The purpose of Thomas Hajkowski’s meticulously researched, archive-driven, and eminently readable contribution to the rapidly growing field of radio studies (and to the cultural studies of early British radio in particular) is to survey the many ways that, through its programming, the BBC both worked and negotiated the simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal possibilities of early radio broadcasting with respect to the ideological agendas of empire and nation. How did the BBC, during its first quarter century—from its beginnings in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company and its incorporation a few years later to the moment in the early 1950s when, coincident with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, commercial pressures began fundamentally to alter the ideological landscape of British broadcasting—“reflect, define, and project British national identity” (2) not only in England and for the English but also in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, and for the citizens of these three sisters of the United Kingdom? “What it meant to be British,” Hajkowski writes, “and broadcasting’s part in fostering a particular type of Britishness, is the subject of this book” (2). In chapters on empire and identity from 1923 to 1939, on war and evolving notions of empire from 1939 to 1953, and on the BBC’s promotion of monarchy as a central symbol of British identity over the course of the second quarter of the twentieth century, the first part of the book shows how the BBC, beginning under the influential and itself rather imperial leadership of John Reith, “championed the British imperial ideal … and constructed the monarchy as a guarantor” and embodiment of such traditional British values as “individualism, freedom, and pluralism” (3). In these early chapters, then, which make the case for the BBC’s centripetal influence, Hajkowski makes the unsurprising although thoroughly detailed case that a great deal of programming in the first three decades of British radio, in broadcasts devoted to both education and entertainment, served a unifying purpose of interpellating listeners in England and across the United Kingdom into an imperial ideological order: this programming educated listeners in the supreme values of empire and monarchy and encouraged listeners to see themselves as members of a British “imagined community” (Hajkowski sees his work in part as an extension into the realm of electronic mass telecommunications of Benedict Anderson’s well-known argument about how print capitalism in the eighteenth century fostered the rise of national consciousness: “Broadcasting, I argue, works in fundamentally the same way” [6]).

The second, and more interesting and innovative, part of Hajkowski’s book comprises chapters on the politics of regional broadcasting in, respectively, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, with a conclusion that emphasizes the tremendous influence exerted by the BBC in its first three decades with respect to the simultaneously political, social, and cultural project of national identity creation and contestation. “From its founding in 1922 until its monopoly was broken in 1954,” Hajkowski writes, “the BBC was the central site where national identity was produced, projected, and contested” (234). The interesting point of these latter chapters is that this production, projection, and contestation occurred, and quite consciously among BBC administrators and program producers, in different ways in different national contexts—in ways that, far from serving to impose a monolithic notion of Britishness onto all regions of the United Kingdom, instead served centripetally to make space under the general umbrella of national identity for expressions and affirmations of regional identity. The second part of the following sentence is telling: “In contrast to the prevailing scholarship, this book [argues] that the BBC constructed Britishness as an inclusive, pluralistic identity and that the Corporation created spaces for the expression of multiple national identities in Britain” (236, emphasis added). In other words, according to Hajkowski, the BBC may appear to many broadcasting historians to possess a unitary identity as a bastion of (southern English, metropolitan) Englishness, but in fact it was internally fractured, multiple, heterogeneous, and the most prominent cultural site for the “refashion[ing of] Britishness and British institutions such as the empire and especially the monarchy in ways that increasingly recognized the multi-national character of Britain” (237).

Taking “programs, not policy, as its subject” (4), The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–1953 dives into the BBC archives and scours the Radio Times and offers useful and thorough surveys of scores of programs and series from radio’s formative years. This book is marked by a generous attentiveness to program details within the context of a grand narrative of Britishness that will be helpful to scholars interested not only in the cultural work of the early BBC as a centripetal locus and diffuser of national identity but also in how the precommercial, pretelevision BBC played a vital centrifugal role in the promotion of a multilayered, multinational sense of Britishness that helped to transform that very notion, “pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be British” (237) on air in the early to mid-twentieth century.