“You’ve joined the BBC (Jimmy boy) and it’s just about to crack. Bloody gentlemen of the BBC think they are above criticism... Airey Neave and Margaret Thatcher have come to see me and we’re absolutely agreed that there should be no increase in your licence unless you put things right.”

That threat was delivered by a government minister, Roy Mason, when addressing James Hawthorne, controller of BBC Northern Ireland, during a “friendly pub lunch” in 1978.

It was not an isolated incident either, as Robert Savage reveals in his absorbing history, The BBC’s ‘Irish troubles’: television, conflict and Northern Ireland.*

Mason also accosted a BBC reporter, Bernard Falk, and warned him that there would be repercussions for the corporation if he continued to interview “terrorists”. Falk told his bosses Mason had said: “Stay away from these killers, Bernard, remember the licence fee. Get sharp son.”

Falk had previously been charged with obstructing justice and spent four days in jail for refusing to identify an IRA volunteer he had interviewed.

Savage’s study of internal correspondence by BBC executives from the 1960s until 1982, citing memos and board minutes, shows how the corporation was placed under consistent government pressure over its coverage of the troubles.

The BBC faced existential threats throughout the administrations of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Thatcher as its journalists sought to carry out their job of informing the public about the conflict.

Incident by incident, Savage highlights the way in which ministers, in company with military commanders, senior police officers and unionists, trampled on press freedom and sought to compromise the BBC’s public service remit.

The situation was complicated by the division between the BBC’s Belfast-based outfit that served only Northern Ireland and the corporation’s London-based headquarters responsible for serving all of the UK.



That split was evident in many of the most hysterical rows over NI coverage, such as the filming of IRA operatives who staged road blocks in Carrickmore in 1979 and the Real Lives fiasco in 1985.

Although the behind-the-scenes acrimony over Real Lives was explored 10 years ago, the vast majority of Savage’s research is new and benefits from being situated in an unfolding story.

It begins with the decades of self-censorship, when BBC Belfast was determined to side with unionism and the BBC in London (reflecting Westminster’s own apathy) ignored Northern Ireland altogether.

For a brief period after 1968, when civil rights demonstrators suffered from police violence and Stormont antagonism, BBC journalists - especially those who arrived from London - reported with relative freedom.

Incidentally, it is surely significant that the footage of the notorious police attack on the civil rights march in Derry in October 1968, was shot by Ireland’s broadcaster, RTÉ, rather than the locally-based BBC.

Savage shows how, year by year for the following 20 years (when the broadcasting ban was introduced), journalists were increasingly constrained from covering the conflict as they wished.

There were continual clashes between BBC executives and the government as producers and reporters tried to make documentaries that would explain to the British public why people were killing and being killed in Northern Ireland.

One of the most fascinating examples of the pressure on the BBC occurred at a dinner at Belfast’s Culloden hotel in November 1976 when corporation executives were treated to a series of hostile speeches from several critics.

One of them was made by the then Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert Lowry. He accused the BBC of being biased because it carried interviews and/or comments by Sinn Féin politicians. He argued that impartiality between lawful and unlawful men was a spurious concept, saying he “felt the BBC would have given Satan and Jesus Christ equal time.”

Savage’s book Photograph: .

That sort of argument was advanced by many unionist politicians and, in a wider context, has formed the basis of criticism of the BBC and other media outlets in a host of conflicts. It was, of course, the reasoning behind the broadcasting ban on Sinn Féin from 1988 until 1994.

Even so, and in spite of such criticism, the BBC took risks. When the commercial television regulator banned Thames TV from screening a This Week programme on torture allegations in 1978, the BBC allowed the Thames journalists to work alongside its own staff to report on the issue in its Nationwide strand.

Indeed, as one turns the pages of Savage’s book, the BBC’s journalists and several supportive executives emerge as heroes in their determination to resist censorship by making documentaries that attempted to get at the truth behind the propaganda of governments, military chiefs and the RUC.

There should be a special word for Roger Bolton, now Radio 4’s Feedback presenter, who played a leading role in several bitter clashes with authority over programmes he made about the Irish conflict, both for the BBC and for Thames TV.

Although it wasn’t Savage’s intention to go beyond 1982, he felt compelled to do so, albeit briefly, because of the events that followed, notably the Real Lives crisis and then the broadcasting ban.

And the BBC should take heart from his conclusion:

“Throughout ‘the troubles’, reporters, editors and senior broadcasting officials worked to provide intelligent and timely news and current affairs programming about the Northern Ireland crisis. In many respects the complex role the BBC played in chronicling ‘the troubles’ meant it became an integral part of the conflict. In spite of efforts by politicians, civil servants and security officials to control, suppress or shape its broadcasts, the BBC persevered and offered compelling coverage of events in very difficult circumstances.”

I have read some of the material before, but a great deal is new and the book’s major virtue is in bringing it all together to paint a complete picture of the problems faced by the BBC in trying to fulfil its brief to be a window on the world for its audience.

*The BBC’s ‘Irish troubles’: television, conflict and Northern Ireland by Robert J Savage (Manchester University Press)