British broadcasting (and not just the British Broadcasting Corporation) has done much in the past three decades to dilute its bias towards white men, including among those in the deep-into-six-figure salariat, before and behind the camera and microphone.

But there is one niche – not large but prestigious – that has remained the monopoly of white men of middling ages. That is the space within which a sense of nation, of Britishness, is imparted. It is where nation speaks unto itself.

The select few are led by the Dimbleby Bros, David and Jonathan, commentators of distinction, chips worthy of the old block, their father Richard. They include Jeremy Paxman of Newsnight, some of Radio 4’s Today crowd – John Humphrys, Jim Naughtie and Edward Stourton. Jon Snow of Channel 4 News is in there, and his cousin Peter Snow of the BBC – the latter fading somewhat, but he has a son, Dan, coming up. Melvyn Bragg, unwithered, must be included. David Frost, who might have had the crown, has remained a gadfly, presently buzzing over at Al Jazeera, bless him. The fact that he is not in the running illuminates why the others are: because they have applied themselves, at different times in differing ways, to expressing something of their idea of what “British” is or should be.

I wrote that the select are led, but that should be were . There is a new master of the genre of the expression of Britishness: Andrew Marr (pictured), whose Making of Modern Britain (BBC2, Wednesdays, 9.00pm) has begun in a six-part series, from a book of the same name. Marr has taken up the white middle-aged man’s burden, with huge gusto: Making is still more energetic, inventive and anecdote-laden than his History of Modern Britain two years ago.

Marr was a liberal-leftist political writer and commentator whose books on Scotland – The Battle for Scotland (1992) and Ruling Britannia (1995) – were written by a “splenetically patriotic Scot” who strongly favoured devolution and was insouciant about independence. A period on The Economist made him, as he later said, “question a lot of my assumptions”; after an ultimately unhappy stint at The Independent as political editor, then editor, he was hired as the BBC’s political editor, the beat’s most powerful position.

Coming to the BBC, he had an “opinion lobotomy”; his ability to question bias led to his now-famed comment that his employer did (as the right had long complained) lean to the liberal-leftish side. He could bear witness to that because he had been for most of his working life outside of the BBC. What to him was evident was for his house-reared colleagues the water in which they swam, an environment that was objective because it said it was, and one in which complaints were easily dismissed as bias or self-interest.

Although Marr is now part of the broadcasting establishment, and even of the Establishment, his outsider status has been of great value to his editorial stance. To be part of the BBC, man and boy, is to be part of an institution that is itself now seen as a lobby, an interested party, no longer a voice of the nation. Nor is Marr: but he speaks to it, and the fact that his voice is a personal one gives it added authenticity.

His Making of Modern Britain, both the book and the TV series, is history by an amateur, a journalist of great talent whose ability to digest draughts of information is conjoined with an eye for the telling detail – telling, perhaps, not to a balanced history but certainly to a dramatic programme. Oddly, for a political reporter, he is best in the role of the TV intellectual. He can make false moves: a recent interview saw him ask the prime minister if he took painkillers – a question based on an unsourced blog that intruded into Gordon Brown’s private life, unwise for a journalist who has put an injunction on revelations about his own.

The first episode, on the few years at the beginning of last century, picked out the Boer war, where imperial Britain, faced with an impossible defeat at the hands of some damned Dutch farmers, employed scorched-earth tactics and invented the concentration camps in which thousands of women and children died. It gave space to Francis Galton, founder of eugenics and advocate of the phasing-out of lesser human “types”. It was great on the music hall, and went into a paean on the popular vulgarity of Marie Lloyd. It was touching on the condition of the working and out-of-working classes, and on the pioneering work of Joseph Rowntree in cataloguing their desperate lives.

Throughout the programme – as through the earlier History – runs a vein of affection: a “for all its faults” surrender to the benignity of Britain. With his vestigial Scots accent and his presence – all bones and explanation, a 21st-century Scots dominie – Marr may be the BBC’s secret weapon against Celtic nationalism, the subtle propagandist for a kingdom still united by, if nothing else, its history and its eccentricities. Let us hope so.

When will a woman enter this club of Britain-evokers? Or a man of colour? Or a Jew? Do we, unconsciously, cede the place to emphatic men of long British blood lines – and do those who do not wish to make the emphatic statement, and cannot trace the lines, unconsciously step aside? Marr’s contribution to this pantheon may be the best yet, and sets the bar high. But others should be measuring themselves against it, preparing to go higher.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd