Broadcasting's premier intellectual event still packs a punch

WHEN the foremost military historian of our time, Sir John Keegan, was asked to give the Reith Lectures, he fell back on his chair and exclaimed with great and genuine feeling: "This is the highest honour an Englishman can achieve." Indeed, the Reith lecturers together comprise a college of the outstanding thinkers of the 20th century: they include Robert Oppenheimer, JK Galbraith, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Leach, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ralf Dahrendorf, Arnold Toynbee and Anthony Giddens. This week, in Edinburgh, Professor Tom Kirkwood of Newcastle University joins that select company when he lectures on The End of Age. After 53 years, the Reith Lectures remain the premier intellectual event in broadcasting and they still pack a punch.

From the very first, there was a sense of importance about the venture. Bertrand Russell gave the first Lectures in 1948. His topic was The Individual and Authority just 18 months after the end of the Nuremberg Trials and the execution of those individuals who had pleaded "orders" in defence of the roles they played in genocide. As it developed, this annual series of radio talks - and they were talks in a studio rather than lectures delivered to an audience - explored a theme over a period of weeks and encouraged debate and comment in The Listener, the BBC weekly magazine that printed the text of the lectures. The intellectual debate was sometimes powerful enough to captivate a large and general public when controversy sparked in the press.

For a few weeks in 1962, Professor GM Carstairs became the most famous man in Britain when his talks on young people and their behaviour provoked a reaction. At a time when rock 'n' roll was dangerous and a generation ignorant of military disciplines was becoming assertive, Carstairs touched every shrieking nerve in our conservative society when he spoke openly about sex, violence and the young. Penguin rushed out the text of the lectures in paperback and citizens across the country found themselves exchanging opinions on the ideas Carstairs was promoting. Every 10 years or so, the subject matter of the Reith Lectures is synchronous with the public's urgent need to know about it. Steve Jones, now a superstar who appears in car adverts, explained to a fascinated nation the language of genes in his Reith Lectures. He was an outstanding communicator who offered the right briefing at the right moment. His special study had been snails but his brilliance was in allowing the radio listener to feel confident for the first time that laymen might grasp some understanding of this complex science that appeared to contain the meaning of life.

There have, of course, been occasions when the lectures missed the mark. In 1979, the Kenyan, Ali Mazrui, seemed to misjudge the platform. He was a distinguished scholar who had graduated from Manchester, Columbia and Oxford. He was also the first black lecturer and it was a pity that the series on the African condition - a subject germane to world politics throughout the following two decades - was not entirely successful. Some of the criticism was justified but signs of racism directed at Mazrui were also evident. Nevertheless, the lectures were printed and reprinted. The Reith Lectures have been endlessly resilient and so it proved again: in the following year, Ian Kennedy, an Australian, produced a brilliant series on medicine, ethics and the law, to great acclaim.

Where there have been failures they have been honourable and they have inspired a determination to strengthen the lectures. The series given by Patricia Williams began with tabloid stereotyping of this American academic who was, we were told, "a militant black feminist". She may be, but she is also a renowned scholar, a Professor at Columbia and is published by Harvard University. Her topic was race and it was timely: the European Union was then resolving to eradicate racism and xenophobia. The posturing of the tabloids ought to have helped establish the point of her talks on the genealogy of racism but somehow Patricia Williams's style got in the way of the substance of the lectures. Perhaps she approached the subject of race as she was used to doing for American audiences; perhaps the vocabulary of her argument was too culture-specific for the British audience but she ran into trouble from the start. In a tense interview with Melvyn Bragg, she failed to be convincing.

The Reith Lectures survived and prospered, however, by mobilising their own prestigious history. John Keegan's Lectures on War and Our World were events in themselves when studio talks become live lectures in front of invited audiences around the United Kingdom. Keegan had been a Sandhurst lecturer, eminent author and adviser to President Clinton; he was also the defence correspondent of the Telegraph. When he went on the road he drew impressive crowds ranging from the subalterns at his old military college to the minister of defence himself. His successor as lecturer, Anthony Giddens, director of the LSE, then brought the lectures to a worldwide audience and presented the talks to audiences in London, Delhi, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. When the audiences engaged with him at the end of each lecture, there followed recorded questions to Giddens from Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and Romano Prodi.

They are a mere handful of radio programmes transmitted on spring evenings on BBC Radio 4 but the Reith Lectures still exert extraordinary influence in this country and across the globe. Since Russell's first lectures, the test of the individual has come to rest on the integrity of the choices made by him or her in everyday life. It is easy to mortgage one of our freedoms and take in exchange a set of 100 television channels with free-phone facility and DVD fallback. How much choice is there in that super-abundance of entertainment?

The Reith Lectures are still bothersome: they require attention, consideration and discussion. That's because of the secret format: ideas galore.

James Boyle is the new chairman of the Scottish Arts Council

Copyright 2001
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