This is taken from The Sunday Times:

BBC tried to gag HG Wells over God and Stalin
The first BBC director-general tried to prevent author HG Wells from expressing his socialist views during a radio programme about Russia
by Richard Brooks
Published: 17 October 2010

Lord Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, tried to stop the novelist HG Wells from voicing his socialist views on the airwaves.

Reith asked his staff to ensure Wells, a former Labour parliamentary candidate, did not use his first radio broadcast, a live programme in 1931 about Stalin’s Russia, to air his left-wing sympathies.

The director of talks, Hilda Matheson, calmed Reith after she persuaded Wells to write a letter undertaking to be impartial in the programme, Russia in the Melting Pot.

“I am convinced we can trust [Wells] to give a perfectly fair summing up and not abuse his privilege,” Matheson told BBC managers.

The exchange is included in materials released today by the BBC, which includes correspondence to and from Wells, author of books such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and some of his broadcast talks.

In an earlier letter from 1929 from Matheson to Wells, the head of talks urges him to be as objective as possible in his views that the countries of the world should unite for peace.

She goes on to state that Reith wants to “avoid the controversial handling of religious, industrial or political subjects, except in discussions or debates”. The BBC asked Wells not to attack “God, the King or America”.

Wells’s books also include The First Men in the Moon, which has been adapted for BBC4 by Mark Gatiss for broadcast on Tuesday.

Reith’s concern about airing socialist views was not unprecedented. Five years earlier, he had agreed to a Conservative government demand not to air a Labour broadcast during the General Strike and refused requests to let union officials speak.

Wells, although a socialist who went on to interview Stalin in 1934, was never duped into becoming as outspoken a fan as George Bernard Shaw or Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the stalwarts of Labour’s Fabian Society.