Fleming Memorial Lecture

Television, Parliament and people

Norman Collins

It is one of the classic commonplaces of any broadcasting discussion to say that the political element in broadcasting is self-apparent and inevitable. With the number of wavelengths

restricted by natural laws, so the argument goes, it would be impossible to achieve that random and prolific development which has Made the national press so abundant and so

various, and journalism so free, so liberal, so democratic.

With only a small handful of broadcasters to set against the legion of newspaper editors — so the same argument goes on — how could there possibly emerge that diversity of opinion

on which democracy depends and which the Press has shown itself able to provide? The argument is clearly an attractive one. It carries the air of having been based upon inescapable fact. The trouble with it is simply that, when shaken, it begins to fall to bits. For the number of medium wavelengths available for radio services in London is exactly

equal to the number of London morning newspapers, and there is the 1500 metre long wave going begging. If the use of VHF is Invoked as well, then the press becomes the minority, and therefore presumably the potentially dangerous partner.

At this moment putting the entire press of the country under the control of two public authorities and leaving radio to go free would, if the argument were a true one, serve the cause of democracy equally well; and, with the steadily diminishing number of newspapers, What is already true for sound radio may soon become only too true of television also.

But all that is mere idle speculation. For the Manner in which broadcasting developed in this country made government intervention inevitable. And once any government has

intervened in anything it is usually there for ever. Thus, of all the means of mass communi cation — books, films, the theatre, the press and so forth — broadcasting remains unique in the fact that it operates according to strict and has rules drawn up at Westminster, and nas never been regarded by Parliament as responsible enough to be left free to manage its own affairs. But, once having drawn broadcasting to

them for its own protection, the politicians Promptly began to thrust it as far away as Possible in order to protect themselves. Consider what happens. First, the govern

TIerit sets up an autonomous Corporation or uthority with an eminent public figure for

friairman, and a board consisting of persons of listinction drawn from all walks of life. It 2,:lak' es that body answerable to a Minister of me Crown who, in turn, is usually answerable . to a more senior Minister, a member of the Cabinet this time. Within the House, however, neither Minister is other than loath to answer for the autonomous body for the simple and transparently honourable reason that it is autonomous and that its virtue might be da'aged if it were interfered with. And even the government itself is equally reluctant to express a first-hand opinion though some Fime Ministers have on occasion been known , to do so, Therefore when some fundamental re-assessment of broadcasting appears to be called for, the government sets up yet another body With another eminent public figure for chair, man and another lot of members drawn from persons of distinction in all walks of life, to investigate the doings of the other two eminent public figures and the other two lots of persons of distinction drawn from all walks of life.

All in all, the arrangement savours of what the lawyers call an arm's length transaction rather than a more intimate form of embrace. For it is not until the last of these bodies has reported upon the other two who were there in . the first place that Parliament is encouraged to have anything to do with it.

Discounting the Television Advisory Committee which sat more or less continuously from 1935 onwards, and rewarded the world with one of its reports as late as 1972, there have been to date six committees and five reports — . for the report of the sixth, the Annan Committee, is still a year or more away from us.

In 1949, Lord Beveridge's Committee on Broadcasiing was appointed. Its report stands aloof and apart as a classic among such reports.

It ran to two volumes of 910 pages all told. ' The number of words that the Committee was called upon to absorb amounted to 640,000 from the BBC alone, and to a further one million from outside sources not to mention the 500,000 words of the Committee's own preliminary conclusions.

But it is for another reason altogether that I have referred to it as a classic. And I have done so because of the sheer unhurried elegance of the composition. Take this as an example: We have spoken lii reads] of the 'ether' and of setting up 'waves' in the ether, though as appears from the definition of technical terms the ether is no more than a

'hypothetical non-material medium, filling all space, the existence of which is postulated for theoretical purposes in relation to the propagation of electromagnetic waves'. The ether, so defined, is a hypothesis rather than a reality, and it may well be argued that there cannot be waves in a hypothesis.

It was at this stage in the history of British television that I came in. Sir William Haley had just appointed me Controller of Televison. It therefore fell to me to help in the preparation of the BBC's submissions to the Beveridge Committee, to appear before them.

Let me for a moment try to give you a picture of the sort of television service it was that Lord Beveridge was invited to investigate and subsequently to pronounce upon.

. For a start, there was not very much of it to investigate. Transmission lasted for only 31/2 hours a day. Not that the public at large could pretend to feel badly deprived because there were fewer than 25,000 sets in use at the time. But even then things were moving. By 1948 the figure had risen above the 50,000 mark. And before I resigned from the BBC in 1950, I had been able to write a celebratory piece for the Radio Times entitled 'The First Hundred Thousand'.

And along with numbers, the sets themselves had been changing. The first one that the BBC installed in my house was the size of a small wardrobe with a screen the size of a Christmas card. By 1950, the screen was approximately up pp quarto size. Black and white in intention, brown and pale grey in reality, it seemed that the ultimate in picture quality had at last been reached.

The price, incidentally, was equivalent to about £300 at today's prices which was why Herbert Morrison, as Lord President of the Council, the Minister responsible for broadcasting, assured me that I was wasting my time by becoming involved with television rather than remaining with radio because television could never be other than a rich man's toy.

Lord Beveridge began by asking himself whether the BBC was doing all that could be done to advance the art and science of broadcasting or whether possibly some other body might do better. This is how he put it:

Is the BBC today so near human possibilities of perfection that all we have to do is to recommend renewal of the present Charter and Licence for another ten, fifteen or fifty years ... ?

It was, indeed, the issue of monopoly in broadcasting — sound radio as much as television — that was Lord Beveridge's chief I concern. And, looking back twenty-five years later, it is difficult to credit the depths of fury and passion which such a controversy engendered.

It is also rather interesting to look back and see who the monopolists were, and who were the libertarians who went round quoting Milton and John Stuart Mill.

Naturally enough, in the first camp was the BBC itself powerfully supported by the Labour Party and the TUC. The anti-monopolist camp was a far more modest affair. The other side even described it as cranky. The principal banners displayed were those merely of the Fabian, and the Liberal Research Groups. And victory for the monopolistic seemed so predictable as to be even rather dull.

Then, on April 19, 1950, there appeared before the Committee the Right Honourable the Lord Reith, PC, GCVO, GBE, CB, TD, DCL, LL.D. And immediately the proceedings assumed a new majesty.

Lord Reith began by quoting the Poet Laureate's Testament of Beauty to the effect that broadcasting can "enrich the wasting soil". He then made it quite clear that he disapproved of all committees of inquiry — "great disruption attends an inquiry" he wrote — and on the subject of monopoly, observed: It was the brute force of monopoly that enabled the BBC to become what it did; and to do what it did; it made it possible for a policy of moral responsiblity to be followed. If there is to be competition it will be of cheapness and not of goodness.

Calvin, I think you will agree, could scarcely have been more emphatic. And to show that Lord Reith was by no means complacent about the church which he had himself established upon earth, he went on to say: Listener research on the scale and system now in operation is a waste of time and money; its results are unreliable and misleading; it is inevitably a drag down; it causes producers to look to itself for criteria of success; it is subversive and a menace as here practised.

Not that Lord Reith's criticism was by any means the only adverse comment to reach Lord Beveridge. Sir Waldron Smithers, MP, for example, objected that: the BBC should not pay for meals and drink for people who broadcast and who receive fees for doing so.

The incorporated Association of Headmsters observed that: some disapproval is felt of the variety programmes, crooning, some plays, and certain other features which should be, but are not always, outside the comprehension of the child mind.

The Royal Society of St George entered a powerful objection to the fact that: "The BBC has lately advertised for a Director of Welsh music, but ithas no Director of English music."

The Songwriters Guild (of Great Britain) The popular music programmes of the BBC have a foreign sound...

And the Presbyterian Church of England button-holed Lord Beveridge to tell him that: The assumption that it is the normal practice of ordinary people, meeting for business or pleasure, to take alcoholic drinks together is a false one.

On a quite different level — it was largely a technical matter this time — there was widespread anxiety that proved if not illfounded, at least strangely premature. For newspaper proprietors feared that the BBC monopoly might prevent the radio transmission of facsimile newspapers, and the film companTel were apprehensive that they would be denied the right of simultaneous transmission to their picture theatres.

In the result, however, it was not the expressions of extraneous minority opinion that undermined Lord Beveridge's considered opinion that the BBC was pretty much all right as it was. It was the expression of minority opinion — one-man opinion at that — within its own committee. For Mr Selwyn Lloyd remained unmoved by the arguments of the monopolists in general, and of Lord Reith in particular. And in a minority report, Mr Selwyn Lloyd wrote: I do not like this brute force of monopoly and I am afraid that its dangers in regard to this medium of expression afe both insidious and insufficiently appreciated by the public . . . Having considered these arguments put forward by the BBC on behalf of monopoly I am of the opinion that independent competition will be healthy for broadcasting.

It is here that I, so to speak, come personally into the picture again. I had already resigned from the BBC because I felt that the divergences between television and sound broadcasting were not sufficiently appreciated and that the development of television was, no matter how unintentionally, being retarded by preoccupation with Sound.

For some two years, therefore, I devoted my time, health, energy and well being to the campaign for Independent Television. And there were few allies. Vested interests in the world of the films, the theatre, and the press were opposed to me. So also were the Church Assembly and the Headmasters' Conference. Westminster, too, was dangerously divided. • Passions, indeed, were running so high that one day the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, sent for me to learn more about the background to the controversy, for the Conservative Party was, by then, formally committed to the introduction of an alternative television service. Mr Churchill listened patiently and then gave this piece of good counsel: "Ah, the wireless, Mr Collins, the wireless. Keep agitating, pray keep agitating."

And, in the end it was the view of Mr Selwyn Lloyd that prevailed. The Television Broadcasting Act of 1954 established Independent Television.

With the setting up of the Pilkington Committee of 1960, only eleven years after the Beveridge Committee, already we are in a different world. It is the world of television in general with sound broadcasting relegated to a lesser place, and with the focus of attention by now upon Independent Television.

The Pilkington Committee was certainly nothing if not thorough. Its printed report ran