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Whose finger on the button? british television and the politics of cultural control

2005; Routledge; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439680500262926

1465-3451

Lawrence Black,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

Abstract ‘The study of television’, John Corner suggests, ‘has suffered from a lack of historical studies’. This was ‘a particular problem in Britain’, where studies of television were prone to ‘privileging questions of policy and organisation’ rather than obtaining a sense of the power of television as a medium, assessing its cultural content and reception by viewers or the status and meaning of the medium, the television set and activity of watching it. Corner's own work on television history has broached such matters, but exceptions like Tim O'Sullivan's exploration through audience research and oral testimony of cultures of televiewing (in everyday life and as civic ritual around national events) in a Corner-edited volume apart, has not induced many others to do so.1 1. John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford, 1999), pp. 126–127. Tim O'Sullivan, ‘Television memories and cultures of viewing,’ 1950–65, in John Corner (ed.) Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History (London, 1991). Corner has hit upon a broader debate about the predilections of post-1945 British history that necessarily impacts upon writing about television more than radio, since television only became a mass activity in the mid-1950s. Critics charge that contemporary British history has too readily reproduced the categories used by its subjects (particularly political, social elites) and resisted integrating its own sub-disciplinary boundaries (of the political, social, cultural, economic).2 2. Introduction, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort & Chris Waters (eds) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–64 (London, 1999). Thus, there are studies of the magnitude of Asa Briggs’ and Bernard Sendall's history of broadcasting—authoritative accounts of personnel, policy and structures, but in which programming itself is less prominent. Des Freedman charts the Labour Party's oscillating television policies, but is less able to capture the mien of the television viewer.3 3. Bernard Sendall, Independent Television in Britain, Volume 1: Origin and Foundation, 1946–62 (Basingstoke, 1984). Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume V: Competition, 1955–74 (Oxford, 1995). Des Freedman, Television Policies of the Labour Party 1951–2000 (London, 2003). Television has featured as an adjunct of press and media histories,4 4. James Curran & Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility (London, 1997); Ralph Negrine, Television and the Press Since 1945 (Manchester, 1998). but has not received the sort of treatment that film or inter-war radio has. Yet there seem grounds (popularity above all) for regarding television as more intimate to Britons than either film or radio.5 5. Daniel Lemahieu, A Culture for Democracy (Oxford, 1988); Paddy Scannell & David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. 1, 1922–39 (Oxford, 1991). Programme content, meanings and reception have been more cultural studies’ terrain. Many historians would concur with Dominic Strinati and Stephen Wagg that ‘whereas popular culture was once dismissed … as mass culture … now its importance is such that, on occasion, it may be taken too seriously’. What historians consider the interpretive and contextual abandon of cultural studies—in its postmodernist forms at least—has not encouraged them to stray into this territory. Yet that disserves the majority experience of television (which is as viewers) and its diversity as a genre and impact on everyday life. Might a history of television move beyond discussing it chiefly as an institutional mode of communication to the exclusion of its cultural forms; contemplate it visually and as something not only produced but also consumed? The extent to which it has not done so betrays historians’ biases, since what was produced was (somewhat) easier to know. It suggests the degree to which historians have shared in classing television as culturally corrosive rather than attempting to account for its popularity. As historian Peter Mandler has it, whilst ‘suspicion of television’ was widespread at its 1950s outset, ‘it lingered among academics, and among historians more than most’.6 6. Dominic Strinati & Stephen Wagg (eds) Come on Down? Popular Media Culture in Post-War Britain (London, 1992), p. 1. Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002), p. 123. Historians, in short, might prosper from spending more time watching television and less time sitting in judgement on it. Janet Thumim's recent collection attempts something like this, broaching programme content (for instance the penchant for nostalgia programming, repeats of vintage, retro-classics), gendering viewers and attending to the television set as a technology requiring expert maintenance. Whilst always cognisant of the fluidity of meaning of a programme amongst individuals and across time and thus the ‘difficulties of ‘knowing’ the historical audience’, its essays attend to ‘what audiences do with the ‘texts’ they consume’. The text analogy might seem more useful to literary than historical scholars, but does flag up the numerous meanings television and its programmes might generate, both at the time and over time (as select television programmes become seen as representative sources for a certain period, understandings of them often shift dramatically). Nor does it preclude researching what another media historian John Ellis describes as ‘the temporary meaningfulness of programmes at their initial broadcast’, from which ‘can be extrapolated much about the material culture of the time’.7 7. Janet Thumim (ed.) Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s (London, 2002), pp. 4–5, 10. John Ellis, ‘Television and history,’ History Workshop Journal, 56 (2003), 278–285. See also Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1) (2004) for further comments from Ellis and Corner. Rather than reflecting or fashioning society and values, this article provides evidence of a more interactive, dynamic relationship between television and its viewers in the imagining of both by politicians, cultural commentators [from the New Left to Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners’ Association (VALA) and educational pressure groups] and television critics. Debates about television as it became a, if not the, popular leisure and cultural activity amongst Britons in the 1950s and 1960s, were fixated with the content of programmes, their impact on audiences and the act of televiewing. In this were disclosed assumptions and readings of cultural quality and perceptions of television's audience. Television's textuality entails both the content and reception of programming and the social setting and meanings put by televiewing. It illustrates this through debates at commercial television's inception in 1955 and the government commissioned Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting (1960–1962) and its legacy—debates it argues have since been rehearsed repeatedly. It assesses television's impact on politics as a medium and how the main parties viewed it. Labour was critical of Independent (commercial) Television (ITV) broadcasting and paternalist in traditional British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC, the public broadcaster) style towards audiences, but the Conservatives cannot be reduced to cheerleaders of ITV, pandering to audience tastes. Their suspicions of its social effects co-existed uneasily with a belief that competition would improve programming, resulting in Pilkington and by the later 1960s in Whitehouse's campaign to ‘clean-up’ television. Both parties then are better understood as relating uneasily to television. Socially (or in taste terms) both were closer to (although hardly uncritical of) the BBC's content; politically the Conservatives took the credit for ITV and its popularity at the risk of alienating its middle class vote; Labour's opposition put it at odds with its traditional supporters. This provides a good example of how a political party does not automatically reflect their electorate. Both were reluctant to hand over to popular, remote control of television—and Labour especially protective, doubting the audience's ability to handle their newfound and prized choice gainfully. But television's popularity limited party control of it. As important was that as a medium television was changing how politics was performed and (in both its popularity and content) disturbing politics’ claim to inform cultural life and politics’ authority per se. Acknowledgements An early version of this article, delivered at the Governing Television? Politics and Television in Europe, 1954–75 conference, Bologna University, Italy, May 2004, benefited from the comments of Sam Aasman, David Ellwood and Harriet Jones, as well as discussions with Jeffrey Milland and Janet Thumim. Lawrence Black is lecturer in modern British history at Durham University, UK. A visiting Fulbright scholar in the USA in 2002–2003, he is the author of The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–64: Old Labour, New Britain? (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003) and co-editor with Hugh Pemberton of An Affluent Society? Britain's Postwar Golden Age Revisited (Ashgate, 2004). Notes Notes 1. John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford, 1999), pp. 126–127. Tim O'Sullivan, ‘Television memories and cultures of viewing,’ 1950–65, in John Corner (ed.) Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History (London, 1991). 2. Introduction, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort & Chris Waters (eds) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–64 (London, 1999). 3. Bernard Sendall, Independent Television in Britain, Volume 1: Origin and Foundation, 1946–62 (Basingstoke, 1984). Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume V: Competition, 1955–74 (Oxford, 1995). Des Freedman, Television Policies of the Labour Party 1951–2000 (London, 2003). 4. James Curran & Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility (London, 1997); Ralph Negrine, Television and the Press Since 1945 (Manchester, 1998). 5. Daniel Lemahieu, A Culture for Democracy (Oxford, 1988); Paddy Scannell & David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. 1, 1922–39 (Oxford, 1991). 6. Dominic Strinati & Stephen Wagg (eds) Come on Down? Popular Media Culture in Post-War Britain (London, 1992), p. 1. Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002), p. 123. 7. Janet Thumim (ed.) Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s (London, 2002), pp. 4–5, 10. John Ellis, ‘Television and history,’ History Workshop Journal, 56 (2003), 278–285. See also Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1) (2004) for further comments from Ellis and Corner. 8. London Evening News, 29 June 1962. Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London, 1994), p. 54. Besides viewing figures for major events, an intriguing example of this was evidence from Channel Four's Best Kids TV Ever (24 May 2005, 1970s section) of parental approval for the BBC's educationally-toned Blue Peter (a winner of a National VALA award in 1985) rather than ITV's more informal, risqué Magpie. 9. Macmillan diary entry, 9 June 1962—I am grateful to the dairy's editor, Peter Catterall, for this quote. Corner, Critical Ideas, p. 127. Robert Chapman, Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (London, 1992), p. 178. 10. Sampson quoted in Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain (London, 2005), p. 34. Michael Young, Edward Shils, The meaning of the Coronation, Sociological Review, 1(2) (1953). Peter Mandler, ‘Two cultures—one—or many?,’ in Kathleen Burk (ed.) The British Isles since 1945 (Oxford, 2003), p. 146. 11. Claire Langhamer, ‘The meanings of home in postwar Britain,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 40(2) (2005). O'Sullivan, Television Memories. 12. The following paragraphs draw on John Hartley, Uses of Television (London, 1999), ch. 8, ‘Housing Television: A Film, a Fridge and Social Democracy,’ especially pp. 99–111. 13. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York, 2000), pp. 242–246 and ‘Tuning in, tuning out: the strange disappearance of social capital in America,’ PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (1995). Pippa Norris, ‘Does TV erode social capital? A Reply to Putnam,’ PS: Political Science and Politics 29 (1996). Charles Pattie, Patrick Seyd, Paul Whiteley, Citizenship in Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 261, 250–260. 14. See Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London, 1964). Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: The British Cultural Revolution from Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair (London, 2000), ch.6. 15. See Ralph Samuel, ‘Dr. Abrams and the end of Politics,’ New Left Review 5 (1960) on psephologist Mark Abrams. Tory agent A. P. Costain, discussing TV elections, Folkstone Herald, 15 September 1959. 16. O'Sullivan, ‘Television memories,’ p. 167. 17. Harry Hopkins, The New Look: A Social History of Britain in the Forties and Fifties (London, 1963), p. 326. Milton Shulman, The Least Worst Television in the World (London, 1973), p. 7. Mark Abrams, Must Labour Lose? (Harmondsworth, 1960), p. 43; Robert Millar, The Affluent Sheep (London, 1963), p. 12; Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 217. 18. Hopkins, New Look, p. 331. 19. Lawrence Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–1964 (Basingstoke, 2003). Anthony Crosland, The Conservative Enemy (London, 1962), p. 130. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1961). Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 243. Tribune, 16 October 1959. 20. Labour Party, Leisure for Living (London, 1959), pp. 9, 29. 21. H. Hubert Wilson, Pressure Group: The Campaign for Commercial Television (London, 1961). Peter Black, The Mirror in the Corner: People's Television (London, 1972) and Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (London, 1962), pp. 604–609. John Corner, ‘Television and British Society in the 1950s,’ in Corner, Popular Television, pp. 1–21. 22. Black, Mirror in the Corner, p. 42. 23. Michael Kandiah, ‘Television enters British politics: the Conservative Party's Central Office and political broadcasting, 1945–55,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 15(2) (1995), 275. Black, Mirror in the Corner, p. 56. 24. Attlee's speech (13 June 1953). Black, Mirror in the Corner, p. 49. House of Commons Debates, Series 5, Vol. 527, cols 2430, 2432, 20 May 1954. Correspondence Gaitskell & Florence Buggs (6 and 8 December 1953) in Hugh Gaitskell Papers, University College London, E10. Becky Conekin, Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, 2003). 25. Sampson, Anatomy, pp. 605–607. Hopkins, New Look, p. 403. 26. Black, Mirror in the Corner, p. 54. Kandiah, ‘Television enters British politics.’ Christopher Mayhew, Time to Explain (London, 1987), pp. 129–130. 27. Black, Mirror in the Corner, pp. 47, 53–54, 110. Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 128. 28. Christopher Mayhew, Dear Viewer … (London, 1953), pp. 25, 3, 5, 14; Time to Explain, pp. 123, 128. 29. Popular Television Association, Britain Unites to Demand Competitive TV (1953). This and the National Television Council's, Britain Unites Against Commercial TV (1953) in Gaitskell Papers, C86. 30. Mayhew, Dear Viewer … , pp. 5, 9. Mayhew, Time to Explain, pp. 127–128. Richard Hoggart, An Imagined Life: Life and Times, Volume III, 1959–91 (Oxford, 1993), p. 70. New Left, ‘TV Supplement— TV and the Community,’ New Left Review 7 (1961), p. 35. A collaboration of Kit Coppard, Tony Higgins, Paddy Whannel & Raymond Williams, submitted to Pilkington. Denis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC, 1997). 31. Mayhew, Dear Viewer … , p. 14. 32. Valeria Camporesi, Mass Culture and National Traditions: The BBC and American Broadcasting, 1922–1954 (Fucecchio, Italy 2000), pp. 197–199. 33. Mayhew, Dear Viewer.., pp. 5, 14, 24. Labour Party, Leisure for Living, p. 26. 34. Patrick Gordon Walker, House of Commons Debates, Series 5, Vol. 527, col. 2102, 19 May 1954. 35. Sendall, Independent Television in Britain, p. 239. 36. Socialist Commentary (December 1953), p. 275. The Argus—Merton and Morden Labour Party (August 1953). In Merton and Morden papers, 4/3, British Library of Economic and Political Science. Labour Party, Record of the Tory Government (London, 1955), p. 63. 37. Black, The Mirror in the Corner, p. 136. Janet Morgan (ed.) The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman (London, 1981), p. 331 (entry for 26 May 1954). 38. Mary Allen, Future of TV, Labour Woman (July 1953), pp. 154–155. 39. Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (New York, 1969), p. 140. 40. Tom Harrisson, Britain Revisited (London, 1961), p. 208. John Heardley Walker in Weekly Tote Bulletin, 11 May 1959. Merton and Morden Papers BLEPS 4/1. 41. Harrisson, Britain Revisited, p. 209. Sunday Times, 20 April 1958. Jeffrey Milland, ‘Pilkington, populists and paternalism: the Pilkington Report and the struggle for the soul of British television, 1958–63’ (Ph.D., University of Bristol, 2005), ch. 2. 42. Labour Party, Leisure for Living, pp. 36–37. Hugh Jenkins, ‘Entertainment—is it necessary to do anything to do about it?,’ Co-Operative Party Monthly Letter (July 1957), p. 19. J. B. Priestley, ‘Televiewing,’ in Thoughts in the Wilderness (London, 1957), p.194. 43. Labour Party, Leisure for Living, p. 33, 6. Lindsey Mountford, TV versus the Soapbox, Revolt 4 (1955). Eric Hefer papers, Labour History Archive, John Rylands Library, Manchester University. 44. Allen, ‘Future of TV,’ p. 155. Weekly Tote Bulletin, 11 May 1959 and 13 August 1962. Merton and Morden Papers 4/1. 45. Hopkins, New Look, p. 403. Black, Mirror in the Corner, p. 64. Danny Blanchflower, Darker Cricket, New Statesman, 1 March 1963. 46. Daily Worker, 6 June 1956 and 27 January 1956. Bert Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left in Britain, 1950–1970 (London, 2000), p. 91. 47. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. 169. Report of the Committee on Broadcasting (Pilkington Report), Cmnd. 1753 (London, 1962), p. 35. Kit Coppard, ‘Two television documentaries,’ New Left Review 3 (May–June 1960), p. 53. ‘TV Supplement—Use and Abuse,’ p. 39. Francis Hope, TWTWTWTWTWTWTWTWTW, New Statesman, 29 March 1963, p. 467. 48. W. Stephen Gilbert, The Life and Work of Dennis Potter (London, 1995), pp. 98–100, 327. Dennis Potter, Seeing the Blossom (London, 1994), pp. 55, 66. 49. Daily Herald, 31 August 1962, 11 April 1960 and 18 April 1960. 50. William Pickles, ‘Political attitudes in the television age,’ Political Quarterly, 30(1) (January–March 1959), p. 63. 51. New Left, TV Supplement—Some Proposals, Tasks for Education, pp. 48, 43. 52. The Times, 20 December 1950. Hopkins, New Look, p. 412. Christopher Mayhew, Commercial Television—What is to be Done? (London, 1959), p. 15. 53. Daily Herald, 9 April 1960. Mayhew, What is to be Done?, p. 15. 54. Alma Birk, ‘Let's Talk it Over,’ Labour Woman (January 1958), pp. 6, 12 (August 1958), pp. 111–112. 55. New Left, ‘TV Supplement,’ pp. 43, 39–40. 56. Spectator, 16 October 1959. Anthony Sampson, Macmillan (London, 1967). Mark Jarvis, Conservative Governments, Morality and Social Change in Affluent Britain, 1957–64 (Manchester, 2005), ch. 7. Milland, ‘Pilkington, populists and paternalism,’ pp. 41, 33–43. 57. Spectator, 12 June 1964, p. 805; 7 February 1964, p. 173; 21 February 1964, p. 251; 1 October 1965, p. 405; 15 May 1964, p. 659; 24 April 1964, p. 549; 1 January 1964, p. 15. 58. See Mary Whitehouse, Cleaning up TV: From Protest to Participation (London, 1967), quote at p. 17. Michael Tracey & David Morrison, Whitehouse (Basingstoke, 1979). 59. Dallas Cliff, ‘Religion, morality and the middle class,’ in Roger King & Neill Nugent (eds) Respectable Rebels (London, 1979), pp. 128, 149. Hugh Greene, ‘The BBC's Duty to Society,’ The Listener, 17 June 1965. 60. Richard Hoggart, ‘Valid arguments lost in an obsession over sex,’ Guardian, 24 November 2001. Deedes address in Whitehouse, Cleaning-Up TV, pp. 227–235. Tracey & Morrison, Whitehouse, pp. 57–69. 61. Stuart Hood, ‘The Corporation,’ Encounter (April 1965), pp. 76–80. Stuart Hood, On Television (London, 1980). 62. Spectator, 13 August 1965, pp. 202, 205; 31 December 1965, p. 866; 5 November 1965, p. 581; 10 September 1965, p. 323. 63. Labour Party Research Department (LPRD), Re. 499, ‘The Financing of a Third Television Programme’ (February 1959). Hopkins, New Look, pp. 331, 400. 64. LPRD, R. 482, A. W. Benn, ‘Joint Committee on the Future of TV,’ policy draft proposals (1955). 65. LPRD, R. 482, ‘Joint Committee on the Future of TV.’ Tony Benn, Diaries 1963–1967 (London, 1987), p. 440. ‘TV Supplement—Some Proposals,’ p. 48. Chapman, Selling the Sixties, p. 36. 66. David Ellwood, ‘A bridge, a beacon or the 51st state? The Specialness of Tony Blair's relationship with America,’ in Ruud Janssens & Rob Kroes (eds) Post-Cold War Europe, Post-Cold War America (Amsterdam, 2004). 67. Chapman, Selling the Sixties, pp. 36–37, 178. 68. Mayhew, What is to be Done?, pp. 2, 4, 7, 9–10. 69. Mayhew, What is to be Done? pp. 12, 22, 10. News Chronicle, 10 March 1959. 70. LPRD Re. 468, ‘Sub-Committee on TV and Radio’ (November 1958). LPRD Re. 500, ‘Summary of Recommendations’ (Third Programme) (February 1959). Mayhew, What is to be Done?, pp. 22, 24. Gaitskell cited in Spectator, 17 September 1965, p. 342. 71. New Left, ‘TV Supplement— Some Proposals,’ pp. 47–48. Raymond Williams, ‘An educated democracy,’ Socialist Commentary (October 1959), pp. 8–10. 72. Daily Sketch, 6 October 1959. 73. Peter Laslett, ‘Learning from Television,’ Twentieth Century 172: 1019 (Autumn 1963). 74. Ken Adam, ‘Responsibility of the provider I’; Joseph Trenaman, ‘Responsibility of the Receiver,’ in SCTV, Television: Responsibility and Response (National Film Theatre, November 1959), pp. 8–9, 22–23. 75. Taylor's review, New Statesman, 21 July 1961. House of Lords Debates, Series 5, Vol. CCXL cols. 223–334, 9 May 1962. 76. Pilkington Report, p. 245. 77. Black, Mirror in the Corner, p. 154. Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left, p. 68. See Hoggart, An Imagined Life, pp. 59–71. Corner, ‘Television and British society in the 1950s,’ pp. 9–10. Michael Kenny, The First New Left (London, 1995), pp. 103–108. 78. Milland, ‘Pilkington, populists and paternalism,’ chapters 4, 5. Jarvis, Conservative governments, pp. 140–146. 79. Daily Telegraph, 4 April 1962. Correspondence Mayhew to Gaitskell (3 May, 5 July, 24 October 1962), GP316. Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 131. Black, Mirror in the Corner, pp. 156–157. 80. Gaitskell to Mayhew (29 October 1962) GP C316. Tony Crosland, ‘Pilkington and the Labour Party,’ Socialist Commentary (August 1962), pp. 5–8 and The Mass Media, Encounter (November 1962). 81. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, pp. 521–529. Jim Northcott, Why Labour? (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 91–92, 176. 82. SCTV, Pilkington and After (London, 1962), pp. 4–38. 83. Denis Thomas, David Sawers, TV: From Monopoly to Competition (London, 1962). 84. ‘TV Supplement,’ p. 48. Mayhew, What is to be Done?, pp. 9–10. LPRD, Rd. 412, ‘Joint Working Party on TV and Radio—The Government and the Pilkington Report’ (February 1963). Sampson, Anatomy, pp. 612–616. See Clive Jenkins, Power Behind the Screen: Ownership, Control and Motivation in British Commercial Television (London, 1961) and Labour Research Department, Money and Men Behind TV (London, 1959). 85. Bert Baker, The Communists and TV (London, 1965). Lopsided TV, Lowestoft Labour Party, Contact 4 (September 1958). Mayhew, What is to be Done?, p. 17. Sampson, Anatomy of Britain, p. 611. 86. LPRD Rd. 412, ‘Joint Working Party on TV and Radio—The Government and the Pilkington Report.’ 87. Freedman, Television Policies, ch. 3. Lawrence Black, ‘ “Making Britain a gayer and more cultivated country”: Jennie Lee and the creative industries in the 1960s,’ in Glen O’Hara & Helen Parr (eds) Reassessing the Wilson Governments, 1964–70 (London, forthcoming, 2006). Geoff Andrews, ‘Social Democracy, the BBC and the public sphere,’ paper to Rethinking Social Democracy, London University (April 2004). 88. Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘The BBC and the birth of The Wednesday Play, 1962–66: institutional containment vs. “agitational contemporaneity,” ’ in Thumim, Small Screens, Big Ideas, p. 150. Donnelly, Sixties Britain, p. 81. 89. Labour Party, Leisure for Living, p. 38. 90. Joseph Trenaman & Denis McQuail, Television and the Political Image (London, 1961), pp. 93–94. TV Supplement, ‘Use and abuse,’ New Left Review 7, pp. 39–40. Socialist Commentary (February 1959), p. 11. 91. House of Commons Debates, Series 5, Vol. 527, col. 2430, 20 May 1954. Robert Pearce (ed.) Patrick Gordon Walker: Political Diaries, 1932–1971 (London, 1991), p. 35. Daily Mail, 9 June 1960. 92. Martin Rosenbaum, From Soapbox to Soundbite (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 140, 285–286. 93. Ruth Winstone (ed.) Tony Benn—Diaries, Papers and Letters 1940–1962 (London, 1994), p. 276. (Entry for 7 May 1958). Trenaman, McQuail, Television and the Political Image, p. 121. 94. Kandiah, ‘Television enters British politics’; Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner (London, 1966), p. 170. 95. Richard Hoggart, ‘Pictures of the People,’ Observer, 15 November 1959. 96. Cited in Black, Mirror in the Corner, p. 35. 97. Corner, ‘Television and British Society in the 1950s,’ pp. 10–11. Jarvis, Conservative Governments, ch. 7. 98. Hoggart, An Imagined Life, p. 71. Hopkins, The New Look, p. 413. 99. Geoff Mulgan & Ken Worpole, Saturday Night or Sunday Morning? From Arts to Industry, New Forms of Cultural Policy (London, 1986). 100. Freedman, Television Policies, pp. 128–132. On Blunkett, Guardian, 30 November 2000. 101. Phillip Whitehead, ‘Breaking up the BBC,’ New Socialist (21 November 1984), pp. 26–27. Mandler, ‘Two Cultures?,’ p. 146. Freedman, Television Policies, p. 129. 102. New Statesman, 3 March 2003 and ‘When Homer met Tony,’ New Statesman, 12 January 2004, p. 48. ‘Campbell guilty of sexing up Simpson's,’ Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2005.