Tipping the Balance
A friend of mine in the trade attended a seminar on television journalism held over the weekend. Most of the 250 people there were journalists anxious to learn how they could make more money by writing for the telly. They got little change out of the lecturers, who were all BBC executives, producers or reporters. But there was some interesting, if inconclusive, discussion about the sad old problem of balance of points of view within a programme. Mrs. Grace Wyndham Goldie made it clear that if what any- one listening to her wanted to do was mount a campaign on the BBC for, say, entry into the Common Market or against blood sports, they'd
have to try elsewhere. Well, yes : they wouldn't get far with ITV either. All the same, I am not the only one to have noticed that both BBC and ITV are quietly abandoning the idea of balance within a single programme--which, of course, often results in platitudinous nonsense—in favour of (equally strict) balance over a series of pro- grammes or over a period of lime. I'm all in favour of this. After all, it's within the spirit, if not the letter, of the Charter and the Act. Surely it's time that both were amended so that BBC and ITV producers could give us the better pro- grammes that would result. They are surrepti- tiously half-way there already. Why not let them go the whole way openly?
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