Origins

Abstract

Engineers invented British broadcasting, not programme planners and makers. These men of wit and vision stamped one word firmly into the history of broadcasting in the UK, a word that has remained engraved especially in the heart of the BBC: quality. P. P. Eckersley, that much under-rated founder member of the BBC, says in The Power Behind the Microphone that ‘“publicists” often say the creation of the BBC was a “far-sighted measure of sociological planning”. In fact it was nothing of the sort; the BBC was formed as the expedient solution of a technical problem … scarcity of wavelengths’.