The Secret History of Analysis
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2010
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Analysis celebrates its 40th birthday by making its own history the subject of its trademark examination of the facts.
The Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, recently told the New Statesman that in decades past the organisation's current affairs output had displayed a left wing bias. He could not have had in mind the early years of Analysis. "We tried to avoid received opinion like the plague," says the programme's founder editor George Fischer. He required his producers to look at issues from scratch and to go beyond the bien pensant agenda.
In doing so they spotted issues that others missed. Amongst the themes they identified as important were the depth of the Thatcherite project before the term Thatcherism was coined; the tensions likely to emerge in the feminist movement; and the potential for disaster in Zimbabwe if expectations over land reform were not fulfilled. The programme's willingness to question fashionable assumptions attracted some accusations of political bias. Was that fair? Michael Blastland, an Analysis producer from the 1990s and now a regular presenter, looks back at the programme's history and meets some of its early staff and contributors. Follow Analysis on Twitter: @R4Analysis
Contributors: George Fischer, founder editor of Analysis Ian McIntyre, founder presenter of Analysis, later Controller of Radio 4 Rt Hon Tony Benn Gillian Reynolds, radio critic, The Daily Telegraph Michael Green, former Analysis producer, later controller of Radio 4 Caroline Thomson, former Analysis producer, now Chief Operating Officer for the BBC Fraser Steel, former Analysis producer Hugh Chignell, Associate Professor of Broadcasting History, Bournemouth University Lord Griffiths
Producer: Linda Pressly.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
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| 0:35.4 | Sounds. |
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| 0:45.0 | This week, to mark 40 years of analysis, Michael Blaslin delves into the program's unique beginnings in 1970. |
| 0:55.0 | Right, here we are on the fourth floor Broadcasting House. |
| 0:59.0 | So where do we go? |
| 1:00.0 | Straight ahead. |
| 1:02.0 | To step over the drilling. I say. Ah, gone. We're just faced with the white wall. |
| 1:10.0 | Well, we've been wondering through Broadcasting House trying to find the old analysis editing haunts and I'm here with George Fisher who was the first producer of analysis the person who got the whole thing rolling in the beginning and we were going to try and find this place but here we are it's a white brick wall. |
| 1:23.6 | There's nothing here anymore. Perhaps we could write on the wall. This is where |
| 1:30.1 | analysis started. Yeah well, come with me instead to the 1970s where the program began. |
| 1:38.0 | Here we will find remarkable voices, frank and revealing. |
| 1:43.0 | The Shah of Iran, at the beginning of a then unimagined end in Islamic Revolution, discussing torture. |
| 1:49.9 | If you are thinking that they are accused of torturing people. I don't think that this is very true because |
| 1:58.7 | the new modern system of questioning people is in itself a kind of a torture but it's very refined |
| 2:06.2 | and psychological way of torturing people with your subtle questions. |
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