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.