Monday Mar 22, 2021

#024 SPECIAL: Part 1 of 1922‘s Parliamentary Broadcasting Debates

Westminster, 1922: Parliament learns a new word, 'Broadcasting'. And they LOVE to argue about new words.

In this special, our cast of 20 brings to life EVERY broadcasting debate from 1922, no matter how big or small. No editing here. On our specials we outstay our welcome and we dig a little deeper. So approach this episode as if you're tuning into the BBC Parliament channel, only it's a century ago and they're deciding if and how there should be a BBC. Some parts may be an easier listen than others. You may need to tune your ears to their 'old-fashioned Parliament' setting.

But listen closely and your ears will be rewarded with never-before-heard insights into how and why we've ended up with today's broadcasting landscape: how the licence fee, protectionism, public service broadcasting, innovation, French weather reports, and so much more all jostled for attention a hundred years ago. MPs' decisions then affect us now.

While the engineers and broadcasters were pioneering this new tech, Postmaster-General Frederick Kellaway adopted a strict approach. You'll hear how the chaos of America was to be avoided, but how MPs differed on whether the PMG was taking too firm a line on this fledgeling invention.

We have eight debates of varying sizes to bring you - too many for one podcast, so part 2 will pick up the tale. We're grateful to our cast; in this episode you'll hear:

Paul Hayes - Sir Douglas Newton

Mike Simmonds - Lt Col Murray

Paul Stubbs - Mr Kennedy

Wayne Clarke - The Speaker of the House

James Maidment-Fullard - Mr Malone

Andrea Smith - Lt Comm Kenworthy

Adam Hawkins - Capt Guest

Paul Kerensa - Postmaster-General Mr Kellaway + Sir Henry Norman

The text is all courtesy of Hansard; this episode contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0 (https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright-parliament/open-parliament-licence/).

You'll hear the following moments:

Part 2 will pick up the story.

Elsewhere in this episode we mention the Irish Broadcasting Hall of Fame blog, re May 16th 1922's first Irish singer of the wireless: Isolde O'Farrell. Do have a read of their marvellous blog and support their work.

You can support our work at patreon.com/paulkerensa, where you'll currently find our full unedited video interview with Diddy David Hamilton - we'll extract some audio nuggets of David's interview for future podcast episodes, but the full version will only be viewable on Patreon (after all, this is audio, that's video).

THANK YOU if you support us there... It helps keep us in web-hosting and research books. We don't turn a profit on this podcast - it's just for the love of it, so thanks for keeping us afloat! For a one-off tip, there's also paypal.me/paulkerensa, and I thank you.

We also mention Shaun Jacques' Tell Me A Bit About Yourself podcast (which includes an interview with Paul, host of this podcast) and Jack Shaw's Wrong Term Memory podcast. Have a listen.

We're on Twitter and have a Facebook page and a Facebook group. Do join/follow/like.

+ Subscribe to get all of these podcasts in your podtray. Next time, the Parliamentary debates continue!

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We're nothing to do with the BBC, BTW, FWIW, ICYMI.

Thanks for listening, if you did. And well done. More soon.

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