Word: bbc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...political debate in India has been effectively silenced. Newspapers have become dull and predictable, and people seem reticent about discussing controversial matters in public. From the beginning of the emergency, much of the government's anger has been directed at the press. The other day, in discussing the BBC (which has withdrawn its correspondent from India), Mrs. Gandhi told an interviewer, "They seem to think that anything is fair if it's anti-Indian." Both the domestic and foreign press are still subject to stringent controls. Three weeks ago, the government abruptly expelled Jacques Leslie...
Bombings and Trashings. That conflict is recounted with harrowing accuracy in Shoulder to Shoulder (PBS Masterpiece Theatre, Sunday, 9 p.m. E.S.T.), a six-part series that began this week. If there is a television aesthetic, the BBC comes close to fulfilling it in Shoulder, a show that could have easily degenerated into agitprop; instead it is made a continually probing revelation of period and character. Led by a beautiful, red-haired widow, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, the suffragettes endured ridicule, torture and repeated jailings; several of them were killed. The angriest went underground, accelerating their...
Those who knew the private John Reith were less sure whether he was a pillar or a petty tyrant. BBC employees fairly quaked in his presence; he once told a chief engineer who was named as the innocent party in a divorce case: "My son, you have strayed from the paths of righteousness. Our ways must part forever. You are dismissed." Now the private man has been mercilessly unwreathed in his startlingly venomous diaries, whose publication he arranged out of what one critic described as an impulse toward "posthumous suicide." They reveal him as a splenetic, mean-spirited misanthrope...
...than 2 million words that Reith had written in his tiny, crabbed handwriting over a 60-year period. Most frequently, Reith's targets were people who stood between him and the pinnacles of power that he thought were his natural habitat. His first run-ins were with the BBC board of governors. He dismissed Lord Clarendon, the first chairman, as "a stupid ass" and Board Member Mrs. Ethel Snowden as "a truly terrible creature...
When Reith left the BBC in 1938, he hoped to be appointed ambassador to Washington or possibly Minister of War. Occasionally, he nurtured even grander ambitions: "I hope if I were Prime Minister, I would have the strength to stake it all on Christ." When asked instead to reorganize Britain's airlines into a single state-owned corporation, Reith felt slighted. He found it degrading to work under Air Minister Kingsley Wood, whom he described as "a bally crook" and a "little swine." In May 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill appointed him Minister of Transport, but Reith...