HAPPY 50th, AUNTIE BEEB : <i> BBC-TV Celebrates Its Golden Anniversary Worldwide </i>

Gerald Cock should rate at least afootnote in the history of broadcasting. In the year 1926, Cock, a tennis buff as well as head of programs for the fledgling British Broadcasting Co. wireless (radio) network, was so delighted with the All England tennis championships at Wimbledon that he felt all England should be able to follow the matches, shot by shot. He petitioned the board of governors of the tourney to allow him to build a booth and supply announcers to describe the games. Thus, sportscasting was born.

A decade later in the year 1936, Cock, again at Wimbledon watching Fred Perry’s remarkable triumph, asked if he might bring in remote equipment to televise the Center Court matches. “To what?” the governors may well have asked. One could hardly fault them. But Cock had been commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corp. (as it was now known) to inaugurate the world’s first regularly scheduled TV service. He did just that, launching the service 50 years ago this month with a program called “Looking at You,” which wasn’t looked at by very many people, as there were only about 250-300 sets in all England.

And the next year at Wimbledon, the BBC did indeed provide the first telecast of a sports event with a 25-minute unbroken transmission of Bunny Austin’s championship match. One critic noted that not only could one follow the action on the court but “even the marks of the passage of the lawn mowers over the grass were distinctly visible.” There were then about 2,000 sets in England. By contrast, the Wimbledon matches last summer were viewed on TV by hundreds of millions in 90 countries.

One is so used to regarding television as an American institution that we forget that the Brits were receiving regular daily TV transmissions from the BBC a full 10 years before the Americans got in on the act. With justifiable pride, the BBC is celebrating the Golden Anniversary of the birth of TV with various observances around the world, including a series of events in this country, including:

On Friday, the prestigious Museum of Broadcasting in New York will begin 100 hours of BBC telecasts with “Behind the Scenes at the BBC,” a package of four BBC specials. On Nov. 17, the museum will hold a lavish, black-tie party as part of its salute, which will continue through Jan. 31. On Nov. 18, Michael Grade, director of programming for BBC-TV, and controller Graeme McDonald of BBC-2 will host a seminar on BBC programming and scheduling, the first of 10 seminars exploring history, issues and other topics related to the network.

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences will host a black-tie dinner here at the Cocoanut Grove Wednesday night, with the networks and major studios joining the BBC tribute. More than a dozen BBC executives are expected to attend.

A banquet Friday in Washington given by British Ambassador Sir Antony Acland will mark the opening of a BBC exhibit at the Library of Congress.

She has come a long way has the Beeb--or Auntie, as she is sometimes called, not always with affection. (Witness the current row with the Conservative government.) In those prewar Depression years, there were only two hours of television a day, six days a week, but such stars as Laurence Olivier, Danny Kaye, Margot Fonteyn and Greer Garson lent their talents to this infant art. One of its first noteworthy events was the coverage of the coronation of King George VI; the coronation of his daughter Elizabeth II 15 years later with the first interior shots of Westminster Abbey was a milestone when millions of Britons bought sets. From the beginning, TV made an impact--soccer balls, for instance, are now checkered because they would show up better on the tube.

Those early years ended abruptly in September, 1939, in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon with the realization that the BBC’s transmission tower on the Alexandria Palace was a splendid homing device for Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombers. BBC-TV stayed off the air until World War II ended in 1945 and then returned to the air with typical British aplomb with the second half of the Mickey Mouse cartoon.

Looking back over the years since the war ended, it’s hard to argue with the observation that British television--and the BBC, in particular--is, in Milton Shulman’s oft-quoted phrase, “the least worst television in the world.” But it is also valuable to note in the light of such triumphs as “The Forsyte Saga,” Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation,” Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man,” “I, Claudius,” “Glittering Prizes,” “War and Peace,” David Attenborough’s “Life on Earth,” “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “Elizabeth R,” “Pennies From Heaven”--scores of others--that we in America see the cream of the British crop.

I have been enchanted by BBC television:I have also been bored stiff. In a country where lawn-mower races are national events each year (in three categories:pushed by hand, baskets attached;motor driven, and ridden upon), there are eccentric programs that bewilder Americans abroad. I have sat in London mesmerized by BBC programs so bad I wondered how they ever got on the air, interminable discussions of old movies, dimwitted panel and chat shows, embarrassing game shows, not only on the popular BBC-1 channel but the erudite BBC-2 as well.

On the other hand, no organization covers the news better than the BBC around the world--the sun never sets on BBC news. Nowhere are sports events better covered--the BBC was the first to televise the Olympic Games in 1948, the first to span the ocean to bring the games from Mexico City to Europe. The BBC comedies from “Till Death Us Do Part” (Americanized into “All in the Family”) and “Steptoe and Son” (“Sanford and Son”) to “Fawlty Towers” and “The Two Ronnies” are state of the art.

There are misconceptions about the BBC that persist through the years. It is not a government network, even though Variety still calls it one; it is an independent corporation that is supported by a tax on radio and TV sets in which the funds go directly to the corporation, not to the general fund. The BBC, often at loggerheads with the government, once sued the government--and won!It does not show commercials, but neither does it hold auctions and other begging sessions as our Public Broadcasting Service does.

The other misconception, born in America of programs like “The Ascent of Man” and “War and Peace,” is that the BBC is some sort of airborne intellectual lecture hall, occupied with philosophical discussion and literary art but hardly for the common folk. Partly this stems from the dictates of the founding director of the BBC, that towering indomitable Scot John Charles Lord Reith (Churchill called him “that Wuthering Height!”). Lord Reith believed “the broadcasting system of a nation is a mirror of that nation’s conscience.”

He said:”We will be judged not in the amusement we have given but what we have stood for and stand for” and that “when broadcasting plays to the lowest, rather than the highest in man, then the country itself will have fallen very low.” In other words, give the people what they should have, not what they want. That led to the image of Auntie Beeb, a blue-nosed, spinsterish autocrat.

But, of course, that is an image hardly in keeping with the wonderfully irreverent “That Was the Week That Was,” with Benny Hill, who honed his leer on the BBC, with Alf Garnet (the British equivalent of Archie Bunker, though much rougher), with Monty Python. And Auntie Beeb was never loathe to import “I Love Lucy” and “Gunsmoke” (called “Gun Law”) and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” even “What’s My Line?” and “Dallas.”

If in later years, the Reith-ian concept of lofty earnestness dispensing cultural and spiritual benefits from some Olympian height was greatly dissipated with competition from commercial channels (the BBC was a monopoly until the ITV network was licensed in 1955), there was and is still the high-minded concept of the founder.

Which reaps double benefits, because the commercial channels in Britain competing with the BBC must provide equally high-quality work, such as “Brideshead Revisited” and “Upstairs, Downstairs”--the quality rubs off. Meanwhile, BBC-2 was created as strictly a minority channel--”We grow nervous if we get as much as 20%of the audience;it means we are doing something wrong, something popular,” Aubrey Singer told me when we hated BBC-2.

When I think of the BBC, I always think of drama, of “The Six Wives of Henry VIII,” of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “Talking to a Stranger,” “The Roads to Freedom,” “An Englishman Abroad,” “The Shakespeare Plays.” Could any other broadcaster in the world have achieved that canon?Good or bad, the immensity of doing all Shakespeare’s plays is an incredible accomplishment, and many were very good indeed.

I think of the playwrights honed on the BBC, many now lighting stages around the world--of John Hopkins and David Mercer, Dennis Potter, Alun Owen, Alan Plater, Peter Nichols. Nor when they achieve fame in theater or films do they desert the BBC. Nichols, author of “Joe Egg” and other plays, wrote a new comedy for the BBC, “Born in the Gardens,” shown only a few weeks ago.

Poldark and Claudius and Lord Peter Wimsey, “Panorama” and the World Cup, “The Search for the Nile,” “The Africans” and “The Age of Kings” . . . “All Things Great and Small.” That latter could be the signature of the BBC after 50 years, all things great and small, some of them great indeed.