Chapter 4 considers how race and racism were presented in post-war television and film. Much of this chapter focuses on blacking-up practices on television, the success of The Black and White Minstrel Show with white audiences, and its defence by white producers, audiences and the press, when Black audiences in Britain protested against it in 1967 through the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD). It also traces the post-war life of the empire film content discussed in Chapter 2, when these films were consistently broadcast on both the BBC and ITV before the watershed and at ‘family viewing times’. The chapter also examines the broader enduring popularity of blacking-up practices on screen in the post-war period.

Throughout the 1970s, audience research conducted at both the BBC and ITV affiliates consistently overlooked audiences of colour, even as these institutions began to hesitantly acknowledge and consider institutional mis-steps in their approach to Britain’s own ‘race problem’. Several extended audience research reports were conducted on shows about ‘race’ in the period, including Till Death Us Do Part in 1973, which began to produce a coherent picture of persistent racial prejudice among white viewers. Alongside this, audiences of colour were finally brought into audience research but in quite exceptional ways, including a 1975 study for ITV, when 21 West Indian television viewers offered their thoughts on Love Thy Neighbour and the broader television landscape, and in 1979 at the BBC for a potential programme on “multiracial Britain.” The chapter examines the shape of this belated inclusion within these institutions and considers the highly circumscribed ways in which Black and south Asian audiences were allowed to speak about screen content and racism.

Chapter 3 moves into the post-war period and the Audience Research Department in the BBC archive, examining two of its ‘special audience research reports’, on a 1952 documentary series about race relations in Africa, and a 1968 study of audience responses to the BBC’s first fictional television series focusing on a Black family, Rainbow City (1967). In doing so, the chapter examines both the department’s conception of racially innocent British audiences and its loose definition of ‘race’ on screen within its own methodologies, and its uncomfortable encounter with the existence of measurable racial prejudice among ordinary Britons in 1968.

This chapter examines Northern Ireland’s literary culture from the 1930s to the 1960s, highlighting how writers identifying as ‘Irish’ engaged with British institutions like the Left Book Club (LBC) and the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). This reflects the complex identities characterising Protestant identity before and after the Second World War. During this period, the Belfast and broader Ulster context of the ‘Progressive bookmen’ represented a vibrant yet overlooked literary environment, challenging the narrow perceptions of a bigoted provincial atmosphere.Louis MacNeice (1907–63) was the most prominent of the writers discussed, alongside other influential figures like John Boyd (1912–2002), W. R. ‘Bertie’ Rodgers (1909–69), and John Hewitt (1907–87). All were steeped in leftist thought and opposed the Ulster Unionist establishment. The passing of the Flags and Emblems Act of 1954, codifying British symbols, and the rising tide of Irish nationalism posed significant challenges.Despite this, these Protestant writers advanced their values in union halls, WEA classes, pubs, and media outlets. The chapter explores their connections to local publications, the Labour movement, the Spanish Civil War, nationalism, and the BBC. Ultimately, while the Northern Irish conflict overshadowed the Progressive Bookmen, this chapter highlights their rich literary heritage and complex identities.

This chapter examines the consolidation of attitudes and praxis in relation to the emergence of a supraregional accent of English. Engaging in detail with phonological history, it documents the increased salience of delocalisation in representations of speech from the mid eighteenth century onwards while exploring the intersection between formal prescription and private practice. An abundance of primary texts on the need for a normative model of speech was in existence by the late nineteenth century while popular culture, and an emerging national system, also addressed desiderata of this kind. The advent of the pronouncing dictionary, an influential sub-genre in the history of lexicography, is a further important strand in the attempted dissemination of one accent for all, though broadcast English brought other avenues by which paradigms of ‘received’ English were both implemented and encouraged. If the social, cultural and linguistic hegemonies of a ‘standard’ accent were originally embedded in formally democratic models, the chapter also provides a critical examination of both the rhetoric and praxis of ‘received’ English in this respect, alongside its legacies in Present-Day English.

In this chapter, Deborah Cameron, University of Oxford’s Professor of English Language tackles head on what she calls ‘The Trouble with Oracy’. She identifies several key contradictions and tensions within the oracy movement, including the lack of consensus on goals and definitions, the issue of social class, and the enduring clash between traditional and progressive education philosophies. Despite a contemporary shift towards business-centric goals, she notes, defining essential spoken language skills remains problematic, reflecting broader societal divisions. Though supportive of the aspirations of the oracy movement, she concludes on a sceptical note. To Cameron the complexities in defining "good" communication and the enduring influence of class divisions on educational discourses, will continue to hinder equitable oracy education.

George Benjamin recalls his friendship with Pierre Boulez which lasted over thirty-five years. He pays homage to Boulez’s quite extraordinary musical abilities and remembers the exceptional lucidity and brilliance of his mind.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pierre Boulez collaborated as a commentator and conductor on a series of challenging and distinctive BBC Television programmes about twentieth-century music. This chapter discusses the range of Boulez’s appearances on British television but focuses principally on this group of visually innovative broadcasts that combine musical analysis and performance to illuminate the creative processes of composers including Debussy, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez’s own compositions, including ‘Improvisation II sur Mallarmé’ and Le Marteau sans maître, are also imaginatively visualised, with highly distinctive camerawork and cutting-edge graphics. Created initially for the television studio and later as individual film documentaries, these broadcasts often exploit the full potential of the medium of the time. Little seen since their initial transmission, these programmes remain provocative creative resources for all those engaged with combining music and moving images.

How did new forms of mass politics and culture that included and gave voice to all men and women finally develop in Britain between 1885 and 1931?

The last major chapter of the book reflects on the question of ‘happiness’ as discussed by Popper, Hayek, and Neurath, but also presents a case study of how Neurath not only theorized on such matters but also sought to make a practical difference by collaboration in planning projects. He became a consultant for the redevelopment of Bilston, a small town blighted by the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. In discussion with town councillors and architects, he steered plans by taking into account the needs of residents, seeking to represent those whose voice was generally not heard. This finally led to Neurath being interviewed in the mainstream media, marking acceptance and respect for Neurath in British culture. He did not want to use his broad learning to set himself apart as an intellectual but instead to articulate the needs of ordinary people.

The chapter examines Vaughan Williams’s relationship with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It focusses on the policy pressures and dynamics shaping BBC music broadcasting, and interrelationships between those and the creation, promotion, dissemination, consumption, and reception of Vaughan Williams’s music, reflecting on the ways in which a range of public and quasi-public bodies dedicated to the production and promotion of ‘national’ culture created a distinct political dynamic to the ‘field of cultural production’ in Britain in the period from the foundation of the BBC in 1922 through the interwar, war, and postwar years. It argues that this context and relationship is foundational for understanding his work, style, and reception, and invites (re)consideration of the role of authorial agency and authorial voice in reception history.

War formed a backdrop to much of Vaughan Williams’s life, and his understanding of its effects – whether from his service in the First World War or as a civilian on the home front during the Second World War – evoked some of the most powerful and poignant musical responses of his career, including The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, Dona Nobis Pacem, and the Pastoral, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies. These and other compositions incubated and emerged during tumultuous periods in the realms of musical performance, broadcasting, publishing, and patronage. Vaughan Williams’s navigation of these fields reveals a cross-section of major issues of concern to myriad composers, performers, and institutions, including the limits of political and ideological tolerance, the role of the state in artistic sponsorship, the responsibility of the artist to society, and the nature of musical memorialization.

After World War One, new institutions and gadgets gave reality to a changing landscape of public culture. Therefore, in this chapter, we explore applied science in the inter-war public realm. Society’s usage interacted with officials’ language as public and bureaucratic discussions of applied science intertwined. Talk about applied science connected intimately with an intense discussion of ‘modern civilisation’ to make sense of science too. Amidst anxiety, the separation of pure and applied became important to science’s standing. To some, the process by which scientific research led to a multitude of new gadgets was frighteningly dangerous. To others, science was exploited too slowly due to the historical inadequacy of British industry. Both branch of government and a cathedral of applied science, the Science Museum displayed linkages between science and technical wonders. Debates were conducted over the new radio service and in newspapers, and were contested by bishops as well as politicians.

Across the globe radio developed rapidly as a popular and transformative technology in the aftermath of the Great War. In the 1920s it quickly became a means of mass communication reaching millions, enabling listeners access to news, information, and entertainment. In Ireland the advent of ‘wireless’ broadcasting coincided with independence and the partition of the island. Initially, broadcasting in Ireland looked inward as it sought to help define and consolidate the deeply conservative states that emerged from the violence of the Irish Revolution. However, identities throughout the island of Ireland have evolved to challenge the narrow, defensive, insular states that struggled to assert themselves a century ago. This chapter addresses the evolution of broadcasting in Ireland and how Irish writers have successfully used radio and television to find regional, national, and global audiences. Although presented in an Irish context, much of their writing transcends national borders because it explores the human condition in a variety of dramatic and comedic forms.

Like most countries around the world, Wales saw a flowering of popular music in the 1960s. Following the ubiquitous contemporary Anglo-American model, the popular music that emerged in Wales during that decade signalled a number of cultural shifts, both musical and linguistic. This chapter surveys the roots and developments of Anglophone and Welsh-language popular musics from the 1960s into the twenty-first century, focusing on shared traditions, political engagement, the attitudes of the ‘official’ institutions of both Welsh- and English-language culture (including the eisteddfod, the chapel and the media), and the impact of Welsh devolution; and revealing Wales’s contributions to fifty years of global musical dialogue. It considers the careers of several Welsh stars who ‘crossed over’ into the Anglo-American mainstream, including Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones, and the rise of the bands of the so-called ‘Cool Cymru’ era - prominent among them Catatonia, Super Furry Animals, Manic Street Preachers and Stereophonics. These bands achieved a new level of sophistication and cultural importance for Welsh pop, the clearest signal of which was the release of Super Furry Animals’ internationally acclaimed album Mwng (2000), a collection of songs sung entirely in the Welsh language. Post-devolution Wales has offered a greatly enriched cultural environment and infrastructure for pop music that has ensured the mainstream success of a new generation of Welsh artists such as Gwenno.

This chapter is shorter than the others and takes the form of a postscript devoted to the state and organisation of music in Wales at the time of the book’s publication. It is shaped around the coincidental but simultaneous occurrence of two key historical moments: the devolution of many segments of administrative authority from the UK government to Wales and the establishment of a Welsh Parliament (Y Senedd), and the ubiquitous adoption of digitisation in the service of cultural communication and creativity. This latter development was not, of course, a uniquely Welsh phenomenon, but in Wales, because of the country’s geography and bilingualism, it had an especially important impact. Digitisation facilitated the ambition of Wales’s devolved governments to express the country’s cultural distinctiveness within the UK and globally. Devolution had the ancillary effect of elevating the importance of the creative industries, including those devoted to or including music. Additionally, the legal framework that underlined devolution led to an increased protection of the Welsh language and consequently the music cultures which had flourished within it. The chapter deals with the consequences for Welsh music of two decades of devolution and its impact on traditional and the modern agencies and institutions concerned with Welsh music: music education, performance, the curation of Welsh historical materials and the associated scholarship.

In the hundred years that saw the widest effects of industrialisation and immigration to Wales, the popular music of the country embraced an increasingly passionate and secular adherence to traditions derived from choralism and eisteddfod culture on the one hand, and the development of commercial popular music on the other. ‘Popular music’ was defined not by repertoire but by the circumstances of its performance. Major features of this story include the first conspicuous appearances of Welsh choralism outside Wales, the world’s first virtuoso private brass band, Welsh manifestations of music hall and romantic theatre music, the rise of tourist entertainment and the projection of Welshness in the early years of broadcasting. One of the more interesting features of the period is the way Wales digested broader trends in popular music, modified them and projected them in distinctive ways. The chapter paints a picture of Welsh musical life that is seldom seen, in which strong musical traditions steeped in the culture of the Welsh language coalesce with popular modernism and new types of musical commerce and consumerism.

The book’s conclusion returns to the commercialisation of Alice in Wonderland by considering the controversy surrounding Jonathan Miller’s 1966 Alice film, screened by the BBC. The art film offered a surreal Victorian dreamscape of childhood, as much for an erudite adult audience as for a child audience. It was a representation that was highly unlikely to have concerned Dodgson at all but was considered controversial enough to provoke public responses of hostility and incomprehension, attracting protests about a liberality that ought to be banned. This controversy allows us to reference changed understandings of childhood. Particularly in light of Disney’s rendition of Alice and the development of the BBC’s institutional role in the 1960s, where there was ready acceptance of the children’s department remit, with the imagery of the child overlaid with expectations of marketing and age-appropriate merchandise. Many issues that vexed the BBC in this period are rooted in the paradox that underpins the whole book: the tension between exploitation and innocence; family and market; public and private; and the normalisation of the logic of commercialisation tied to intellectual property.

Chapter 6 traces the rise of merchandising agencies as a distinct and independent profession in the United Kingdom. It focuses on the most influential independent agency of the period, Walter Tuckwell & Associates. A former Disney employee, Tuckwell fostered a network connecting and linking commercial and legal opportunities offered by television programmes and the emerging demand for child-related products. The chapter discusses the specific relationship between content creation and marketing that arose during the earliest days of television. This entails a discussion of Tuckwell’s role at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), where objections to the development of merchandising inside the corporation were managed. Commercial television changed agendas, leading to stabilisation in contractual practices between broadcasters, licensing agencies and sectors such as the toy, publishing and food industries; all eager to capitalise on the new communication medium. By the late 1960s, children’s participation in commodification was a fully integrated component of intellectual property practice and an integral part of television culture, regardless of the character of the broadcast licence.