A Punch-Drunk Public
It proved to be a highly enjoyable game for the panel (a word which, originating as a technical term in the craft of saddlery, graduated to meaning a list of jurors and then of doctors and is now, 1 would say, well on its way downhill). The programme cannot, for various excellent reasons, have been nearly as much fun for the viewers as it was for us; but viewers, I suspect, are not an audience for whom it is easy to feel much responsibility or even much compunction. I cannot myself claim to be a viewer; but the occasional glimpses I have had of the stuff that viewers are required to look at, combined with the criticisms of programmes in the news- papers, strongly suggest that the members of this warrior-breed can take almost any amount of punishment, that their capacity for self-sacrifice is as yet unplumbed. I know it is wrong to think in this way about large numbers of my compatriots. I could plead in extenuation that, when broadcasting on sound radio. I have never had the same feeling about listeners, whom —rightly or wrongly—one thinks of as persons of discrimina-
tion, not as a semi-captive audience. But this would be a bogus excuse, because listeners can not only switch over to an alter- native programme if they do not like yours but find it (1 suspect) much easier to switch off altogether than viewers do; and broadcasters are well aware of this. ,
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