What Questions Need to Be Asked about the History of the BBC?

Abstract

The BBC produced, between 1922 and 1995, over a million hours of programmes. In the face of such a massive corpus, strategies for understanding and recounting BBC history are necessarily challenging, and there is a real danger of being satisfied with a simplified, institutional, top-down approach. This contribution takes us on a tour of different currents of historical and cultural research to suggest some particularly fruitful questions about the history of the BBC, among the huge panorama of possible interrogations.

Keywords

• BBC
• media studies
• propaganda
• enchantment
• historiography