Writing the history of the BBC in under three hundred pages is a task that has escaped most historians of British broadcasting to date. Asa Briggs's foundational history of the institution famously took over thirty years and sprawled across five volumes: for media historians and BBC enthusiasts alike, Briggs's History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (1961–1995) remains the first port of call. Although Briggs's position as official historian was subsequently taken up first by Jean Seaton and then David Hendy, both have judiciously steered clear from attempting a similar mammoth endeavor. Others have continued to produce important work exploring more tightly focused themes, such as Sian Nicholas's work on propaganda and war, Thomas Hajkowski on national identity, or Kate Murphy on women's roles at the BBC. With This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922–2022, published to coincide with the institution's centenary, Simon Potter accomplishes two things: first, to compress existing knowledge about the BBC's hundred-year history into a monograph-length volume; and second, to frame this historical account in the context of current discourse about the BBC and its future.

In his opening chapters, Potter offers a fairly standard account of the first fifty-odd years of the BBC from its inception in 1926 as the British Broadcasting Company. Potter presents a clear account of the broadcaster's founding principles and its overall architecture while simultaneously offering readers a glimpse of what programming on the BBC sounded like (and later, looked like) in the years leading up to the Second World War. Moving to the postwar years, Potter turns his emphasis to the shifting governance of the corporation and how this responded to changes in government policy, popular taste, and technological developments.

One of the strengths of this account is the way that Potter centers the BBC's international—and indeed, imperial—orientation from its early years. This is to be expected from a historian like Potter, whose research over the past twenty years has plumbed the depths of this angle of BBC history. It is refreshing to see this international angle reinscribed firmly into the mainstream history of the corporation—and not just for reasons of historical completeness. The BBC's remit stretched beyond UK shores practically from its inception, as it took a leading role in the creation of the International Broadcasting Union in Geneva in 1925. In 1932, it launched the Empire Service (aimed primarily at listeners in the white settler colonies): this was replaced during the Second World War by the Overseas Service, which placed more emphasis on foreign language broadcasting, and the Transcription Service, which distributed recorded programs around the world. The General Overseas Service, launched in 1942, was the precursor to today's World Service. Aside from their obvious purpose of broadcasting to audiences outside of the United Kingdom, what these initiatives had in common was their separation from the traditional funding model of the BBC. While the broadcaster's commitment to public service broadcasting at home was funded by license-fee payers, these international services were instead bankrolled by government departments, including the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Even after David Cameron's government controversially removed financial support for the World Service in 2014, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office continued to provide £85 million of funding intended to support the provision of services of strategic interest, including to Africa and Asia.

This aspect of the BBC's work is key to the corporation's story precisely because it is usually omitted from both historical and policy discussions about the BBC's function and purpose. We may like to think of the BBC as funded directly and exclusively through the license fee, but since the 1990s, it has increasingly supported itself with revenue derived from exporting its content overseas, particularly in the United States. The success of the BBC's international brand is largely the product of the policies pursued by successive governments that have used their control over the periodical renewal of the royal charter and the setting of the license fee to influence the BBC's aims and governance.

To its detractors, the fact that one of the most recognizable symbols of Britishness in the twentieth century was essentially a state monopoly was unacceptable. The story of the postwar years that Potter tells therefore shows how the BBC and British broadcasting more generally were shaped in the image of the free market: from the arrival of ITV in the 1950s to, more recently, the introduction of quotas for BBC content produced by independent production companies. There is a great irony in the fact that even as the BBC has sought to adapt to this new climate of free market competition, its detractors have criticized the corporation for being too competitive in certain key areas, including its overseas business. But its success in the global market since the 1990s has also raised some fundamental questions for the corporation: Is it possible, for example, to remain a public service broadcaster while relying quite so heavily on income from abroad?

Potter's main takeaway, which the reader encounters toward the end of the book, is that most of the BBC's audiences have an outdated view of how the BBC functions—from its funding model and its relationship with government to its very status as a broadcaster in the age of digital media. It is hard to read these latter pages without reaching the conclusion that all efforts to acquiesce to the demands of the corporation's fiercest critics are doomed to failure. Meanwhile, rehearsing the recent litany of scandals and mistakes—including the handling of crises arising from the Jimmy Savile, Martin Bashir, and Alistair McAlpine cases—will make even the BBC's most ardent supporters reflect on what exactly it is they are fighting for. And yet, as Potter himself remarks, the fact that the last fifty years of the institution's history have been characterized by “perpetual crisis” (5) is perhaps indicative of the BBC's capacity to reinvent itself and weather the storm.

As Potter makes clear in his introduction to the book, this is no “celebratory” (8) account of the BBC as an institution. Instead, Potter's is a “critical” text (8), and his account of the corporation's past poses difficult questions about its future too. This raises the question: Who is the target audience for this book? Certainly, as a survey of broadcasting history for undergraduate students and scholars who wish to access a digestible account of the BBC's past, this is an excellent addition to the existing literature. The publisher may also have hoped to reach a wider readership interested in deepening their knowledge of the corporation during its centenary year. For the former, the lack of detailed footnotes pointing to the wider scholarship will prove frustrating, while both categories of reader will be irritated by the lack of images and the fairly frequent typos. Nevertheless, these issues do not detract from the overall value of a book that manages to tackle a hundred years of BBC history in a way that is equally accessible and thought-provoking.