'Thorough and engaging ... you can't understand England without understanding the BBC' New York Times'Fascinating and informative' Daily Telegraph**'A dramatic tale of innovation and determination' GuardianIn 1922, a tiny group of men and women came together to found the BBC, using what had been a weapon of war - Marconi's wireless - to remake culture for the good of humanity.Twen...

Radio Four has been described as 'the greatest broadcasting channel in the world', the 'heartbeat of the BBC', a cultural icon of Britishness, and the voice of Middle England. Defined by its rich mix, encompassing everything from journalism and drama to comedy, quizzes, and short-stories, its programmes - such as Today,The Archers, Woman's Hour, The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, Gardeners' Question Time, and The Shipping Forecast - have been part of British l...

In 1941, a secret radio station deep in the English countryside prepared its first broadcast to occupied Europe. What followed was an hour of misinformation and slander about Hitler and his cronies - all delivered in the earthy voice of a disgruntled Nazi officer. Shocked and thrilled, ordinary Germans were glued to their sets.But this was just one front in Britain's extraordinary radio war. From clandestine stations to trusted BBC broadcasts, radio was used as a propaganda weapon ...

This 30-part Radio 4 series explores how our interactions with sound have shaped us over 100,000 years. These specially extended episodes, recorded on location around the world and in collaboration with curators of the British Library Sound Archive, take us from prehistory to the present, encompassing the shamanistic music of our cave-dwelling ancestors, the massacre of noisy cats in pre-revolutionary Paris, the nerve-destroying din of trench warfare, right through to the cacophony of the ...

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, many proclaimed the start of a new Elizabethan Age. Few had any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that would take place over the next 50 years, in Britain and around the world.In Our Times, A.N. Wilson takes the reader on an exhilarating journey from that day to this. With his acute eye not just for the broad social and cultural sweep but also for the telling detail, he brilliantly distils half a century of unprecedent...

In 1964, Mary Whitehouse launched a campaign to fight what she called the 'propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt' being poured into homes through the nation's radio and television sets. Whitehouse, senior mistress at a Shropshire secondary school, became the unlikely figurehead of a mass movement for censorship: the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, now Mediawatch-uk.For almost forty years, she kept up the fight against the programme makers, politicians, pop stars and...

'An active pleasure to read' Mail on SundayHarold Wilson's famous reference to 'white heat' captured the optimistic spirit of a society in the midst of breathtaking change. From the gaudy pleasures of Swinging London to the tragic bloodshed in Northern Ireland, from the intrigues of Westminster to the drama of the World Cup, British life seemed to have taken on a dramatic new momentum.The memories, images and colourful personalities of those heady ...

For about 40 years, RTE's radio and television channels have played an enormous role in shaping Irish social and cultural life. As the national publicly owned and funded broadcaster, RTE is the biggest cinema, school, sports stadium, market square, performance stage, town crier and concert hall in Ireland. It sets the agenda for the national conversation that drives modern Ireland. This work is a study of the structural transformations now taking place in Irish broadcasting. The book will ...

This Text-book traces the evolution of the newspaper, documenting its changing form, style and content as well as identifying the different roles ascribed to it by audiences, government and other social institutions.Starting with the early 17th century, when the first prototype newspapers emerged, through Dr Johnson, the growth of the radical press in the early 19th century, the Lord Northcliffe revolution in the early 20th century, the newspapers wars of the 1930s and the rise of ...

In the 1930s, British film producers and critics championed the idea of ‘quality’ pictures - thoughtful, intelligent films that would project a particular and positive view of Britain. The result was to drive a wedge between ‘national’ cinema (which reflected middle-class values) and ‘popular’ cinema (which reflected the working-class values of the majority of cinema audiences). ‘Popular’ became a term of abuse, particularly directed at comedies, whose roots often lay in music-hall. A very...

When Reporters Cross the Line tells the true story of moments when the worlds of media, propaganda, politics, espionage and crime collide, casting journalism into controversy. Its pages feature some of the best-known names in British broadcasting, including John Simpson, Lindsey Hilsum and Charles Wheeler. There are men and women who went beyond recognised journalistic conventions. Some disregarded the code of their craft in the name of public interest; some crossed the line in ways that h...

Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism explores contemporary UK national and local newspapers at a significant and pivotal moment in their development when some pundits are busily, if mistakenly, announcing their demise.The book offers a detailed examination of features which previous studies have tended to neglect, such as editorial formats (News, Op Ed pages, readers’ letters, cartoons, obituaries, advice columns, features and opinion columns), aspects of n...