What Did You Do in the War, Auntie?: The Bbc at War 1939-45 - Hardcover

Hickman, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0563371161 ISBN 13: 9780563371168

Publisher: Bbc Pubns, 1995

Synopsis

The importance of the BBC in the Second World War is incalculable. It became the voice of the people for the people, maintaining day-to-day morale at home and abroad, providing entertainment and advice and the all-important wartime news.
What did you do in the War, Auntie? traces the development of news reporting from the Blitz to the deserts of North Africa and the beaches of Normandy, it explores the BBC's battles with the Government and its Ministries, and it shows how it brought hope and help to the peoples of occupied Europe.
Tom Hickman's book is also a nostalgic tribute to wartime radio programmes like Workers' Playtime, The Brains Trust and the astoundingly popular ITMA, and to such much-loved personalities as Tommy Handley, J. B. Priestley, Gert and Daisy, the Radio Doctor and Vera Lynn.

About this title

Reviews

Having lived in Ireland during World War II, Hickman first heard the reporting and entertainment he describes here after 1945. Corporate editor of the BBC from 1988 to 1993, he bases this wide-ranging popular history of the wartime BBC on Briggs' classic history of U.K. broadcasting, the dozens of books BBC employees have written over the past 50 years, and other materials and staff interviews. When Hitler took Poland, the BBC was an "aloof and impenetrable organization" with a "vestigial" news operation and a "virtually nonexistent" reputation beyond the U.K.; the way it met the war's challenges made it "an indispensable part of British national life" and "the world's unrivaled international broadcaster." Hickman covers policy debates, listener response, hugely popular variety and music shows, and technological breakthroughs that gave war correspondents mobility. Photographs display BBC stars and staff and suggest the demanding conditions under which they worked, and their civilian and military audiences listened. Mary Carroll

During World War II, the BBC?the "auntie" of the title?provided not only news and entertainment but also a sense of social unity and an enormous boost to the morale of a war-torn population. Through its power, Churchill was able to address the whole nation, as Roosevelt did in his radio "fireside chats." Hickman, a British journalist and former corporate editor of the BBC, has put together a generously illustrated, popular history of the BBC during the war years. It will nicely complement Asa Briggs's The War of Words (1971), Volume 3 of his scholarly, multivolume History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (1961). Suitable for public and academic libraries, especially for collections in media and communications.?Patricia A. Beaber, Trenton State Coll. Lib., N.J.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bbc Pubns
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0563371161
• ISBN 13: 9780563371168
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224