Vox Meditantis

London, England – 7th June, 1953

The corridors of Broadcasting House hummed with a peculiar energy that morning, as if the very walls still vibrated with the echoes of Tuesday’s coronation broadcast. I adjusted my headphones and checked the levels on the mixing desk for what must have been the dozenth time, though Mr Burnham hadn’t yet arrived for our 6 o’clock session. The clock above the studio door read ten past six, and punctuality was something Sidney Burnham prized above most virtues.

I was Thomas Latham then, twenty-three years old and green as spring grass, having secured my position as sound engineer through a combination of technical college certificates and sheer bloody-minded persistence. The BBC was still finding its feet in this new world of television, and they needed young men who understood the mysteries of frequency modulation and audio compression. What they didn’t tell you in the interviews was that you’d spend most of your time with the same person, day after day, until their habits became as familiar as your own breathing.

For me, that person was Sidney Burnham.

The studio door swung open with its characteristic groan—Broadcasting House was showing its age even then—and Burnham entered carrying his usual leather satchel and a steaming cup of tea that had already left rings on half the documents in London. His grey hair was more dishevelled than usual, and there were shadows beneath his eyes that spoke of sleepless nights.

“Morning, Thomas,” he said, settling into the chair opposite my mixing desk. “Forgive the tardiness. I was reading.”

“No trouble at all, sir. Shall we begin with the opening segment?”

But Burnham wasn’t listening. He’d opened his satchel and withdrawn a worn paperback book—I glimpsed the title, Animal Farm—along with his production notes. This had become a ritual of sorts over the past months. While I calibrated equipment and tested microphone levels, he would sit quietly, sometimes reading, sometimes simply staring at the book as if it might reveal some previously hidden truth.

“Thomas,” he said suddenly, “who would you say you spend the most time with?”

The question caught me off guard. I paused in my adjustments of the reverb controls. “I suppose… well, you, sir. Here in the studio, that is. My fiancée Sarah in the evenings, of course.”

He nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he’d already suspected. “Yes, I imagine that’s natural for a young man. Work and love, the twin pillars of existence.” He set the book down carefully on the desk between us. “I find myself in rather different circumstances.”

We were meant to be preparing a special programme about the evolution of British broadcasting—from the wireless sets that had carried the nation through the Blitz to the television cameras that had just shown twenty million people their new Queen’s coronation. But Burnham seemed more interested in philosophy than production schedules.

“You know,” he continued, “George always said that the most dangerous thing about power wasn’t its corruption of those who wielded it, but its ability to make the rest of us forget what truth looked like.” He touched the book’s cover with one finger. “I find myself thinking about that more and more these days.”

I’d heard him mention George before—George Orwell, the writer who’d died some three years past. They’d been friends, apparently, and colleagues of sorts. Orwell had worked for the BBC during the war, broadcasting to India. But the way Burnham spoke of him, you’d think the man was still alive, still offering opinions on every decision we made.

“The coronation broadcast,” Burnham mused, “twenty million people, all watching the same thing at the same time. George would have found that fascinating. And terrifying.”

I adjusted the gain on channel three and pretended to be absorbed in my work, but I was listening intently. In the months I’d been working with Burnham, these soliloquies had become increasingly common. It was as if he were having conversations with someone who wasn’t there.

“Sir,” I ventured carefully, “perhaps we should review the script for the documentary? The director will be expecting the sound tests completed by nine.”

“Of course, of course.” Burnham opened his production folder, but his movements seemed automatic, distracted. “Though I do wonder sometimes whether we’re documenting history or creating it. The BBC has become rather powerful, hasn’t it? When we can bring the sacred ritual of coronation into sitting rooms across the Empire…”

He trailed off, staring at his notes without reading them. Outside the studio window, London was waking up properly now. I could see the early commuters hurrying past on Portland Place, their umbrellas raised against the gentle drizzle that seemed to be Britain’s natural state.

“George used to say that the future would belong to whoever controlled the narrative,” Burnham continued. “Not the facts, mind you, but the story we tell about the facts. Rather prescient, wouldn’t you say?”

I found myself drawn into his contemplation despite my better judgment. “You think we’re… controlling the narrative, sir?”

“Oh, my dear boy, we’re not controlling anything. We are the narrative now.” He gestured towards the mixing desk, the microphones, the recording equipment that surrounded us. “Every programme we produce, every news bulletin we broadcast, every documentary we create—we’re not just reporting on Britain, we’re defining what Britain means.”

The weight of that statement settled over the studio like dust. I’d never thought of my job in such terms. I mixed sound levels and adjusted frequencies; I made sure the presenters’ voices came through clearly and that the background music didn’t overwhelm the dialogue. Technical work, nothing more.

“Is that what troubles you, sir?”

Burnham looked up sharply, as if surprised to find me still there. “Troubles me? No, not troubles. But it does make one think about responsibility. About the company we keep.” He picked up the Orwell book again. “George is still the person I spend the most time with, you see. Even though he’s been dead these three years.”

The admission hung in the air between us. I didn’t know quite how to respond. In my experience, people didn’t typically discuss their relationships with the deceased during work hours.

“Every decision I make,” Burnham continued, “every programme I approve or reject, every editorial choice—I find myself asking what George would think. What would he say about this documentary we’re preparing? About the way we’re presenting the monarchy to the masses? About the power we’re accumulating, programme by programme, broadcast by broadcast?”

I began to understand something about Sidney Burnham that I’d missed before. The long silences during our sessions, the way he sometimes seemed to be listening to conversations I couldn’t hear, the quotes he’d mutter under his breath—he wasn’t just grieving a dead friend. He was maintaining a relationship with him.

“He was rather critical of the BBC, wasn’t he?” I asked. “During his time here?”

“Oh, magnificently so.” For the first time that morning, Burnham smiled. “George had no patience for institutional thinking. He believed that the moment any organisation became more interested in preserving itself than in serving its purpose, it began to die. Rather uncomfortable truth for those of us who’ve made careers in institutions.”

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here was Burnham, one of the BBC’s most successful executives, spending his mornings communing with the ghost of one of the corporation’s harshest critics. But perhaps that was precisely the point.

“Is that why you keep him close?” I asked. “As a kind of… conscience?”

Burnham considered this carefully. “I suppose you could put it that way. Though it’s more complex than that. You see, Thomas, when someone influences your thinking as fundamentally as George influenced mine, they don’t really die, do they? They become part of how you see the world. Part of how you make decisions.”

He opened the production folder properly now and began shuffling through the programme notes. “This documentary we’re preparing—about the evolution of broadcasting—it’s really about power, isn’t it? About how information shapes society. George understood that better than anyone.”

I watched him work, noting how his fingers drummed against the desk in a particular rhythm, how he tilted his head slightly to the left when he was thinking, how he occasionally nodded as if in response to some unheard comment. These weren’t the mannerisms of a man talking to himself; they were the habits of someone engaged in ongoing conversation.

“The coronation broadcast,” he said suddenly, “do you know what struck me most about it?”

“The technical achievement, sir?”

“The silence.” He looked up at me with those intelligent, troubled eyes. “Twenty million people, all watching in complete silence. No commentary during the sacred moments, no explanation of what they were seeing. Just… witnessing. George would have appreciated that. The honesty of it.”

I began to see what he meant. In that silence, the BBC had done something remarkable—it had stepped back and let the event speak for itself. No interpretation, no editorial perspective, just pure transmission of experience.

“But now,” Burnham continued, “we’re making programmes about the broadcast. Analysing it, explaining it, contextualising it. Turning the thing itself into content.” He shook his head. “George always warned about that—the way institutions gradually consume the very things they were created to serve.”

The morning light had grown stronger, casting long shadows across the studio floor. I found myself thinking about the question he’d asked earlier: who do you spend the most time with? For Burnham, the answer seemed both obvious and impossible. He spent his time with a dead man who remained more vivid to him than most of the living people around him.

“Sir,” I said carefully, “do you think he would approve? Of what you’re doing now?”

Burnham was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was softer than before. “I think George would remind me that the moment we stop questioning our own power is the moment we begin to abuse it. I think he’d tell me that every broadcast is a choice about what kind of society we want to be.” He smiled sadly. “And I think he’d probably suggest that spending this much time talking to dead friends isn’t entirely healthy.”

But even as he said it, I could tell he had no intention of changing. This strange companionship with Orwell’s memory had become essential to him, a way of maintaining his moral bearings in an increasingly complex world.

We spent the rest of the morning working through the programme notes, testing sound levels, and preparing for the recording sessions that would begin after lunch. But the conversation had changed something between us. I began to pay closer attention to Burnham’s habits, to the way he seemed to carry on internal dialogues, to the questions he would ask himself before making decisions.

And I began to understand that loneliness wasn’t really about being alone. It was about being without the kind of companionship that challenged you, that made you better than you would be on your own. Burnham had found that companionship in the most unlikely place—in the continuing influence of a friend who had died but whose ideas remained vibrantly alive.

As we packed up our equipment that evening, Burnham turned to me one last time. “Thomas,” he said, “when you’re old like me, you’ll discover that the people who matter most aren’t necessarily the ones who are physically present. They’re the ones who’ve shaped how you think, how you see the world. George may be dead, but he’s the most alive person I know.”

He tucked the worn copy of Animal Farm back into his satchel, and I realised that I was witnessing something remarkable: a friendship that had transcended death, a conversation that continued across the impossible distance between the living and the dead. In his way, Sidney Burnham had found the secret to defeating loneliness entirely.

As we walked through the corridors of Broadcasting House together, our footsteps echoing in the darkening building, I understood that I had learned something important about the company we keep—and about the conversations that matter most.

The End

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.

Photo: BBC Broadcasting House, London © BBC