Chapter 7
The Pilkington Report on the Future of Broadcasting, commissioned in 1960 and published in 1962, has been little regarded by media historians. Somewhat typically, in a textbook for undergraduates, Andrew Crisell (1997: 112) called it ‘politically, a dinosaur…no government of any colour would attempt radical reforms to a service as popular as ITV’.1 This chapter will argue that, although Pilkington’s main recommendations for the radical restructuring of ITV were rejected, it remains a classic and cogent attempt to embody in policy what James Curran (2002: 4) has recently styled ‘the liberal narrative’ of media history, even if in the last decades of the twentieth century it succumbed to Curran’s ‘populist’ narrative. Broadcasting in Britain continued to be based on Pilkingtonian principles for forty years, establishing criteria for judging the performance of broadcasters which few challenged, at least until the 1980s. Pilkington’s insistence on broadcasting’s moral responsibility dominated the debate. The programmes that resulted were much praised, especially perhaps by programme-makers themselves. Furthermore, an analysis of the structure that Pilkington helped put in place supports Curran’s insistence on the need for a synthesis of rival narratives to provide proper historical understanding. As he says, this should ‘offer a…contingent view of ebb and flow, opening and closure, advances in some areas and reverses in others’ (ibid.: 51). But by failing to examine the philosophical underpinnings of the terms in which Pilkington and its supporters made their case, and in scorning populist notions, in the end, the report carried little moral authority. Broadcasters were told they must not just give the audience what it wanted. But how was Pilkington’s paternalist approach justified, and how was it to be sustained?
The system that operated from 1968 onwards (when the ITA awarded new contracts) left many discontented. Pre-Pilkington, people had been choosing in very large numbers to watch programmes such as Take Your Pick, Double Your Money and Beat the Clock. In 1962, a survey for the Sunday Times found that 60 per cent of the television audience believed that the general standard of television programmes was ‘satisfactory’ or better, despite having only two channels to choose from (Sawers 1962: 71). In 1985, post-Pilkington, the Peacock Committee was given evidence that, with four channels on offer, only 46 per cent of television viewers declared themselves ‘very or fairly satisfied’ with the quality of television as against 45 per cent who were ‘very or fairly dissatisfied’ (Peacock 1986: 198). In the post-Pilkington world, with the ITA having the power to vet schedules ahead of transmission, Take Your Pick and Double Your Money were taken off the air despite the undiminished size of their audiences. For decades, viewers were denied programmes they wanted to watch. David Cannadine (1998: 160) wrote of the 1970s that it was widely agreed then that there had been ‘a collapse of deference’. But a society that was witnessing that collapse saw it continue to be enforced on television, where overwhelmingly working class viewers of all three channels and, later, even more so of a fourth channel, were expected willingly to defer, much of the time, to the tastes of the educated middle class.
Why was this? How, in a largely democratic society, did Conservative governments, torn between paternalism and populism, come to acquiesce in a broadcasting system that tried to marginalize the profit motive and regularly neglected popular taste?
It was in 1958 that television in the United Kingdom reached five million homes for the first time. That year, also for the first time, there were more combined radio and television licences issued than radio licences alone. With increasing affluence, television was on the point of genuinely becoming a mass medium, as had been noted by the celebrated anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (1958), who was commissioned by the Sunday Times in 1958 to research and write a series of articles on the effect television was having on British life.
Five years ago [in 1953] there was something near an absolute majority of middle-class ownership of TV sets, with the greatest amount of ownership in the upper middle class; even three years ago [in 1955] there was something not very far from a balance between middle-class and working-class viewers…[Now] there are approximately three owners of a [television] set from the working-classes for every two from the middle-classes; and if, as seems likely, this pattern continues over the next few years, the television audience will be at least two-thirds working-class.
A medium that had been almost entirely the preserve of the comfortably off was, through increasing affluence, becoming available to all. Its audience would be predominately working class, and likely therefore to reflect working class taste. For some, like Gorer himself, this was a disturbing prospect.
In that year also, the Conservative government was forced to confront the political problems caused by the medium’s increasing penetration into British society. By now, audiences were dividing four to one in favour of ITV. A BBC executive explained to his Board of Governors in 1957 that the attraction of ITV was a schedule consisting of ‘wiggle-dances, give-aways, panels and light entertainment’ (Briggs 1995: 16). One result was the rancour-inducing profitability of the ITV companies, which, it has been calculated, were making an average profit of 130 per cent on capital per annum before tax (ibid.: 11). Scottish Television began operating in the autumn of 1957 and, shortly afterwards, its Canadian owner, Roy Thomson, is famously said to have told fellow guests at a social function that he held ‘a licence to print money’. His biographer adds that his advisers, aware of the damage it might cause, ‘begged him not to repeat this observation elsewhere’ (Braddon 1965: 240). But Thomson, pleased with it, repeated the phrase to journalists in Canada. In government, the size of the contractors’ profits was regarded as one of ‘the most pressing current problems’ in broadcasting policy; the other was the imminent feasibility of a third, and even a fourth, television channel, and the consequent need to make a decision as to whether any should be allowed, and who should operate them.2
The performance of ITV since it had gone on the air in 1955 had sharpened differences within the Conservative party, which included both those fervently committed to it and a minority equally opposed. In 1951, Selwyn Lloyd, then a Conservative back-bencher (later, of course, to become a senior minister) added his own Minority Report to that produced by the Labour government’s Beveridge Committee. He called for a new television service to be funded entirely by advertising, leaving the BBC to broadcast only on radio. ‘If people are to be trusted with the franchise’, he argued, ‘surely they should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to be educated or entertained in the evening’ (Beveridge 1951: 201). In 1953, ‘competitive television’ was supported by a large majority at the Conservative party conference, its supporters having claimed that the vote symbolized their commitment to private enterprise (Ramsden 1995: 254). But others were bitterly opposed to the introduction of commercialism into any form of broadcasting. In a debate in the House of Lords in 1953, the newly ennobled Lord Hailsham compared those Conservatives in favour of commercial television with ‘the ancient Israelites who applauded the erection of a golden calf in the Temple [in order to] provide [an] element of healthy competition’.3 Later, he was to scorn ‘the bulk of Conservatives…[who] in their almost inspissated ignorance of the issues…thought they were fighting for liberty and freedom of choice’ (Hailsham 1990: 277). In 1975, he was still an opponent of ITV, writing that ‘the introduction into the home of the most powerful advertising stimulant ever devised may have been an important contributory cause of…wage demands and inflation’ (Hailsham 1975: 127).
In order to placate such opponents, the Act which Parliament passed in 1954 provided for an initial experiment lasting only ten years. As the decade’s end approached, the government became uneasily aware that new legislation would be required to keep ITV in existence. Its disappearance from the screen was unthinkable, despite a Labour party pledge to abolish it. There were many Conservatives who wanted to use its popularity for electoral purposes. Lord Poole, the Party chairman and a senior figure close to Macmillan, called it ‘the most important thing we have done’ and argued in the committee preparing the party’s manifesto for the 1959 election that it should figure prominently.4 But he was replaced in the actual run-up to the election by Lord Hailsham, a more effective campaigner, whose opposition to ITV had not reduced his popularity in the party. In the end, no Conservative claim to the authorship of ITV was included in the manifesto. And by the time of the election, Hugh Gaitskell, recognizing that his Labour voters were also likely to be ITV viewers, had withdrawn the commitment to abolish it to the chagrin of many in his party.
On the left, the division was between, on the one hand, most of the intellectuals and others who had an instinctive dislike of advertising and ‘hucksterism’ and, on the other, the great bulk of Labour party voters who were inclined to accept consumerism and were ready to join ‘the affluent society’. On the right, many Conservatives, especially those who recalled the BBC’s role in wartime, wanted to ensure that its presence in the life of the nation would continue, unaffected by the values of the marketplace. Others insisted that, whether or not the BBC survived, the television industry should, in keeping with the ideology of the free market, be competitive, consumer led and market driven. In 1960, unable to agree on a policy of its own, the government set up a committee under the industrialist Sir Harry Pilkington to look into the issues and to recommend a future structure for British broadcasting.
Sir Harry was not the government’s first choice. Files in the National Archive show clearly that many other names were considered before his. He was chairman of the family glass-making firm (which, in 1960, was establishing a monopoly in the supply of float glass), a believer in consensus, with a reputation as a paternalistic employer in Lancashire, where his company had been based since the 1820s. Apart from the footballer Billy Wright, the best known name on the committee was the entertainer Joyce Grenfell, who was clearly one of its most talkative and influential members. Others, such as a senior university administrator from Wales and a clergyman’s wife from Edinburgh, shared either a distaste for commercialism or a partiality for the BBC, or both. Grenfell was to form a close alliance with another critic of ITV, Richard Hoggart, the second youngest member at 41. He was to write later that he believed that his nomination had come from civil servants in the Ministry of Education who had read his book The Uses of Literacy, which had sold widely on its publication in paperback in 1958 (Hoggart 1992: 60). More recently, he had won some tabloid newspaper notoriety in 1960 when he had given evidence for the defence in the Lady Chatterley trial. He certainly shared the distaste for television game shows and quiz programmes common to patricians and left-wing intellectuals. But probably the strongest influence on the committee was its secretary, Dennis Lawrence, a career civil servant in the Post Office (where he had risen through the ranks after joining at the age of 16), which shared with the BBC a belief in the ideal of a public service operated by a benign monopoly. The extent of his influence is best demonstrated by extracts from a paper he wrote for the committee at its second full meeting, an opinion that would reappear in the Report published nearly two years later:
Such slogans as ‘broadcasting should give the public what it wants and not what someone thinks is good for the public’ invite us to believe that the issue is democracy versus paternalism, or the free society freely choosing versus the directed society having what it is given…these are two extremes…the issue is not one of either–or principle, but one of degree.5
Many more examples could be given. Although there was widespread expectation in politics and the media that a third channel would be advertising financed, the committee’s deliberations show that from the start it believed that commercialism had little place in broadcasting. In fact, it argued, the need to satisfy advertisers prevented broadcasters from maintaining the ‘constant and sensitive relationship with the moral condition of society’ that was required of them. The sale of advertising needed to be physically wrenched away from programme making and a new role given to the Authority, which, freed from any desire to maximize audiences and with no interference from advertisers, would itself control the schedules. One committee member, Dr Elwyn Jones, a former geography lecturer and Secretary of the University of Wales, wrote to the chairman, as the Report was being completed, that he was looking forward to a future in which its recommendations would be implemented. Then, ‘programme companies [would] compete to provide programmes of real merit and of regional and national relevance, and not of high TAM rating’. There would be an absence, he predicted, of ‘mediocrity’ and ‘triviality’, ‘relief from violence and crime, more freedom of expression in religion and politics, the reasonable protection of the young and family, and the cultivation of wholesomeness’.6
Given the dominance of such opinion on the committee, it is unsurprising that it recommended that the third channel should go to the BBC, and that ITV should not be given a second channel until it was fundamentally reformed. Its programmes were not only overwhelmingly ‘of poor quality’, ‘vapid’ and ‘puerile’, but also had a tendency to encourage greed, immorality and violence. No weight was given to the judgements of the British public as measured by viewing figures, which were still showing 70 per cent of the audience regularly won for ITV’s undemanding schedule of popular entertainment. The Authority was excoriated for failing to recognize what the committee saw as the immense power of television to damage British society. It was clear that the Report agreed very largely with the evidence given to it by the Association of Municipal Corporations, which claimed to speak for some 27 million people. It certainly spoke for ITV’s critics. The Association shared, it said,
a common criticism of some television programmes that they have been damaging in certain moral aspects, and that too many have featured sordid, unsavoury and violent themes. Wrong standards of behaviour and domestic life have been portrayed, such as regular and frequent drinking of alcoholic liquor and incessant smoking…the Association considers that popular appeal and financial considerations play too important a part in the selection of programmes.7
It can be seen that the criticism was thought to be strengthened by being called ‘common’, but ‘popular appeal’ was to be disregarded. Many other organizations such as teachers’ unions, Women’s Institutes and various local and national church bodies gave similar evidence. In fact, the BBC archives reveal that its senior executives were regularly in touch with a variety of organizations, including sporting bodies, in order to persuade them – in many cases successfully – to give evidence in support of the BBC. The General Secretary of the Association quoted above even wrote to the Director-General suggesting a meeting to discuss what form his oral evidence should take if he was required to give it.8
In some quarters, there was uproar. The Daily Mirror – which had a substantial shareholding in the largest ITV company, ATV – headlined its report PILKINGTON TELLS THE PUBLIC TO GO TO HELL in its thickest and biggest type. Conservative backbenchers were overwhelmingly opposed. Harold Macmillan recorded in his diary that ‘the tone and temper of the Report [was] deplorable’, accusing it of ‘spleen’ and ‘bias’.9 But by 1963, a settlement had been achieved on Pilkingtonian lines, not entirely by design, which would endure for decades. The BBC would remain the country’s dominant broadcaster, with two channels, as Pilkington had recommended, while ITV – its structure admittedly left largely unchanged – was to be placed under the strict control of a newly strengthened Authority. Not until 1982 (although the frequency was available) was a second advertising-funded channel allowed, and that was Channel Four, constructed on strictly Pilkingtonian lines, with the sale of advertising totally quarantined from programme making and a carefully delineated public service remit. Some described the system that resulted as a ‘benevolent duopoly’, claiming that ‘the excellence of British programmes [was] unmatched anywhere in the world’ (Dunkley 1985: 83). Others called the duopoly cosy and campaigned for it to be cracked open. Overlapping with them were commercial interests who were waiting more or less patiently for the day when, in a metaphor once used by Macmillan, who had spoken in discussions on the 1959 manifesto of his fear of losing what he called ‘the Malvolio vote’, Sir Toby Belch’s hedonism would overcome Malvolio’s puritanism. Only then could Take Your Pick return to British screens in the guise of Deal or No Deal.
A clue to the reasons for the BBC’s success in reasserting its authority is to be found in Macmillan’s reference to the Malvolio vote. That can be seen as the vote of those who believed in decorum and moderation, and abhorred the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, conservatives with a small ‘c’, more or less puritanical in spirit, convinced, many of them, that they knew what was best for others better than they knew themselves (even if the more austere and intellectual among them were often drawn to the Labour party). Many Malvolios did not watch television at all. But if they did, they watched the BBC. Politically, those in the Conservative party identified with ITV; socially, with the BBC. There were many Malvolios on the Pilkington Committee itself – as the BBC was relieved to discover through its well-organized network of spies and moles. And many were also to be found in the higher ranks of the Civil Service. Throughout the decision-making classes, there was an overwhelming consensus that the BBC’s position in British life had to be safeguarded. And that something had to be done about the awfulness of ITV.
While waiting for Pilkington, officials in the Post Office, then the department responsible for broadcasting, had drawn up a basis for possible legislation on ITV which was barely less radical than that the committee was to recommend. Treasury officials, for their part, were anxious to derive as much revenue as they could from ITV, which led them to think of it as a welcome source of funds rather than a capitalist enterprise in need of support. Initially, officials had proposed an increased levy on profits, but had decided instead to impose a levy on the companies’ revenues. That was after they had realized how many ingenious methods ITV companies would have of evading a profits tax, such as switching profits to subsidiary production companies. Some Conservative ministers were hopeful that this new tax on revenue, which would be very lucrative, could finance the BBC’s second channel without an electorally damaging increase in the licence fee. That was successfully resisted by the BBC, which insisted on retaining the licence fee as a guarantee of its independence.
Meanwhile, ITV mounted a fierce campaign against the levy, in public, and in private contacts with their friends in the government. Often they made what seemed to Treasury officials hysterical claims that they would be driven out of business. The Deputy Chairman of ATV, for example, claimed that ITV would become ‘a licence to lose money’. Enough support was available among Conservative leaders to force the civil servants to go over the figures they had produced, and time after time officials concluded not only that they were right on any reasonable prediction of advertising revenue – ITV could afford to pay the levy (as indeed it could) – but also that the figures produced by ITV were deliberately misleading. A flavour of the attitude inside government is given in a note from one Treasury official to another about the answer to an ITA request, on the companies’ behalf, for a meeting with the Prime Minister to go over the figures again. ‘We have already allowed’ wrote the official ‘an appeal to the Chief Secretary [over the head of the Postmaster-General, the responsible minister]; now we have an appeal to the PM. Are the ITA contemplating a petition to Her Majesty?’10
In the end, it was Reg Bevins, as Postmaster-General, who ensured the passage of the Act with the levy intact. That was in the face of opposition from several members of the Cabinet, itself distracted coincidentally by the Profumo affair, and a sustained back-bench campaign led by Selwyn Lloyd, now out of office again. The supporters of ITV were calling for the government to announce a timetable for a second commercial channel. This would have the effect of enabling the companies to make a fresh case for their inability to pay the levy and, once a second channel was in operation, could very likely be run in such a way as to reduce the audience for the BBC to insignificant levels. After threatening his own resignation, and with Opposition support, Bevins won a crucial vote only with a studiedly ambiguous response in the House of Commons to a demand for the government to make a specific commitment to a second ITV. It was just enough.
But the most significant factor in all of this had been spotted by the BBC’s political correspondent, Hardiman Scott, at the time of the Report’s publication. In one of his regular briefing notes for the Director-General, not intended for broadcast, he referred to
the anxiety of [much of] the Conservative Party to present the image of responsible government…the Prime Minister has been developing the theme of a party with a sense of responsibility not only for material values but for spiritual values. So, when all the fuss has died down, there will be strong pressures within the party for the Government to do the right and honourable thing.11
Inside the BBC, as elsewhere among the governing classes, there was no doubt that ‘the right and honourable thing’ was to defend the BBC by defending the cause of paternalism in broadcasting. And by 1970, the ITA’s leadership was also in paternalist hands.
Until then, its Director-General was an Australian former journalist, Sir Robert Fraser, of unorthodox views, with a background in the Labour party. He was described by a contemporary as ‘believing in democratic choice, in contrast to the platonic ideals of the BBC’ (Sampson 1962: 610). According to his deputy, he believed ‘passionately’ in the judgement and good sense of ‘ordinary people’ (Sendall 1982: 136). He approved of commercial television as ‘people’s television’:
If you decide to have a system of people’s television then people’s television you must expect it to be, and it will reflect their likes and dislikes, their tastes and aversions, what they can comprehend, and what is beyond them.
Fraser quoted in Sampson (1962: 610)
His successor was to demonstrate very different attitudes. Brian Young, an Etonian and an affable former headmaster of Charterhouse, who was also later to be knighted, chose the title The Paternal Tradition in British Broadcasting for a lecture he gave to a university audience in 1983 following his retirement. He spoke of the ‘commanding paternal role’ played by the Authority, a role which was strengthened, he said, after it had been ‘too indulgent with its children’. The reference, of course, was to the post-Pilkington increase in the Authority’s powers. The context indicates that by ‘children’ Young meant the ITV companies, but he might well have meant the British people as a whole. Indeed, he said, he was happy to use the word ‘paternal’; in broadcasting, and in television in particular, the state should act like ‘a wise father’ (Young 1983: 2). That meant regular opera from Glyndebourne (in peak time), two current affairs programmes a week, at least one ‘main’ weekday drama and one documentary and regular programmes on art and religion, all in peak time. And tight limits on the number and style of quiz shows. ITV became a channel many of whose programmes – Brideshead Revisited, The World at War, News at Ten – could be watched in middle class homes without a health warning.
Many in the educated classes – certainly on the left – were active in campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s against censorship in areas such as films, theatre and print. But, they argued, the freedom of expression they were demanding for artists in those areas – and the ‘quality’ of programmes – could only be guaranteed in television, along with freedom of choice for the viewer, if the industry continued to be closely regulated. If few would now argue that the cinema, the most influential art form of the twentieth century, would have benefited, or might still benefit, from closer government regulation, and so produce better films, Pilkington’s central argument was that the interests of advertisers on advertising-funded channels would always work against the possibility of producing better television. Richard Hoggart has continued to make this case, most recently in a book published in 2004. The advertisers’ almost constant need for the largest possible audience, he has argued
more and more determines that populist programming wins, programmes which do not disturb or suggest wider horizons, which offer instant and repetitive gratifications, whose world is, except intermittently, closed to other considerations.
Hoggart (2004: 112)
He also quotes approvingly Huw Wheldon’s well-remembered aphorism about public service broadcasting: that it exists ‘to make good programmes popular, and popular programmes good’.
By ‘good’ programmes, Wheldon ‘meant those made because the broadcaster thought them, though perhaps “difficult”’, of great value and wished, without selling them by over-simplification, to make them widely available. By popular programmes, he meant those unlikely to appeal to and not designed specifically for a highly educated audience, but which became ‘good’ because they too did not sell out by patronising, or secretly despising, their audience’s taste, by talking down to them.
Hoggart (2004: 116)
In other words, it was the programme-makers themselves whose attitudes determined whether their programmes were ‘good’ or not. In an earlier article, he had offered a defence of the Report, in similar terms:
The Report said that light and serious programmes each had their place, that goodness or badness was not a matter of height of brow but had to do with the quality of the imagination and the response to life in any work, whatever its mood. It attacked…triviality.
Hoggart (1973: 192)
‘Triviality’, the Report had said, was ‘a natural vice of television…where it prevails it operates to lower standards of enjoyment and understanding. It is, as we were reminded, ‘more dangerous to the soul than wickedness’ (Pilkington 1962: 34).12 But who was to judge that standards were lower? By whose standards? And how would ‘the quality of the imagination’ in any particular programme be measured? Or its ‘response to life’? What criteria were to be used other than those honed by life-long ‘highbrows’ in the course of successful ‘highbrow’ careers? And was ‘triviality’ really more dangerous than ‘wickedness’?
This is not to argue that all judgements are of equal worth and validity. Some are more soundly based than others. But the evidence for a judgement has to be given, and an articulate case has to be made for it. And those who make it have to remember that they are only taking part in a debate, not issuing papal-like pronouncements. And it is not adequate to say that a television programme is ‘good’ because it was concerned with something the producer thought had ‘great’ value, or because of the ‘quality’ of the imagination at work in it, or because of its ‘response to life’. All that is happening in these cases is that synonyms are being offered for ‘good’.
A judgement as to whether a programme is ‘good’ or not, or ‘trivial’ or not, will always depend on who is making that judgement. As when the Pilkington Committee decided in their consideration of quiz shows, in the words of Joyce Grenfell (1980: 138), that ‘the prizes should be trivial but the programmes shouldn’t’. But what about those people who liked quiz shows the way they were, who wanted the questions to be ‘trivial’ and the prizes significant? Hoggart wrote, in an article attacking the Report’s critics, of ‘the difficulties of democratic debate’ (Hoggart 1973: 183). Were those people not as entitled as anyone else to take part in a democratic debate? As has been said, many of their favourite programmes were not available to be watched in the decades after 1968. But there was little debate over whether there was a place for such ‘triviality’ on television. Nor about whether those who objected to it should have the right to deny it to those who did want it. It was to Pilkington’s discredit – and indeed it is part of the historical significance of Pilkington – that it failed to encourage such a debate.
Despite the weaknesses in the paternalists’ arguments, with their unmistakeable flavour of special pleading for the kind of programmes they liked (and that employed significant numbers of them), it is clearly the case that British television under paternalist control produced many programmes thought by people of cultivated taste to be ‘good’, and that many such programmes would have been unlikely to have been made under a regime determined to maximize audiences at all times.
That can be seen in the success of British television in international festivals, where in the seventies and eighties it did spectacularly well, although it is worth quoting the Peacock Report’s point that ‘the award of professional accolades…can only be at most an indirect guide to what will promote the interests of those for whom the system is ultimately designed’ (Peacock 1986: 198), that is the audience. And the programmes that won prizes were seldom those most popular with audiences, which continued to prefer triviality to seriousness. It was harder for viewers to find all the triviality they liked on ITV – although easier than it had been on BBC1, which transferred much of its more serious programming to BBC2, leaving more room for triviality on BBC1. In contrast, the proportion of ‘serious’ programmes on ITV in peak time had risen in the 1970s at the expense of light entertainment, by up to 50 per cent, according to the company that operated one London franchise. As a consequence, ITV’s share of top ten programmes fell from over half in 1972 to just a quarter in 1976 (Potter 1990: 227).
There was one area in which the authorities had found themselves obliged to give in to popular taste. That was radio. Pilkington had paid little attention to the campaign for commercial radio, and nor had the government. But the demand for more pop music was irrepressible, and enterprising businessmen could meet it. In 1964, Radio Caroline started broadcasting non-stop pop from a ship moored just outside territorial waters. Within a month, a BBC executive was complaining that ‘most of our part of Suffolk is listening to Radio Caroline and, I am sorry to say, comparing it favourably with our own output’ (Lance Thirkell to Frank Gillard, quoted in Briggs 1995: 512). Figures for Caroline and other pirate stations quickly reached two million. Here were mostly young people, in the spirit of the time, not prepared to defer to those who thought they should have something better to do than to listen to pop music. By 1967, the Labour government had passed legislation designed to prohibit the pirate operations. But only after the BBC had been forced to create Radio One to supply practically non-stop pop music and legal landbased private stations replaced the ships after 1972. Happily for the broadcasting authorities, pirate television ships were a technical impossibility.
That a change in society had taken place was not always recognized. On the night of ITV’s debut in 1955, the then Sir Kenneth Clark, the ITA’s first chairman, had spoken to 500 or so dinner-jacketed dignitaries and their ball-gowned wives in the City of London.
This is a historic occasion…here is a means of communication which enters the homes of millions of our countrymen, and has an unrivalled power to persuade…hitherto it has been in the control of a single institution…[now] free television, like a free Press, will not be controlled by any council or committee, but by two factors, the television companies’ sense of responsibility and the fundamental good sense and right feeling of the British people.13
Clark’s faith in the companies’ sense of responsibility did not long survive working with them. A BBC internal document reported him as saying privately in 1960 – after his early retirement from the ITA – that ITV programmes were ‘awful’.14 Equally, his faith in the ‘right feeling’ of the British people may have been short-lived. Seven years after ITV went on air, it had become clear to elite groups that they could not trust the people to choose for themselves what to watch on television. Pilkington was commissioned because there were influential concerns that ‘free’ television had to be controlled by councils and committees. In 1963, those concerns were enacted into legislation. The backlash, when it came with the availability of digital channels, was savage and sustained. Now, in the era of broadband and video-on-demand, the viability of ITV itself is threatened as it clamours to be set free from the last vestiges of the principles of public service broadcasting. The populist narrative, thus, is unchallenged. But far from its victory resulting from the particles of gold that Curran (2002: 44) discerns to be contained somewhere within it, it marks only how feeble and flabby have been the counterarguments of the cultural elite.
1 If Michael Tracey’s (1998: 21) gloomy survey in 1998 of The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting recognized that the Report was ‘the high-water mark of public and official acclaim for the notion of public service broadcasting’, this was undercut by his failure to acknowledge the Report’s authorship of a significantly original claim. ‘By its nature’, the Report declared, ‘broadcasting must be in a constant and sensitive relationship with the moral condition of society’. Broadcasters, it insisted, ‘are, and must be, involved; this gives them a responsibility they cannot evade’ (Pilkington 1962: 15). Tracey has twice, in separate publications, misattributed these remarks to a pamphlet published privately a year after Pilkington, by Sir Arthur fforde, then chairman of the BBC (Tracey 1998: 19; 2003: 15).
2 Burke Trend to the Prime Minister, 29 July 1958: The National Archive, PREM 11/3669, Note on Broadcasting Policy.
3 House of Lords debates 1953: col. 1517.
4 Draft minutes of Conservative Steering Committee, 26 June 1959: Conservative Party Archive CRD 2/53/34.
5 Lawrence 1960: paper for the Pilkington Committee, BC/Sec/32, TNA HO244/4.
6 Elwyn Jones 1962: letter to Sir Harry Pilkington, TNA HO244/293.
7 Memorandum from the Association of Municipal Corporations 1961, Pilkington (b): 1157.
8 Sir Harold Banwell, letter to Hugh Greene, 26 May 1961: BBC Written Archive, R4/46/15.
9 The Diaries of Harold Macmillan, entry for 8 June 1962. I am grateful to Dr Peter Catterall for enabling me to see this material.
10 Note from John Littlewood: 30 April 1963: TNA T319/476.
11 Hardiman Scott to Hugh Greene, 28 June 1962: BBC Written Archive R4/51/1.
12 The quotation is from evidence submitted to the committee by the Workers’ Educational Association, quoting an address at an unspecified date from their President, R. H. Tawney.
13 Clark 1955: Tate Gallery Archives: Clark Papers/8812.2.2.1021, quoted in Weight (2002: 249).
14 Note from Colin Shaw to Harman Grisewood, 7 November 1960: BBC Written Archive R4/46/2.