In 1926, with the General Strike looming and the right warning of a Bolshevik revolution, the BBC found itself in a dreadful dilemma. Writer Jack Thorne on why he turned this into ‘a love letter to people in authority’
at the Edinburgh TV festival). He himself suffers from a long-term condition called cholinergic urticaria, an allergy to heat or movement that, though manageable now, was debilitating when he was younger.He was recently formally diagnosed as autistic, after a doctor wrote to his agent suggesting as much, having heard him on. It has been hugely helpful, he says, and not just to give him an excuse to get out of going to the parties he had always inexplicably hated.
For Thorne, it is precisely “the uncertainty that makes it interesting”. The play “doesn’t have a polemical message. It’s much more asking, ‘What would you have done? What would I have done? How the hell would we have done it?’ And by the way, it could have been any of us.” What he means by that last comment is that the BBC was in its infancy. It was a tiny startup, staffed by a group of young war veterans, misfits, impresarios, intellectuals and engineers. But Reith, a visionary with immense ambition – matched by Churchill’s immense personal ambition – understood that broadcasting could be a great democratic power. “Most of the good things of this world are badly distributed and most people have to go without them,” he wrote.
Thorne adds: “I hope this whole play is a love letter to the BBC. I hope this whole play is a love letter to people in authority and how they find their way through these crises. Because I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”
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