Cod on Ice

Andy Beckett

• Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride And Paranoia by Richard Lindley
  Politico’s, 404 pp, £18.99, September 2002, ISBN 1 902301 80 3
• The Harder Path: The Autobiography by John Birt
  Time Warner, 532 pp, £20.00, October 2002, ISBN 0 316 86019 0

For those inclined to ponder the state of the BBC, and of British television in general, the performance of Panorama has long been a favoured indicator. In January 1955, not much more than a year after the current affairs programme began broadcasting, the Sunday Times declared: ‘Panorama is a perfect illustration of what is wrong with television.’ Yet within five years, the Daily Mail was praising the programme for establishing investigative television as a British broadcasting genre:

Panorama has become an unbreakable Monday night fixture for between six and eight million people . . . The current muster has Robin Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor . . .