The corporation’s claims to the public and to neutrality are crucial for the British state and its power across the globe.
An insider glimpse of the conference that inspired this week's theme, plus an outsider view.
This week’s guest editor, Claire Westall, a Lecturer in English and Related Literature at the University of York, guides us through the argument this week:
Despite the sale of televised England home-matches from the BBC to commercial broadcasting, cricket remains central to collective imaginings of 'Englishness'. Recent attempts to situate the sport within the history of empire reveal much about the BBC's continuing ties to the ideology of state-led
The desperate construction of cultural Britishness observable in this summer's Jubilee and Olympics is just another attempt to conflate British identity with an idealised vision of England. The motivation for those in power is clear: to disguise the gaping constitutional issues that threaten the U