Entertaining, informative, lucid, kaleidoscopic: this centenary history of the British Broadcasting Corporation is like the finest BBC program. The task facing David Hendy, emeritus professor of media at the University of Sussex, and a former BBC journalist and producer, could hardly have been more daunting.

Since its first broadcast crackled to air on November 14, 1922 (barely rating a mention in the British press), the BBC has transmitted somewhere between 10 and 20 million TV and radio programs. It is a multi-channel phenomenon that broadcasts and streams around the clock and around the world. Historian Asa Briggs laboured for more than 30 years, between the 1960s and the 1990s, on a five-volume history of broadcasting in Britain commissioned by the BBC.

After committing to write an authorised history for the BBC centenary, Hendy had to contend with pandemic interruptions to research, as well as his own case of long COVID. His achievement, then, is all the more remarkable.

The book’s early pages remind us of the exhilaration of wireless, something utterly novel and untried, and explain how the BBC’s first generation had been scarred by World War I as they built a new community, with a transcendent sense of purpose, at the original headquarters, Savoy Hill. While the opening chapter may be focused on the founding figures of Cecil Lewis, John Reith and Arthur Burrows, the book is also about “the waifs and strays, the damaged souls, the oddballs, idealists, pragmatists, moralists, military types, dilettantes, actors, journalists and pacifists” who peopled the BBC.

Hendy has sought to uncover the world of thought and debate behind key BBC developments, and understand “one of the most extraordinary creative communities of the last century”. Drawing partly on the collection of hundreds of oral history interviews with staff that the BBC has been accumulating for decades, the author unpicks the experiences of lift attendants, telephonists and engineers as well as brilliant program-makers such as Lance Sieveking, Hilda Matheson and David Attenborough.

The BBC is democratic in another way. Running through the first of the book’s four sections is a consideration of how early broadcasters struggled to understand working-class life from the inside, and how they haltingly came to take popular culture seriously and explore the lives of ordinary Britons. Helping to drive this transition was the BBC North Region, centred in Manchester, and documentarians Geoffrey Bridson and Olive Shapley, who brought to the airwaves compelling and sympathetic slices of everyday life.

This is a refreshing institutional history that spends little time on boardroom meetings or minutiae. And yet a slightly fuller explanation of the administrative arrangements surrounding the BBC’s birth might help readers understand the complex relationship between the broadcaster, the General Post Office (GPO) and the government.

The book’s vivid second section is devoted to World War II, when many BBC operations were decanted to the country, the staff who stayed in London slept in shifts on mattresses in the concert hall, and Broadcasting House was struck by bombs. The BBC emerged from the war with not just operations in the provinces, Wales and Northern Ireland, but as a fully-fledged global institution, with English and foreign-language services across the world.