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In advance of a special Media Show debate on the future of the BBC, Steve Hewlett explores the troubled past behind today's dilemmas - and traces them back to the Corporation's origins in the distant world of the 1920s. He explores how the BBC was forged in the paternalist culture of interwar Britain. And how its first Director-General, the forbidding six-foot-six titan John Reith, carved it into the form it still has today: a public corporation. Reith's new British Broadcasting Corporation was not part of the government, but nor was it a commercial company. It occupied a public space somewhere in between. Reith's model was all very well in an age of deference, when the BBC had the airwaves to itself. It even managed, after initial hostility, to come to terms with competition, in the shape of ITV. But Steve explores how Reith's interwar Leviathan has fared since the 1970s, as it's been buffetted by hurricanes of change: the death of deference, the pressures of high inflation and political strife, and the tech-driven birth of a highly competitive global media market. What does the BBC's past tell us about its capacity to survive and thrive in this brave new world, and how it might need to change? With: Simon Heffer, David Hendy, Charlotte Higgins, Dominic Sandbrook, Jean Seaton Producer: Phil Tinline.
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