The future of the BBC

AS A boy growing up in the 1930s in the Midlands, Norman Painting, the son of a railwayman, listened to a new radio service from the British Broadcasting Corporation. His mother hoped he would get a job as a manager at the mine, but listening to the voices from London talking about world affairs, culture and music gave him other ideas. “The radio opened a door to the world,” says Mr Painting, who went on to Oxford University on a scholarship and became an academic before later working for the BBC's Radio 4 in its long-running soap, “The Archers”. “I often say that really I was educated by the BBC.”