The Sound of Breaking Glass — Commercial Radio

Abstract

The BBC may well be ‘the world’s most famous cultural institution’¹ and if it is, that reputation was founded in its origins as a monopoly broadcaster. The central place of the BBC in British cultural life, and then as a global brand, was due to very secure foundations in decades spent without the distractions of commercial competition. For half a century the BBC had no legal, UK-based competition for its radio services: a remarkable fact given the total domination of commercial radio in other parts of the world, and most notably the USA. It would be wrong, however, to say that there was no competition at all. From the 1920s there were stations based in continental Europe broadcasting in English to the British mainland.² Stations such as Radio Normandy and Radio Luxembourg transmitted a populist mix of programming in direct competition with the BBC. Many of the programmes broadcast from the continent were recorded in London ‘by major agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, and they began making major inroads into the BBC audience, notably on Sundays, when Reith’s strict sabbatarianism had resulted in an output which excluded any form of popular entertainment’.³ The German invasion of France and the Low Countries ended such commercial radio and after the war the broadcasting ecology was very different. In France the incoming post-liberation government made broadcasting a state monopoly and therefore denied the return of English language stations. This was not the case in Luxembourg, however, and Radio Luxembourg continued to serve English-speaking listeners with some innovative popular entertainment, including the first Top Twenty programme in 1948.⁴ The importance of commercial competition after the war was diminished by the launch of the BBC’s entertainment-based Light Programme and the much less puritanical attitude to Sundays following Reith’s departure from the BBC before the war.