Pinkoes and Traitors in UK

While we all rubberneck at the hooting, honking pile-up of BBC Two’s Top Gear, it’s worth glancing back to the Seventies and Eighties – the period of BBC history surveyed by Jean Seaton – to this show’s earlier incarnation: back then, it was an exquisitely staid motoring magazine presented by William Woollard and Angela Rippon, there to introduce us to the indicator-light features of the Mini Metro. The men who ran the BBC then would have been bemused by the idea that such a series could create shrieking headlines around the world. But the BBC that Seaton portrays (she is picking up the baton from Asa Briggs who chronicled its earlier decades) is an institution trying to hold a line of imperious impartiality and taste in a world that was raucously transforming around it.