Tony Hall - Speech at Ulster Hall marking 90th anniversary of BBC Northern Ireland

Ladies and gentleman, it’s my great pleasure and also great honour to be with you tonight.

We’re celebrating 90 years of our mission to inform, to educate entertain and also inspire Northern Ireland. It’s wonderful so many of you are celebrating with us.

BBC Northern Ireland had two beginnings. As I’m among friends, I’ll confess neither went entirely to plan.

Number one came on 15 September 1924 when 2BE took to the airwaves. Tyrone Guthrie, then just 24 years old, was the first voice listeners heard. He heralded the new era with a cheery “Hello, hello, this is 2BE, the Belfast Station of the British Broadcasting Company.”

The orchestra then played the national anthem. After that, there followed 15 minutes of complete silence owing to a technical fault.

Nonetheless, the reviews were mostly positive. But not in every case. One listener wrote in to say “I see from the papers that there is a large increase in the sales of radio sets. I am not surprised. After last night’s programme I am selling mine too.”

Undeterred, we continued. The formal opening happened here in Ulster Hall on 24 October 1924. At 9pm, all BBC stations connected to Belfast so the formal proceedings were heard not just through the 5,000 or so sets in Northern Ireland but across our developing radio network as well.

As now, Ulster Hall was packed. Unlike now, the audience was subjected to no fewer than five speeches, not all of them short. My predecessor, John Reith, travelled to Belfast for the occasion. His enjoyment of the evening was marred by what he regarded as several unforgivable breaches of etiquette – a very Reithian concern. He also noted in his diary that “the programme ran 25 minutes short.”

Despite all of this, it was an historic occasion. Northern Ireland had only recently been created and the BBC itself wasn’t quite two years old.

In his speech, Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, spoke warmly of the wireless as “one of the most beneficent methods… in bringing the whole world into more harmonious relationship.” And these were sentiments shared by other speakers, early broadcasting bringing with it a great sense of possibility.

But unlike most of his team in Belfast, the BBC’s first local director, Major Walter Montagu Douglas Scott, didn’t fully embrace the potential of what we were doing. Tyrone Guthrie described him as: “charming [and] of distinguished pedigree … mildly interested in dogs and women … [and] keenly interested in pheasant shooting. Belfast, broadcasting, science, art, literature and office routine he openly and cordially detested.”

One of his earliest tasks was to reassure people that the wet weather around the time of the launch was not, I quote, “the result of a disturbance of the atmosphere by wireless waves.” Let no-one think that theories of man-made climate change are new.

But the BBC’s first Belfast director, like John Reith himself, did believe that audiences deserved programmes which should be “only the best”. That’s a belief which drives us still.

Ninety years ago, the then governor of Northern Ireland, the Duke of Abercorn, thanked the BBC for setting up a station here, noting that: “There are many benefits to be derived from broadcasting.”

He went on to say that: “It is now possible to bring the very best forms of entertainment into the most distant parts of [Northern Ireland], where in the past – especially in winter – the inhabitants were far removed from any form of amusement.”

Quite what the inhabitants made of that comment I cannot say, but the BBC did strive to make things better – and not just in winter.

The BBC story in Northern Ireland is still in the making. We’re determined to make each chapter even better than the one which went before.

We’ve always been innovators. Once we were a radio company. We went on to pioneer television. Now we’re embracing the internet and digital technology.

Audience expectations are changing fast. We want to surpass them and bring the wonders of digital technology to everyone with a service that’s more personal, more exciting and more compelling than ever.

I hope you can tell that our ambition to be “the best” for our audiences burns strongly.

You are what tonight is really about. Our audiences are why we do what we do. You are why we want to do it as well as we possibly can, be that through the radio, the television or whichever digital media you choose.

This is your BBC. I’m delighted that so many of you are here to wish it a happy birthday. If the Ulster Hall were many times bigger we could still have filled it many times over, such was the demand for tickets.

Northern Ireland’s where I began my career with the BBC and I’m so pleased and proud to be back.

We were then part of the organisation known above all for the quality and sensitivity and courage of our news and current affairs.

We still are - but we do so much more as well. The proof is there in dramas like Line Of Duty, events like last year’s Radio 1 Big Weekend and through everything we’ve been doing to showcase Derry/Londonderry as the UK City of Culture.

The BBC is part of a thriving – and growing – creative industry here. It’s one that’s giving enjoyment to audiences right across the UK and the whole world as well.

We’ve got a great show for you tonight. It’s part of our way of saying “thank you” for helping us make BBC Northern Ireland as bright, as bold as brilliant as it is today – and will be for many years to come.

Thank you very much.

Related BBC Links

• BBC Northern Ireland
• About the BBC Blog - BBC Northern Ireland at 90: A rich heritage to build on