My esteemed chairman (of the BBC Trust), Lord Patten, gave a marvellous speech at the Oxford Media Convention today. Do read it – Is the BBC as good as it can be? –  if you have an interest. A large part of the speech is about respecting the seriousness and ambition of audiences. As he expressed it: “I remain unashamedly of the view that introducing people to good books, great paintings, or beautiful music – allowing them to better pursue and appreciate their passions and interests – helps to enrich them as individuals and to improve the quality of civic life for all of us.”

Lord P cited a book I absolutely loved, Jonathan Rose’s [amazon_link id=”0300098081″ target=”_blank” ]The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes[/amazon_link].The book traces the rise – and decline since the mid-20th century – of the strong auto-didactic tradition among working people, including the role played by the BBC. As Lord P notes, the BBC’s Third Programme was fiercely and intentionally elitist, making no concessions to middlebrow listeners (as the snobbish Virginia Woolf characterised them). Yet a third of the audience in the first week consisted of working class listeners, and  by 1949 21% of working class audiences had listened to it (compared with 63% of the middle classes). (P437, 2002 paperback edition.) Similarly, Wilfred Pickles successfully broadcast poetry on his Light Programme show, The Pleasure’s Mine, despite being advised by more elitist types that it would never work (p195).

As for news, in January 1938 the BBC found that 60% of working class listeners regularly tuned in to the 6pm news, compared with 54% of middle class listeners. Rose writes that the BBC’s newscasts: “Made political discourse intelligible to the under-educated, something that ‘quality’ newspapers, weekly reviews, and most statesmen failed to do.” He gives the example of a 1939 speech by Labour politician Herbert Morrison, a populist who had been a shop assistant – a survey of his audience found that 50 words had been over their heads – ‘lineal’, ‘suppliant’ and so on. (p223)

The book only touches on the BBC. The tradition of working class self-improvement went far, far wider. Rose’s account of the passion and determination of so many people to learn and debate and participate is very moving. It’s a terrific book which deservedly won a bunch of prizes.

I have a particular soft spot for the Workers’ Educational Association, still in existence. In her retirement my mother took one of its courses for working people (wine appreciation, no longer available alas) along with a watercolour class provided by her local council. Suitable retirement hobbies, I think, for a clever woman who had been forced out to work in a factory at the age of 14 but sent her own four children to Oxford and on to PhDs.

[amazon_image id=”0300098081″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale Nota Bene)[/amazon_image]