A Scottish radical: David Hutchison remembers the multi-faceted Stuart Hood

One of the most creative periods in ­British broadcasting was the 1960s. The BBC was finding itself under pressure from the recently established ITV, which to many viewers seemed brasher, much less stuffy and a lot more fun than the Beeb. The Corporation responded with one of the boldest moves it ever made by appointing Hugh Greene as Director ­General in 1960.

With Greene at the helm the BBC became much less risk averse and much more innovative. That was never more the case than under the director of television Greene appointed in 1961. That man was Stuart Hood, and under his leadership ground breaking programmes as varied as That Was The Week That Was, Z Cars, Steptoe and Son and The Wednesday Play were introduced.

Hood is an excellent example of a Scot who left his native land and flourished in the media world of the south. Other striking examples are John Grierson, often regarded as the father of documentary, and Dennis Forman, managing director of the ITV company Granada in its heyday. The lure of the south for talented Scots continues to this day of course, not only in media but also in politics and business.

Hood was rather unusual. Not only was he a broadcasting executive, later a film maker, he was also a novelist and translator. And, most striking of all, he had been the leader of a group of Italian partisans during the Second World War.

Hood was born in 1915 in Edzell in Angus where his father was the headmaster of the village school. Later his father was promoted to a post in Montrose and so Hood spent the rest of his childhood there. Much, much later, after he had kindly agreed to be chief examiner for a degree course in Communication and Media run by my university, and I had got to know him reasonably well, I asked why he had moved to Brighton from ­London. He replied that he felt the need to be back beside the sea as he had been in Montrose.

After distinguishing himself academically at secondary school, Hood went to Edinburgh University where he initially studied languages and then moved to English literature. He taught briefly at Boroughmuir School in the city, although he had no real intention of following in his father’s footsteps. At Edinburgh he also found himself drawn to Marxism and he joined the Communist Party. At one point he was responsible for typing the monthly bulletin of the rail union, ASLEF!

He had seen something of fascism during a trip to Germany in the early 1930s and in 1940 volunteered for the army and was assigned to the Royal Engineers. On joining up Communists were expected by the Party to resign, so that if asked whether they were members they could say ‘I am a member of no party’. He never rejoined, although later in life he was very briefly a member of the far left Workers Revolutionary Party in which the actress Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin, were prominent.

During the North African campaign Hood was captured by Italian troops who happily provided their prisoners with spaghetti and Chianti, for which they were very grateful. He was transferred to a prisoner of war camp at Chieti in Italy where he participated in escape attempts and then, seen as a ’troublemaker’, he was moved to another camp, Fontanellato, in the north of the country.

In September 1943 Italy signed an ­armistice with the Allies and the commandant at Fontanellato declined to hand over his prisoners to the Germans but set them free and wished them well. Many were recaptured before they reached Allied lines but Hood and Gurkha officer, Ted Mumford, evaded capture and after several months on the run, much helped by Hood’s knowledge of Italian, they met up with a partisan group fighting the ­Germans – who were now an occupying force – and their fascist collaborators. They joined the group.

At a small hamlet called Valibona, the group was surrounded by a group of Italian fascists and in the ensuing battle Hood found himself running for his life. After three months in hiding he met up with more partisans in the Siena area and was put in charge of a unit of 50 men which continued a campaign of attack and sabotage.

This period in Hood’s life is explored in his remarkable book, Carlino (originally published in 1963 under the title Pebbles from Skull). Carlino was the name the partisans gave him because ‘Stuart Hood’ was too difficult to pronounce.

At the end of the war he was in Berlin working in Intelligence and it was there that he encountered Russian troops, much of whose behaviour he found difficult to come to terms with. And he couldn’t understand either why Russians who had been fighting with the resistance in France were not greeted as heroes by the Soviets when they returned, but instead sent to the Siberian gulag.

It was in Germany that he was pointed in the direction of the BBC, and not wishing to return to school teaching, he happily joined the Corporation as a sub-editor in the European service. He moved into the domestic services, then to head up the news operation and finally he became director of television.

In interviews he gave to Robert Lumley for the Edinburgh Review in the late1980s Hood happily admitted to being a very ambitious man, something he attributed substantially to his Presbyterian background. It became clear that he might well have ended up as Director General of the Corporation. But he was uneasy -

“I was increasingly having to adopt a public posture that was at variance with my own convictions on such things as the monarchy, royal weddings, religion, politics, etc.”

So he left the BBC, and did so rather abruptly. He then worked for a brief ­period as Programme Controller for ­Associated Rediffusion, the ITV company holding the London weekday franchise. He did not enjoy his time there and later ruefully reflected that he had failed to ­remove the quiz show Double Your Money from the airwaves.

Leaving ITV, he then pursued a career as an academic, teaching film and television at the Royal College of Art and elsewhere, and as a translator, novelist, critic and documentary film maker.

He wrote and co-wrote several books on the broadcasting industry and in that sense he became a media studies academic. But he was a very unusual academic, not least because of his wealth of practical experience. Media folk often deride those who teach courses about what they do, arguing that such academics haven’t got a clue about the pressures which mean 1000 words have to be produced before lunchtime and schedules have to be designed, filled and transmitted. Hood was immune from such criticism.

The themes to which he returns constantly in his books, particularly On ­Television which went through several editions, are those of ownership, finance and control. And these themes centre round the concept of public service broadcasting (PSB), that is to say broadcasting which is not market driven but sets out to offer citizens a varied menu of “information education and entertainment”, to use the oft quoted phrase supposedly ­originated by John Reith, the first director general of the BBC and another ex-pat Scot who rose to the top in the media world and indeed has been credited with the invention of PSB in the UK.

Hood would have had little sympathy for many of Reith’s ideas, not least in politics but they shared a commitment to broadcasting as a tool of knowledge and enrichment as well as diversion.

When Hood’s books appeared it was already clear that the model of PSB in the UK, which has given us not only the BBC but also the other commercially ­financed terrestrial services, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, was under threat. Both the BBC and Channel 4 are owned not by the government but by the people of the UK, but they depend, as do all other broadcasters, on being licensed by the all ­purpose regulator Ofcom and ultimately by the government.

It is no secret that the current UK administration has no great enthusiasm for the BBC, which some ministers appear to feel gives too much airtime to criticism of what the government is doing. Nor is it a secret that the Holyrood government has its reservations about some of BBC Scotland’s news and current affairs coverage. In several of his books Hood acknowledges that the tension between broadcasters and politicians is unavoidable and the best that can be hoped for is a willingness on both sides to accept the legitimate roles of each other.

It is doubtful if he would have been happy about current moves to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, and the suggestion that it might be replaced by some other method of finance. There may be better ways of raising the money but the suspicion persists that the ultimate aim of some in government is the diminution of the power of the Corporation.

It has to be acknowledged of course that the BBC has in recent years became its own worst enemy by paying bizarre salaries to some of the so-called ‘talent’, by failing to appreciate the existential threat to newspapers which its news gathering and online activities present, and, on occasion, by transmitting tendentious material which lacked rigour and balance.

But the fact remains that PSB is one of the great British cultural achievements and, despite the competition from Sky, Netflix and the like, the five terrestrial channels still pick up over 70% of viewing, with the BBC being regarded as the most trusted source of news during the current pandemic, according to Ofcom’s research. BBC radio services continue to attract half of the listening in the country.

In the fourth edition of On Television, published in 1997, there is a clear anxiety that a two tier system might develop, with the ability to pay determining what level of service we receive . In a sense we have reached that point already, although there is an intriguing paradox here: a television licence costs approximately £13 per month, subscriptions to premium satellite and digital services cumulatively a lot more, but these services tend to offer a rather more restricted bill of fare, despite their success with high end drama such as The Crown and Game of Thrones.

One issue not anticipated by Hood is the loss of advertising revenue to the likes of Facebook, a loss which has proved equally damaging to the press. If we are to sustain vibrant indigenous media solutions will have to be found to current financial problems, and soon.

Although he had written novels in the immediate post-war period, Hood’s career as a novelist belongs largely to the later stages of his life, and in several of the books he wrote he returns to some of the experiences and dilemmas he faced as a younger man. Two of these novels are particularly striking.

A Storm from Paradise appeared in 1985, when Hood had just entered his 70s. It won several awards. The action is set in the early part of the 20th century in a fictitious village, ­Slateford, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Edzell. The central character, John Scott, head teacher of the local school, embarks on a love affair with a Polish-Jewish refugee, Elizavyeta. This does not go down well with all members of the rather inward looking community.

Hood uses his narrative not only to explore the life of that community, which is not dissimilar to the one created by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in Sunset Song, but also to examine questions such as the tensions between nationalism and internationalism and the impact the rigidities of the class system have on the life chances of ordinary working people.

In The Upper Hand, published in 1987, the central character, John Melville, also hails from the north east but he journeys far from there, as did his creator, and spends part of World War Two in North Africa. But at university he has been recruited by the British secret service as an informer. This leads to him wondering whether the much more dashing upper class leftist, Colin Elphinstone, with whose life his own life has become intertwined, is in fact a Russian agent.

It is a novel which captures very well the agonies of the inter war period, as fascism and communism clashed, and the feel of post-war London. In the relationship between the two protagonists there is something of the doubles/split personality theme which is at the heart of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Hood regarded Robert Louis Stevenson highly, much preferring him to his father’s favourite, Walter Scott.

Other novels followed – The Brutal Heart (1989), The Den of Foxes (1991), and The Book of Judith (1995) which were positively reviewed in a variety of publications, and in which he continued his explorations of the interactions ­between the personal and the political.

Hood’s work as a novelist was complemented by substantial work as the translator of 40 books by prominent Italian, German and other writers including ­Dario Fo, Pier Paolo Pasolini and his close friend, Erich Fried.

The question of where exactly Hood placed himself politically remains a puzzling one. In the recently published book about his life and work there is a fascinating chapter by the television producer Tony Garnett who died earlier this year. Garnett first came to prominence for his collaboration with director Ken Loach on television plays such as Cathy Come Home and then the film Kes. Later he produced Between the Lines and This Life. Garnett knew Stuart Hood well but still felt that ultimately he was “unknowable”.

Musing on the fact that an ex-Communist had managed to get to a very senior position at the top of the BBC, Garnett wonders how that could have happened, given that at the time there was a system designed to stop such an occurrence. The Corporation had a subtle way of arresting the progress of “dangerous” people – a Christmas tree was stamped on their personnel file.

Of course Hood’s wartime experience probably made him bullet proof against accusations of being too far to the left. But Garnett allows himself to wonder if he was perhaps some kind of double agent, apparently a man of the left but in reality something else. But then Garnett retreats from this speculation and finally offers the judgement that Stuart Hood was “just a man of his time…what a time! And what a man!”

Stuart Hood: Twentieth-Century Partisan, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2020

David Hutchison is Honorary Professor in Media Policy at Glasgow Caledonian University