The published work was commissioned by Oxford University Press in 2001 and published on 27 September 2007. It is 518 pages long, including 418 pages ofmain text plus 100 pages of footnotes, bibliography and indexing. Overall, the book is approximately 250,000 words in length. It provides a history ofRadio Fourprimarily focused on the period 1967 to 1997, though also containing a brief assessment ofthe wartime and post-war Home Service as well as a limited assessment ofdevelopments since 1997. Though the book is supported by the usual structures ofacademic work - original research, footnotes, systematic referencing, etc - it was also, at the publisher's request, deliberately designed to be accessible to a broader lay readership. Thus, in the interests ofmaintaining narrative focus it deliberately excluded a discussion ofthe wider reading that informed it or ofthe underlying intellectual questions I was pursuing - even the methodologies deployed in researching it. It also sought to provide only implicit conclusions in the fmal epilogue. This critical essay therefore attempts to compensate for these absences by making such 'embedded' elements more explicit. It offers an account, in tum, ofthe background literature, research questions, methodology, and fmdings. Though these are organised under four separate headings, they are, inevitably, interconnected elements in the research and writing ofa book. I therefore conclude, very briefly, by drawing out what I suggest might be the book's overall contribution to the academic field ofmedia history.

This thesis aims to establish the differences and similarities in how publicly- funded public service broadcasters in the UK and Germany negotiate challenges and opportunities related to the transition from broadcasting to a multi-platform provision for children. The substantive subject of this research is the transition from public service broadcasting to public service multi- platform media for children under 13 years in the United Kingdom and Germany, where public service broadcasters offer content and services on multiple platforms, including traditional TV, audio, online and mobile media. The research focuses on the publicly-funded broadcasters SWR, BR (ARD), BBC and ZDF and ARD/ZDF’s joint children’s channel KiKA, while the original research further narrows the focus down to those services on new online and mobile platforms. The research applies a qualitative comparative approach based on a triangulation of literature study, document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews with broadcasters, producers and stakeholders in the policy-making process. The thesis consists of three parts and a conclusion. The thesis concludes that, although there are some similarities, the BBC and the German public service broadcasters under review differ in regard to how they understand the challenge of the multi-platform transformation, the main sources and characteristics of that challenge and the purpose of the multi-platform provision.

The Second World War had radically changed the focus of the BBC's overseas operation from providing an imperial service in English only, to that of a global broadcaster speaking to the world in over forty different languages. The end of that conflict saw the BBC's External Services, as they became known, re-engineered for a world at peace, but it was not long before splits in the international community caused the postwar geopolitical landscape to shift, plunging the world into a cold war. At the British government's insistence a re-calibration of the External Services' broadcasting remit was undertaken, particularly in its broadcasts to Central and Eastern Europe, to adapt its output to this new and emerging world order. Broadcasting was seen at the time as an essential adjunct to Britain's non-shooting war with the Soviet Union and a primary means of engaging with attitudes and opinion behind the Iron Curtain. Funded by government Grant-in-Aid, but with its editorial independence enshrined in the BBC's Charter, Licence and Agreement, this thesis examines, in the context of the cold war, where the balance of power lay in relations between Whitehall and the External Services. In doing so, it traces the evolution of overseas broadcasting from Britain, alongside the political, diplomatic and fiscal challenges facing it, up to the 1956 Hungarian uprising and Suez crisis. These were defining experiences for the United Kingdom's international broadcaster that, as a consequence, helped shape the future the External Services for the rest of the cold war.

The thesis investigates the application of the public value notion in UK public service broadcasting (PSB). In the context of technological change from analogue to digital broadcasting and the reduction of applicable market failures, the notion has been used to describe the remit and assess the performance of PSB, thus providing sustained justification of PSB in the digital age. The overall research interest is to investigate the public value notion in the context of evolving media policy paradigms to examine whether its institutionalisation represents a paradigm shift in the ideological justification of PSB. The ideological justification is investigated in the form of economic and noneconomic regulatory rationales as different academic approaches to market intervention and public service provision. As a fundamental type of policy change, the paradigm shift concept is operationalised by devising an analytical framework that consists of two analytical strands; an ideological shift and a policy process analysis. Based on a case study approach of the notion’s application at the BBC and Channel 4, the research design employs interpretative textual analysis of documents and expert interviews to investigate the ideological composition of the public value notion and its wider policy process. The research finds that no paradigm shift has taken place in the justification of PSB as the public value notion continues the overall more economic than non-economic focus of the incumbent media policy paradigm. These findings contribute to media and public policy studies with regard to the understanding and classification of (media policy) paradigm shifts as a fundamental type of policy change and the use of economic and non-economic rationales as different ideologies in informing policy ideas and decisions-making in media policy.

This thesis examines the extent to which the BBC was able to shape the output of popular culture on radio in Britain, according to its own system of beliefs, between the years 1933 and 1967. This research will show that from the outset, the BBC was an institution with a mission to inform, educate and entertain the nation. While it was not opposed to entertainment, its focus was didactic and supported a mission to improve its audience both culturally and intellectually. This policy was not always welcomed by the audience but, with the exception of the war years, persisted into mid 1950s. The Variety Department was formed in 1933 to produce all forms of light entertainment and this research will examine how its policies shaped the production of popular culture over the period concerned. This study looks not only at the workings of the Variety Department but also the topics of Americanisation and vulgarity, the two areas in which the BBC had particular sensitivities. It analyses the BBC's strategies to counteract the American effect on popular music and spoken-word programmes and how it provided its own particularly British form of entertainment in order to produce programmes it considered suitable for British audiences. It also investigates programme censorship imposed by the BBC to mitigate vulgarity in programmes, so as to produce those it considered suitable for its audiences. This thesis will contend that for over 40 years the BBC Variety Department produced popular entertainment programmes on radio which became an integral part of people's daily lives until, within a few years radio was superseded by television as the nation's principal provider of domestic entertainment. There has been no discrete study of the BBC Variety Department and it is intended that this research will add to the existing scholarship in BBC history and contribute to the analysis of radio's place in domestic popular culture in the period examined.