Saturday night in
Mr Cyril Bennett has been taken on as Programme Controller for London Weekend Television by the new Chairman Mr John Freeman. We are back where we started but Mr Bennett should not have difficulty in im- proving London Weekend Television's com- petitiveness to the BBC on Friday, Saturday and Sunday if he will see to it that he has authority to put on late night soap opera• laic?. have a late night movie on Saturday night with a monopoly position and they are now putting on an old film on Sunday night finishing at 11.30 pm. It is not difficult to believe that the ratings of crime series and old thriller films are much better than reported by TAM and there is no further need for Mr Bennett to keep looking over his shoulder. He is not required, just because it is a weekend, to put on Monitor, Aquarius or anything like the awful hobbledehoy University Challenge, which Mr David Wilson of Southern Television inflicts remorselessly on pensioners and the retired in the South.
True freedom for the viewer is not far away and will come in the future when the video cassette recording system has gained hold. The coming of home video replay systems will be to television what Caxton's press was to the power of the Church— removing from the clergy their previous monopoly in transmitting the written word.
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