1055: BBC Strike August 1985

Just after Mrs Thatcher declared that terrorists should be starved of the "oxygen of publicity", it transpired a senior Republican paramilitary had been interviewed for a BBC 'Real Lives' documentary: 'At the Edge of the Union'. Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, wrote to the BBC Chairman, Stuart Young, asking the BBC to cancel the broadcast. The Governors called an emergency meeting and ordered that it could not go out. When this was seen as government censorship, BBC and staff in other media went on a day's strike; and the Assistant Director-General suggested the Governors were to the BBC 'what the iceberg was to the Titanic'. The programme was later broadcast with minor amendments included; BBC procedures were tightened; and some months later the DG Alasdair Milne was asked to step down.