“A thousand initiatives bloomed in the mid-1990s as BBC staff began to explore the internet and create web pages of their own”
The playwright David Hare wrote recently that, alongside the NHS and the welfare state, the BBC represents “the finest expression of mid-20th-century public idealism”. Yet, from our vantage point in the third decade of the 21st century, such praise can be a dangerous thing. It associates the BBC with past glories: the analogue era, “old media”, the world of radio and television. This raises a profound existential question for an organisation marking its 100th birthday. Having emerged in the first wireless age, can it survive in anything like its current form in the era of internet, mobile social media and highspending multinational streaming giants?
Before reaching for the most pessimistic answer, it’s worth remembering that the BBC kick-started Britain’s own media revolution in the first place. In the early 1980s, the corporation’s education department, alert to warnings of a shortage in computing skills, began
