Public Service or Serving the Public: The Roots of Popularism in British Television.

This paper offers a platform for reappraising British television during the period of 1950-1960 by identifying the inaccuracy and bias of three firmly entrenched assumptions that dominated the history of British television between the publication of the Beveridge Report (1951) and the Pilkington Report (1962): (1) British television in the period 1936-1955 was based on the model of public service broadcasting constructed by John Reith for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) radio; (2) the introduction of Independent Television in 1955 broke with the public service broadcasting tradition by introducing programs and programming techniques derived from American sources; and (3) Independent Television's popularist bias represented a substantial threat to the cultural and moral fabric of British society. Analyses of these assumptions trace their origins and evolution, and provide an alternative reading of the evidence to expose their inherent weaknesses and inconsistencies. (18 notes and references) (CGD)