How The BBC Began
2024 BBC Two/Four
Originally as part of the BBC’s centenary celebrations, How The BBC Began tells the often hilarious stories behind some of the seminal moments of the first fifty years of the BBC – domestic radio and television as well as the World Service. In three feature-length episodes, the eyewitnesses and participants in the BBC’s early history recount some of the triumphs and disasters as new frontiers of broadcasting were mapped out – often by accident rather than design. This series was ten years in the making.
Part 1: Accident and Opportunity
Part 2: Building the Audience
Part 3: Shooting the Rapids (BBC Four, March 2024)
The whole series is available on BBC iPlayer.
FILM CREDITS
| Narrator | Joanna Scanlan |
| Photography | Jonathan Partridge, Dirk Nel, Vaughan Matthews, Ariel Grandoli |
| Sound | Patrick Boland, Stephen Anderson, Paul Paragon |
| Archive Producer | Alex Cowan |
| Production Research | Paul Kerensa |
| Archive Researcher | Lucy Jones |
| Consultants | John Escolme, Kate Murphy |
| Production Managers | Janine Melton, Jackie McKinney |
| Production Executive | Sophie Campbell |
| Post Production | Storm Post |
| Dubbing Mixer | Sam Hodgkins |
| Finishing Editor | Aaron Tennant |
| Assistant Producers | Oliver Soden, Joseph Fell |
| BBC Commissioning Editor | Mark Bell |
| Executive Producer | Magnus Temple |
| Film Editor | Riaz Meer |
| Written and produced by | John Bridcut |
In memory of: Richard Baker, Edward Barnes, Helen Clare, Peter Dimmock, George Fischer, John Grist, Trevor Hill, Michael Peacock, Sylvia Peters, Monica Sims, Dorothy Singer, Rena Stewart
With thanks to: Merchant Taylors' Hall
Archive Sources: BBC, APTN, Getty Images, Alamy, ITV, IOC, BFI, British Pathé, AP / British Movietone, Imperial War Museum, Shutterstock, BBC Oral History collection
This project was a co-production between Crux Productions and The Garden Productions. The copyright is held by Crux Productions.
REVIEWS
'A feast of delicious morsels... The most striking sequence was the testimony of Frank Gillard, the only reporter present at the 1942 Dieppe raid. He had relayed the propaganda line fed to him of its being a great success, while all around him the sea was red with blood and full of corpses. His contrition and shame were deeply moving.'
'Despite its bone-dry title, How the BBC Began was a juicy piece of fruit. The gossip in John Bridcut's spirited documentary [Shooting the Rapids] helped it to avoid being a stuffy paean and to entertain as well as inform. There were enough titbits from horses' mouths to keep a diarist in long lunches for months. But it also gave plenty of meat to the argument that the BBC was the "greatest cultural institution of the 20th century".' ****
'It can seem as if the BBC is constantly firefighting, under attack from all sides as it struggles to uphold its doctrine of impartiality. As this film [Shooting the Rapids] from John Bridcut shows, such turmoil is nothing new – it was a concern with the coverage of the 1926 General Strike.'
'John Bridcut's fascinating, impeccably thorough documentary, a follow-up to the first two episodes aired in 2022'
'You may remember two excellent documentaries made for the BBC's centenary in 2022. Film-maker John Bridcut found himself with so much material and plenty more to say on the corporation's history that he's had a third film in the pipeline ever since.'
'Shooting the Rapids was the belated third part of John Bridcut's trilogy How the BBC Began. Theoretically, this one was about impartiality, but the best bits were actually just Joan Bakewell gossiping about the 1960s.'