The day the BBC said there was no news

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On the evening of April 18, 1930, the British nation tuned in the BBC news and was told, “Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news.” 

In the blank, baffled space the news would’ve filled if there’d been any came 15 minutes of piano music and, I expect, a lot of people turning to each other and saying, “What???” 

Irrelevant photo: A rose, trying to escape the neighbors’ garden.

 

The story behind the story

When I first heard this from a neighbor, I assumed someone either quit or got fired right after that. I used to host a radio call-in show and it takes nothing at all for my mind to fill with interesting ways to quit a broadcasting job. But no, that’s not the way the story goes. The newsreader said exactly what he was supposed to say.

He? Almost surely. This was the Dark Ages, when broadcasting an authoritative woman’s voice would’ve led to social breakdown. And also (somewhat irrelevantly but I can’t resist) it was when the BBC allowed one and only one accent: upper class, or what’s also called received pronunciation, or RP. 

Who’d they receive it from? Beats me. Their parents? Their expensive schools? You hang around this country long enough, you begin to forget how strange this stuff is. 

If you want to poke a pin in it, you can call the accent posh and walk away feeling like you’ve won a round.

But enough of that. It really is off the subject. The BBC’s news department was so small back then that you needed tweezers to pick it up: It consisted of two editors and two sub-editors. The British press was pushing hard against broadcast news for fear it would eat into newspaper circulation.  

Before 1927, the BBC couldn’t even broadcast the news before 7 pm, by which time (the theory went) everyone would’ve read their evening papers. And with its mammoth staff of four, the BBC wasn’t in the business of gathering news. It read what came in from news agencies in the form of teletype and pulled out what suited it.

And what suited it is as important to the story as the news department’s minimal size. The BBC’s mission was “to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.” 

What came over the teletype that day didn’t meet their standards. It was sensationalism, which they left to the gutter press.

Okay, gutter press is my phrase. Grain of salt there, please.

The Beeb’s direction was strongly shaped by its first director-general, John Reith, who gave the public what he thought it needed—classical music, opera, drama, literary talks. News that mattered. If that wasn’t what a listener wanted, tough. No other stations were on the air, so if someone didn’t like what was on they could just go outside and smoke a cigarette–although people smoked indoors then.

Yes, it was that long ago.

Another important factor here is that the BBC wasn’t  commercial. Everyone who owned a radio paid a fee and that funded the Beeb, so it had no advertisers screaming for the biggest possible audience and then a bigger one than that. 

 

What didn’t happen that day?

Well, the Indian Republican Army raided the Chittagong police and auxiliary forces armory, unfurled the Indian flag, cut the communication cables, and chased the British colonial administration out of town. 

Was that significant? Hell yes. India was still part of the British Empire. The rebels held out for four days, then retreated to the Jalalabad Hills, which was the beginning of four years of guerrilla warfare and helped shape one strand of opposition to British rule.

To be fair to the BBC, though, the rebels had cut the wires and communication depended on wires back in the Dark Ages, so the outside world had no way of knowing about it. 

What else didn’t happen? A typhoon swept through the Philippines. A fire killed 118 people, most of them children, in a wooden church in Romania. And closer to home, no doubt there were fires, traffic accidents, maybe a murder or two, mayhem of various sorts that the BBC was too high-minded to cover. The news had to matter or it wasn’t news.

As one article put it, “Reflecting on its accomplishments in 1930, the BBC boastfully claimed that not broadcasting the news was evidence of the merits of its service.” 

 

Did the BBC ever get over itself?

Well, on April Fools’ Day 1957, it reported on a spaghetti farm in Switzerland. By then, TV had joined radio, so the story was backed up by a video of women harvesting spaghetti from an orchard. Italian food was new enough in Britain that hundreds of viewers called in asking how to grow their own. 

“Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best,” they were told. 

The prank was believable enough that some staff members fell for it, including the network’s general director.

In the BBC’s defense, Britain takes April Fools’ Day seriously. The Guardian once, memorably, ran an article on the island of San Seriffe.  It’s in the Indian Ocean and is actually two islands, Upper Caise and Lower Caise. The capital, or at least the largest town, appears to be Bodoni. The paper’s so proud of the joke that it’s archived with its teaching resources, although exactly what it teaches you is anyone’s guess.

32 thoughts on “The day the BBC said there was no news”

  6. I had no idea about this so thank you for this interesting tidbit of broadcasting history.

    No news at all is no doubt a tad extreme but I do feel that, in an era of 24 hour news broadcasting, we are saturated with all manner of information that does not really qualify as news. There is a lot of regurgitation with no updates and a lot of filler that barely qualifies as current affairs let alone news. I actually gave up watching any news years ago – I will watch clips – in favour of reading because it was becoming too overwhelming to sort the wheat from the chaff.

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    • I’ve pretty much done the same. I read the paper, get several news digests in my inbox (some of which I want and others of which come in spite of me), and I catch the news if I’m driving. But enough. After that I have to call a halt.

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  7. I received that posh English accent in the proper way, from my mother — never mind that I grew up in Southern California. I didn’t manage to give it back until I was 13 or so, and it was one of many things that made elementary school a living hell.

    The island of San Seriffe is a glorious place, and I have no idea how I’ve missed it for all these decades! On the other hand, if you look under “Reels” on my FB profile, that spaghetti harvest video is the only thing you’ll find, other than a couple of clips of my dogs.

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    • It’s a pity the spaghetti harvest isn’t on San Seriffe. I’d have thought the climate was perfect.

      I wince in sympathy at your experience of grade school with that posh English accent. Kids really can be horrid.

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  8. Ah ! The San Sereiffe Islands ! I had forgotten hearing about them in journalism classes back at Kent (Ohio) State in 1967, Along with the society editor who went out with a vengeance by writing a true weddung announcement that included the sentence : “The bride is a skinny, fast little piece of baggage who has been kissed and handled by every boy in town.” Good times.
    Nowadays, even on a slow news day, the “history ” column might mention why it was known as “Good Friday.”
    I am old enough to remember when TV news programs were 15 minutes long I have forgoitten what the other half of the half hour slot was filled withl

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    • You mean the other 15 minutes weren’t filled with ads? It’s amazing how long 15 minutes of news will last when puffed out with ads. But no, I do know what you mean: 15 minutes by the clock,not the stopwatch.

      Nobody caught that wedding announcement before it went to press? Ack! I should be offended on feminist grounds, but it is funny. At least until the paperwork for the lawsuit arrives. I wonder what kind of career the former society editor went on to have.

      The history of Good Friday might actually be interesting. Given that it’s leading up to a horrible event, it’s an odd name to choose.

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  9. “Received pronunciation” seems to be something like “Hochdeutsch” : A spoken form of the German language any natural speaker from the Alps to the Sea (“von der Etsch bis an den Belt”, jawoll ! ) has a chance to understand, and reproduce, Austrians and Swiss included. The “natural”, local spoken language reaches from the angelic flow of Franconian in all its sublime varieties to the Saxonian grunts those poor souls utter when trying to engage in a – ahem – conversation.
    Ah yes, Bodoni town, gently nestled at the foot of Gara mons.

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    • Not that you’re biased in any way, right? What I can tell you, reliably, about RP is that it’s based in class, not geography. I’m sure some linguist could have a field day (and a dissertation) working with that bit of history. It would be fascinating.

      I do believe the creators of San Seriffe missed the Gara mons joke. If they knew about it, they’d be kicking themselves for the oversight.

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      • “Biased” – moi ?!
        I am in total accordance with my fellow countrymen regarding the Saxonian dialect, at least with more than 90%, the rest may be Saxonians. Since 2012 results in surveys are consistent : 8% of the questioned “like” this dialect – the remaining 92% think it’s, well … ear bleedingly annoying, to put it mildly.

        Btw NIETZSCHE and WAGNER were Saxonians, and kept this terrible twang until their demise.

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  10. Hi Ellen, the RP thing is quite interesting from the point of view of class and regionality. Mum was quite determined that we would grow up “speaking properly”. We lived near Birmingham and the Brummy accent is fairly much despised. Mum hailed from Yorkshire and never quite lost her accent. I’m certain that a Professor Higgins would pick up my origins from my speech, as I can hear traces Birmingham myself, although most people don’t seem to notice. It would be a pity, I think, if local accents disappeared, some are lovely to listen to.
    Even the most upper class “cut glass” accents have softened. The late Queen sounded rather different in later life than she did at the start of her reign if you ever hear her Christmas broadcasts repeated. A brilliant example is in the film “Brief Encounter”, where everyone has a clipped and precise delivery. It does have the advantage that every word is audible, unlike in modern dramas, but it’s very stilted to modern ears.
    Jeannie

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    • I’m with you on regional accents. They’re as much a contribution to the world’s culture as the languages of small groups that–or so I’ve read–are rapidly disappearing. They contain a world. Admittedly, I struggle with some of the accents, but the world isn’t organized for my particular benefit, I’ve noticed, so why should I be the measure of what accents get to stay and which have to go? I’ve heard so many tales since I moved here of parents wanting their children to move up and so insisting that they learn a speech pattern to match. They remind me of the stories of immigrant families where the children learn the new country’s language and not their parents’. So much is lost. My father’s generation couldn’t really talk with their grandmother–a few phrases of English on one side, and few of Yiddish on the other, but not enough for them to really know each other. My best guess is that the kind of linguistic moving up in the world has a lot of parallels with the immigrant experience, although not as extreme as the one my father talked about.

      As always, thanks for your comments. I enjoy them.

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  13. I am not the BBC is very good at finding news today. They seem to drop stories almost straight away. What happened to all the people in France and Spain who had to be evacuated from the wildfires? They were obessessed with Ukraine at one point. Less so these days.

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