personal and our national memory. Where were you when Grace Archer died, when England won the World Cup, when Live Aid raised the roof, when Lucy Beale was murdered?

Centenary publication

As part of the centenary, there’ll be a newly commissioned history, written by Professor David Hendy. Corporate histories are fiendish things to get right – too hagiographic and nobody takes them seriously; too inward-looking and they risk irrelevancy. Professor Hendy’s approach is refreshing – to conjure up not only the creatives and the mandarins in their corridors of power, but also the audiences, here in the UK and all around the globe. To plumb the industry and the impact of the BBC. He’ll be delving deep into our archives – both programming and papers. He'll also be tapping extensively into the BBC's own oral history which recorded the internal story of the men and women who worked at the Corporation. Many of these interviews have never previously been heard, but they are being opened up now as part of another new history project…

100 Voices

The University of Sussex, where Professor David Hendy works, is one of the UK's centres for oral history. It houses, for example, the fascinating archive of the Mass Observation Project. We went to them for advice on how to open up the BBC's oral history, and contextualise it as a national and international archive, pulling out voices and themes that resonate over the last century.

Last year, we tested the water with an online package on the 'BBC and Elections'. This year there's a second package revealing the 'Birth and evolution of TV', from its Alexandra Palace days in the 1930s. And so on, building towards our ultimate 100 voices collection.

New edition of Pinkoes & Traitors

And there’s yet more. Our official historian, Professor Jean Seaton, will publish her new expanded paperback edition of Pinkoes & Traitors in 2016, exploring the difficult years of the BBC under Margaret Thatcher's government via a sequence of astute and engaging thematic perspectives. 

You can catch BBC History out and about too! 'The Story of Children’s TV' exhibition, curated by The Herbert Museum in Coventry and breaking all footfall records as it tours around the UK, is now at Portsmouth Museum.

BBC History also supports the 'Make It Digital' campaign with an insightful exhibition at Bletchley Park on one of the nation’s forgotten code-breakers, Gordon Welchman.

Then, later in 2016, our 'Faces of Comedy' photographic exhibition will open at Compton Verney Museum in Warwickshire, revealing famous BBC comedians behind the scenes, on set among the paraphernalia of cameras and microphones, in avid script discussion or just having a well-earned cuppa. Hope to see you there.

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

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