Television and Youth
Ice-cream and chocolate are commodities attractive to the young, and manufacturers supply them in abundance. Tele-' vision is another commodity attractive to the young, and its manufacturers supply it as abundantly as their resources allow. So long as programme policy is dictated largely by the demands,) of the majority of viewers, in so far as these demands are given j, true expression through the B.B.C.'s audience research depart-4 ment, it is just to consider the product as a commodity like, ice-cream and chocolate. But the average parent does not make his child so free of the ice-cream and sweet-shops as he does of his television set. The Birmingham University survey: conducted in Coventry estimates that a quarter of the adoles-J, cents in that city between the ages of fifteen and eighteen are! viewers. Only 19 per cent. of the boys questioned and 19.5.4 of the girls admitted that their continuous viewing interfered with their studies, but this,_like a few other things in the survey,;,. may be taken with a large. grain of salt. It needs no survey to make it clear that unselective consumption of indifferent entertainment must inevitably mean the crowding-out of4 homework and other activities which demand a response more' lively than passive acquiescence before a television screen.'i' The Coventry tutorial class in psychology, which carried out the'', survey, thinks that television is altogether too attractive,' and puts forward the high-minded but distinctly odd suggestion that I it should be made less so by raising the programme to a higher intellectual and imaginative level. " What is needed to make television less of a tie and to invite discriminating viewing the raising of the level of programmes to a height half-way,; between the Home Service and the Third Programme of the sound broadcast." This is certainly well-meaning; and there is , indeed no reason why the B.B.C. should feel obliged to pander' to the lowest admissible tastes; but so long as there is only one programme, the demands of the majority will prevail. One can imagine the uproar that would be caused by the B.13.C.'s attempt to do as the survey suggests.
Previous page
