I HAPPEN TO BE WRITING this on my birthday, but it’s to celebrate another, much bigger and more important birthday. The British Broadcasting Corporation, to use its rarely-spoken unabbreviated name, is about to turn one hundred years old.   

When the BBC was initially founded on October 18th, 1922 the C stood simply for “Company,” in fact a grouping of six communication businesses, including most prominently Guglielmo Marconi’s company, Wireless Telegraph & Signal. But within five years it was to become more grandiosely a “body corporate,” endowed with both that “Corporation” title and a Royal Charter, designed in part to protect it as an independent entity from commercial or political pressures.

Since then It has spread into the gargantuan, worldwide conglomerate we all know, although still quintessentially British. A measure of its Britishness is that among a certain class of Brits it’s still known, kind-of affectionately, as “Auntie” – a label that originated in its indelible tendency towards nannying its audience. It’s a tendency that nowadays its best output mercifully avoids. Another nickname, by the way, is the familiar, even chummy abbreviation of the abbreviation to a single syllable, “The Beeb.”

It’s hard, well-nigh impossible, to know what to say in recognition of the Beeb’s century-long contribution to the world, especially in view of its hydra-headed expanse and variety. It’s significant, though, that the person chosen to take charge of all programming marking the centenary (and there will be a massive amount of such celebratory material) is a music man, James Sterling, for six years the Corporation’s Head of Music.

Sterling’s appointment reminds us that music is one of the Corporation’s most salient pillars. It comprises not just the playing of recorded music over the air, but also specially-mounted BBC concerts and concert series like that annual classical event,”The Proms,” not to mention the founding of multiple orchestras, so very many of them. In addition to the lasting and masterful BBC Symphony Orchestra, there has been over time an almost endless list of regional orchestras plus so-called “Light Orchestras” and “Dance Orchestras.” There was even, it’s fun to recall, an entire network once called “The Light Programme” devoted solely to such lightness (see what I mean about nannying, with its little touch of condescension?) There have also been soloists’ competitions, weekly pop-chart shows, musical audience quizzes, and much, much more in the musical vein.

But journalism remains my main concern, and the Beeb’s role here is again enormous, well-nigh indescribable. And that role has been central right from the beginning. One of the primary objectives that the original Charter listed was:

“To collect news of and information relating to current events in any part of the world and in any manner that may be thought fit.”

The Beeb has indeed become its own “newsagency” (that single compound noun is right there in the 1920s document), gathering news internationally and omnivorously. The way it has evaluated and then transmitted this news material outward has rightly earned audiences’ trust worldwide.

The BBC World Service is now a journalistic legend, renowned as a fountainhead of reliable news and analysis, the kind that people living under dictatorships turn to when their own local news is repressed or distorted by governmental control and censorship.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE, I have in my own international assignments always felt it essential to keep in touch by listening to the World Service, in days of yore crackling through a transistor radio (often in the remotest and frankly uncomfortable locations), and more recently crystal-clear online via my laptop or by using the BBC’s own smartphone app.

During the London-based slice of my career (1969 to 1990) I was largely employed by UK’s commercial ITV network and thus I worked in direct competition with the Beeb. So I can readily vouch for its incomparable standards (though as we all know any institution can slip, as the BBC regrettably has at times). For complete disclosure, I should admit I was hired by the Corporation for my very first job after college, and I left after only two weeks. As an impatient twentysomething I just couldn’t bear the institutional atmosphere, condemning it at the time as “like working for the civil service.” Mercifully for me, an ITV executive offered me a better job – in a better location, too, and more lucratively paid.  I had to go.

Long after that early period, when operating as a freelance, I was commissioned by the World Service to make some radio documentaries, from Zimbabwe and Zambia. I can only applaud the rigor and exactness I encountered among the WS producers and editors with whom I ended up completing my broadcasts. I felt I should make amends for the arrogance of my salad days when I was green in judgment.

So from somewhere off to the sidelines, I’d now like to doff my cap respectfully to the cavalcade of BBC celebration that’s about to juggernaut over our airwaves and online.