Love to read the bits they left out. "At 8.15pm on October 5, 1940, a 500 lb German bomb smashed through the seventh floor of the BBC’s Broadcasting House and bored its way down through the building to the music library on the third. It didn’t explode until someone tried to move it during the 9pm news bulletin. The audience heard a muffled crump but the newsreader, Bruce Belfrage, continued almost without a pause (he later admitted to needing a ‘stiffener’ when he came off the air). Seven staff were killed in the blast, there was a gaping hole in the side of the building and the BBC’s telephone switchboard was destroyed. But work carried on. For listeners at home, here was an eloquent expression of British phlegm and a reminder of the central role the BBC was playing in the first big conflict of the broadcasting age, broadcasting the moments that formed our collective wartime memory – Chamberlain speaking from Downing Street, Dunkirk, the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, Churchill’s fighting speeches and D-Day. But if the BBC was a central player in the wartime drama, it was also a drama of its own. The Corporation of the pre-war years was rotten with class privilege and devoted few resources to journalism. It had no reporters at all until the mid-1930s. By 1942, the BBC’s Foreign News Committee lamented: ‘We all share feelings of disappointment, indeed of shame, that British radio should be failing, after three years of war, to exploit its unique possibilities as a medium for reporting.’ But the war forced Auntie to grow up fast and, in time, the BBC produced magnificent wartime coverage, including reportage from the likes of Richard Dimbleby and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, whose broadcasts brought the front line into listeners’ homes for the very first time and in many ways set the standard for news reports today. But not before a series of embarrassing battles with feeble organisation, blimpish attitudes and with the great War Leader himself, Winston Churchill – not to mention the ever-present shadow of censors who thought that the comedian Arthur Askey could somehow help the Nazi war effort…" New book spills the secrets of the BBC's epic battles | Daily Mail Online
