Asa Briggs is the most important broadcasting historian in Britain. By writing about broadcasting as part of modern British social history, he has become a powerful advocate for the continuation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

A Victorian historian of considerable note, Asa Briggs began his great work, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, in the 1960s. The first volume, entitled The Birth of Broadcasting, was published in 1961 and contained a marvelously evocative description of the birth of the BBC, and its founder John Reith, through 1927. The second volume, The Golden Age of Wireless, published in 1965, covered the period from 1927 to 1939 and received very favorable reviews. Volume three, The War of Words, covered the war years, 1939 to 1945. The fourth volume, entitled Sound and Vision, covered the period from 1945 to 1955, and the final volume, Competition, from the end of the BBC monopoly in 1955 to the mid- 1970s.

Because independent television was not created in Britain until 1955, Briggs is primarily a historian of the BBC. However, in 1985 Briggs was commissioned by the independent British companies to write with Joanna Spicer an account of the way the Independent Broadcasting Authority organized the awarding of franchises in 1980. In this book, The Franchise Affair, Briggs’s normal Olympian detachment from the politics of broadcasting was dropped in a fascinating and often critical account of the development of independent TV. Cynics pointed out that Briggs had been a director of Southern Television, one of only two companies whose franchise was arbitrarily removed in 1980. The Franchise Affair was published by Hutchinson, a wholly owned subsidiary of London Weekend Television, which was re-awarded its franchise.

Made Baron Briggs of Lewes in 1976, Briggs is often seen as an establishment figure keen on preserving the status of the BBC. However, readers of his 1985 compilation volume, The BBC: The First 50 Years, were delighted to find that Briggs was not uncritical of the organization that sponsored his mammoth History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom and paid for his offices in London.

Perhaps Briggs’s greatest contribution to British broadcasting may not be his history books; it could be his role from 1978 to 1994 as chancellor of the Open University, a nonresidential institution that provides primary contacts with its students through radio and television broadcasts. The Open University has grown to become a major educational institution, awarding degrees for low fees, while maintaining high intellectual standards. Briggs has spent some of his prodigious energies fostering the growth of similar Open Universities of the Air in countries of the British Commonwealth.

As a member of the Campaign for Quality Television, Briggs has been a great defender of the BBC’s charter, which came up for renewal in 1996. Thanks to the many defenders of the BBC’s position in British society, not least to the Campaign for Quality Television, the BBC had its charter renewed for a further 15 years. Briggs was well satisfied with the result. Thanks to his influence, perhaps in the future some historian will be able to write a history of the first hundred years of the BBC. Briggs’s contribution to broadcasting is that of historian and advocate. He has skillfully narrated the story of the most important of all British media enterprises.