One, Two, Three: bbc radio's formation of intercluded stations, from the Marriott Report (1957) to the present

8^th Biennial International Conference on Music since 1900, Hope University, 14 September 2013

SLIDE 1: TEST (Sound)

In mid-June 1920, during the nascent days of commercial broadcasting, the Daily Mail sponsored Dame Nellie Melba to give a recital from the Marconi wireless works in Chelmsford. Her sensational efforts were picked up in places as far apart as Newfoundland and Norway.

When the British Broadcasting Company was formed two years later, it employed ensembles of nine players each to provide live music in every one of its ten studios around the country. By 1933 Hilda Matheson, BBC’s Head of Talks could write that, ‘When we talk of the effects of broadcasting, we usually think in the first instance of the effects upon the body of actual listeners- upon their tastes in music, their general interests, and their social habits’ (Matheson 1933: 207). She put music first.

Today, the BBC is the world’s largest institutional civilian employer of musicians, appointing five orchestras, a choir and music staff across three terrestrial national stations (Radio 1,2,3) and two digital (1xtra and 6Music). Over these networks it simultaneously transmits each year 2.63 million minutes of music, and words around music. This sum amounts to 63% per cent of the BBC’s total national radio output.

Here are the figures that I assembled for all of the BBC music stations between a typical weekday morning from10am to 11am. I add for comparison the commercial Classic FM, which includes advertisements. The table separates the total time within that hour for music from the total time for talk. On the BBC (and elsewhere) the majority of the time devoted to a music programme is devoted to music, and the greater part of programming is devoted to music programmes.

So, from 1906 to the present, music and speech have remained principle sources of content. What has altered through the nine decades of the BBC radio’s existence has been, first of all, technological change in the efficiency of the broadcast signal (I avoid the word improvement). Secondly, the means to move programming out of real time at the point of reception which has been effected by home taping from the 1960s to the 1990s, and succeeded by podcasting, and more recently online streaming. Thirdly, the generic delineation of music and the provision of stations with distinct, consistent taxonomic identities have been designed to attract classifiable publics: Radio 1Xtra for urban and 6Music for ‘indie’, for example. I call this process one of interclusion, that is, the walling-up of music.

These three dynamic fields of social adjustment (technology, customization, interclusion) have been persistently modified throughout the history of radio, but they have left the basic radial features of broadcasting intact.

Yet the industry itself seems unaware of the benefits of its relative stability. Instead the industry warns us that we are moving through an unprecedentedly turbulent phase, brought on by the threat of interactive digital means of streamed delivery and file transmission of music by request, within that marketing process known as customization, associated with iTunes and Spotify, among others.

My argument is that radio, a child of capitalism, is one among a succession of transmission technologies that has maintained its social value in the face of competition from superceding media. Its value is defined through its discrete characteristic as an aural medium of one transmitter to many receivers. It has faced threats from succeeding technologies of transmission. Yet its distinct sonic disposition and broad means of access has sustained its evolution.

The greatest of these threats to British radio took place in 1955. What took place in reaction to it produced the means by which today we habitually listen to music on BBC radio. In 1955, the BBC was certain that radio was drawing to an end of its life. It was noted that the PEAK of its listenership had come about seven years earlier, in 1948, from which it gradually declined due to the development by the BBC of its monopoly on television. Now in 1955 commercial (or ‘independent’) regional television was launched. Inside a year BBC management believed that they should immediately reduce its three national radio stations to two, and that within a decade radio would survive solely as a service for people who were blind.

SLIDE 11. 1956-64

Audience Research made an estimate of future listenership across the networks, with the result that you can see, of a reduction of two-and-a-half million.

A senior administrator, Richard Marriott, took another view and formed a working group to shape new policy.

Marriott made a horizontal comparison of the corporation’s radio schedules. He showed for example that Dvořák’s Stabat Mater on the Home Service played against an Edinburgh Festival recital on the Third Programme, leaving the Light (quote) ‘to satisfy the rest of the audience’. He asked in his report, ‘Can it be right that we devote twice as much attention to the educated audience as we do to the great majority of our audience?’. The Marriott Report of 1957 concluded that radio’s salvation would be found through music. Television could not cover music as well as radio could. Music was a clear means of distinguishing the stations from each other. New developments of the time in wireless technology – Frequency Modulation, stereophony, the portable radio – benefitted the reception and circulation of music. The BBC’s foreign competitor, Radio Luxemburg, was dedicated to popular music. So, in consequence, the Light Programme should be devoted to (quoting Marriott) ‘the whole range of “pop” music from dance band combinations to the lighter part of light music’. This, incidentally, may well be the earliest recorded use of the word ‘pop’ in BBC policy papers. Meanwhile the music content of the Home Service should be increased, falling between ‘high-brow and low-brow’, extending from ‘Grand Hotel’ to ‘prom-type symphonic music’ or ‘serious music of the less difficult kind’. In sum, Marriott decided that the networks needed more characteristic and democratic patterns of programming, and that music should drive the distinction between them. He proposed to shift attention from the vertical balance of a station on any one day towards the horizontal balance across the stations. This was a process he introduced of stratification: the Light Programme took more pop, Home more light music, leaving the classics for the Third.

The result of Marriott’s reforms on actual listenership against his colleagues’ pessimistic forecast was as follows ­– an increase of 1.1 million, producing a gap between estimate and actual of three million, six hundred thousand.

The overriding problem Marriott faced in boosting music’s presence was that of ‘needletime’. Back in 1934 the record companies had formed an agency known as the PPL to issue paid licences for the transmission of recordings. From 1935 the BBC paid for a PPL licence, but this licence was unusual in that it heavily limited the time the BBC could devote to the playing of records, down at times to the level of one hour a day. This constraint was commonly called ‘needletime’. There was no advantage in this restriction for the record companies; the more the BBC played of their products the more money they got from the broadcaster. But needletime had been forced on the PPL by the Musicians’ Union. Its members worried that their plentiful work could be replaced by gramophone records unless they put a needletime restriction in place.

Here is a list of the eleven salaried ensembles that the BBC employed in 1935, amounting to 394 players. The protectionist curb against the on-air playing of records in this country was imposed until 1979, when commercial radio stations took the issue to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, which declared it a restrictive practice.

A second problem for Marriott in 1957 was the threat of commercial radio being developed on the back of commercial television. The BBC had to make full use of its wavelength allocations to pre-empt surrendering transmission frequencies to competitors. Marriott spotted such a gap due to the Third Programme’s lack of a daytime service. He proposed an education strand at teatime and a light classical music sequence through the day. He wanted some Home Service music items moved over to his new ‘Music Programme’. In his view this would provide a mixture of light and light classical music. However, the Music Department under William Glock had no interest in light music, and instead drew on traditional classical repertory. Marriott had planned the Music Programme in 1959, but due to delays in negotiations with the MU it didn’t air until 1964 (it continued up to 1970, when it became Radio 3). Marriott sought 47 hours a week of extra needletime to make his schedule work, but for four years the MU declined dispensation.

The union changed its mind in 1964 when the corporation cannily picked up on a campaign by MU executive member Basil Tschaikov to create a training orchestra for young musicians. The New BBC Orchestra of 65 players expensively met this need, and in return the MU conceded needletime for the Music Programme, so long as the BBC house orchestras were maintained ‘for the foreseeable future’.

SLIDE 16: Nat. Music Network

The government used this same agreement later to secure an extra hour’s needletime a day towards the BBC’s pop programming, for the following reason. Just before the Music Programme began airing, BBC radio faced unexpected competition in the provision of pop from an armada of off-shore ‘pirate’ radio stations. Following Radio Caroline’s launch in March 1964 there were soon up to ten stations competing for attention around the coastline. Yet the pirates provided the practical evidence the BBC needed that a new audience could be developed through the broadcasting of popular music – a vindication of Marriott’s substantive project.

The bureaucrat was all too aware of the need for the corporation to address the weak presence of current pop on the Light Programme. He considered that this had been due to two factors:

(1) needletime restrictions and the aversion of listeners to hearing cover versions by BBC bands. As he put it, ‘No-one, for example, really wants to hear Get Me To The Church On Time in any version but the one made famous by Stanley Holloway, or Thank Heaven For Little Girls in any but Maurice Chevalier’s… Pop music is also the music of the gramophone record and can only to a limited extent be presented successfully in any other form’;

(2) the insecurity of the BBC in its presentation of popular music in contrast to the confidence and panache of the pirate stations.
The pirate stations faced no needletime restrictions, yet a high proportion of airtime was given over to the reading of requests, DJs banter, and ads. Moving, as it were, alongside the pirate boats, the Light Programme drew inspiration from the off-shore presentation, and did so in two stages. Firstly in 1965 it reformulated and extended programmes most adaptable to accommodating the personality of the subjective DJ rather than the objective presenter. The Light Programme’s shrewd controller, Robin Scott, selected characters for this development such as Alan Freeman and David Hamilton. Scott introduced dedications, ‘phone conversations with listeners and interviews with guests, in order to reduce the needletime content of the programme.

SLIDE 17: Radio 1&@ DJs.

Secondly, in 1967, when the government was due through law to make the pirate stations close themselves down, Scott selected a number of pirate DJs such as Tony Blackburn, Kenny Everett (who, by the way, came from Liverpool) and John Peel (who, by the way, came from the Wirral). Scott added jingles, cross-trails and competitions to avoid needletime.

These DJs soon found themselves, as Tony Blackburn put it, ‘needled by needletime’. Kenny Everett wrote in The Londoner magazine to berate his new employer for using cover versions. He mocked (quote) ‘vileness like Albert Scron and the Strumalongs, and Rita Blurnge singing Strawberry Fields Forever. John Lennon does it much better but we never seem to hear it.’ In a similar article he called for a ban on the Musician’s Union (quote) ‘which forces us to play only a certain amount of records per day’.

SLIDE 18: MU letter

This drew a chain of furious letters from the Musicians’ Union’s General Secretary Hardie Ratcliffe (who, by the way, came from Liverpool). ‘We are unwilling to tolerate Everett’s sniping any longer, Ratcliffe wrote. ‘If you really cannot tame him, we must do it; and it would not surprise me if, when our Executive Committee meet early in June, they will feel the most effective way to do this would be to withdraw the services of our members from broadcasting… The quotation that Miriam Cridge has to sing Strawberry Fields live’ suggests that we limited “record time” but there is no reference to PPL, the Company with which your agreement exists. We have never suggested to you that a singer must sing “live”, for the very good reason that it is difficult to see how one can sing otherwise.’

The responses of Marriott and Scott to these letters and phone calls are object lessons in diplomacy and good sense.
SLIDE 19: In any case, their employment policy gained the corporation listeners and licenses. The figures surged in 1967 when the Labour government closed down the pirates and the BBC launched its number system of stations, Radios 1 to 4. Based on Marriott’s model of stratification, the generic profile of each station was highly differentiated in content and tone. What had been the Home Service, with its mixture of light and light classical music, became the speech-only Radio 4. I use the term interclusion to describe the result, with particular regard to light and classical music, where listenership was dissuaded from entry to a range of provision, and access was reduced.

There was an unanticipated exception, though. There were areas of music that the BBC had formerly invested in that were orphaned. Their former audiences lobbied for continued provision. Radio 2 became the station were they were re-housed. This produced within in it vestiges of the ‘mixed programme’ format of former years. Unexpectedly, Radio 2 gained listenership to such a level that, by the1990s it surpassed Radio 1 in audience share.

My conclusion is that radio will retain an audience in the face of new technologies that are dedicated to the circulation and ownership of music by novel means. It will do so because music has limited social impact without it being talked about, and radio provides a productive aural setting for the experience of music to be brought into social discourse. Finally, as the man on the radio used to say, ‘If you have been – thanks for listening’.