‘Devoid of personality’: when the BBC rejected David Bowie

November 2, 1965. The Lower Third – reputedly the second loudest mod rock band in London, pull up outside BBC Broadcasting House in their decommissioned ambulance and tumble inside. A prized audition had been fixed up by their manager for the BBC’s Talent Selection Group, who decided which acts were worthy of national broadcast; stardom surely beckoned. Soon, they thought, the whole nation would go wild to their Who-like beat rock, weep into its cuppas to their forlorn take on Mary Poppins’s Chi