^#smrgSAHAF The News Business - 1983

The BBC's first Director General deliberatrly courted danger—mental and physical. In the Great War, he preferred to stride along the top of the trenches till felled by the inevitable bullet. He made a rapid recovery which reaffirmed his faith in God and himself.

For fifteen years the BBC gave him all the challenges he needed. He had virtually built the whole edifice of broadcasting himself. When he was attacked from within by his own Board of Governors, he fought them on a personal level. When successive Prime Ministers tried to wrest his Aladdin's Lamp (which could conjure up the Genie of Public Opinion) from him, he clung on. In the end the lamp became a beacon which no amount of Churchillian threats could extinguish.

Throughout his life Reith kept a diary revealing much of the inner character behind the bluff man who wallowed in Ihe razzmatazz of people and power. This major new biographical account of Keith's years at the BBC makes use of those diaries to reveal several facets of a great broadcasting pioneer. Reith coincides with a major two-part dramatisation on the same theme—written by the same author, Roger Milner.