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than some tactful advice, and by 1932 only half a dozen licenses had actually been revoked. Allwere cases of what the Post Office called "cantakerous" people?' But as the merelyuninformed were educated, and as equipment improved in sensitivity, so the purpose of the vans shifted exclusively to the detection of unlicensed receivers-ones that were not giving rise to any listener complaints at all. That is, they became true pirate detectors. The long career of the "detector van," a symbol of Britain's broadcasting culture for the rest of the century, had begun.72 It would be punctuated by poster campaigns against "pirates" every time a new way of listening or watching broadcast media appeared (fig. 13.15 is one of a long sequence of such images).

To Americans, detector vans have always seemed incipiently totalitarian. As early as 1933, when schoolchildren across the United States were told to debate the rival systems for broadcasting, it was the detector van that counted decisively against the British. I have myself heard NPR announcers in more than one city remark during pledge drives that the alternative to giving money would be to have Orwellian detector vans snooping around listeners' neighborhoods. In truth, they were never effective enough to be that sinister. Internal memos spoke more about the importance of publicity than about their actual successes. Advocates had pointed out even before their deployment that their "psychological effect" would be important even if they never actually worked, and rumors about their impracticality always circulated. When television was introduced after WWII, a senior engineer told the director of television that a popular account of the new generation ofvans was needed because with the original radio equipment people had come to believe "that the van was completely bogus." He then added the revealing comment that the vans "used to work wonders in producing licenses some twenty years ago and of course it need not be bluff nowadays." He still only had two of them. It seems that for decades what vans there were spent most of their time cruising the streets in a bid to be visible. As late as the 1970s, one appeared on the children's show Blue Peter in hopes of convincing people that it really worked.73

FIGURE 13.i5. "Don't be a pirate!" Courtesy of the Royal Mail Archives (PRD ioog).

CULTURAL AUTHORITY, PIRATE LISTENING, AND THE NATURE OF A MEDIUM

The BBC was never just an expedient response to the threat of ether chaos. It was also designed to be an instrument of cultural improvement. As Reith put it, it tried to give the people slightly better than what they wanted. Listening to its programs was supposed to be work. Its own popular publications insisted on this point. Listening must not be done while pursuing other activities, for example. One article declared that if any one listener enjoyed a whole evening's programming, then something must be going badly wrong. The organization also sponsored listening clubs, trying to make the practice into a collective one. The ambition seems to parallel those of the reading and authorship clubs that flourished in the same years, but the effort was less successful; the listening groups seem to have died out quite quickly once BBC sponsorship ceased.74 Avery interesting history of listening could be excavated from such attempts.

The problem of listener piracy was accordingly not only financial and technical, but also cultural. Pirate listeners might listen to something the and in some other way. They might migrate to private stations intruding on the ether, for example. Several of these appeared over the years, the most notable prior to WWII being Tory MP Leonard Plugge's Radio Normandie. After the war this threat would revive in the form of Radio Luxembourg, and later the i96os North Sea pirates like Caroline. Even if listeners remained with the BBC, moreover, they might listen merely for enjoyment, or for escapism, or inattentively. Programs might be juxtaposed in unpredictable ways, leading to unanticipated meanings and criticisms. In this