RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue
ensure control over the broad range of output. Second, that this group felt sufficlentl/ confident of its social, economic and political position , both in the face of internal and external competitors , to believe that its interests , ideas and values wou!d remain without serious challenge . There were certainly divisions of opinion between and within the different groups as to the nuances of policy , but there was agreement on the fundamental issues . On those conditions , those with political power were guite Парру to allow their cultural cousins to get on with broađcasting more or less undisturbeđ , even if the price was the occasional rather left wing đrama production . The days when the British ruling class and their immediate servants felt secure in their position are clearly passing . Internally the society exhibits all of the symptoms of social crisis and internationally the bench-marKs of comparison are no longer Germany and Japan but Spain and ltaly . In such a situation there is по longer consensus over the maih directions of social and political policy and, even when agreement within the elite is obtained , there is a need for greater ef fort in order to win consent from the mass of the population . Broađcasting is simply one of the areas of social life which has, over the last decade, experienced a much greater degree of centralization and direction . 2 ) A similar logic operates with regard to the idea of 'public service broadcasting'. This ill-defined set of beliefs has a long tradition inside the British state machine and was imported, along with Civil Service recruitment procedures , into the BBC in its earliest days . The funđamental соге of the idea is neither particularly attractive nor at all democratic . It rests on the notion that the privileged and highly-educated people who run such institutions are the bearers of the best traditions of the national culture and it is their right and duty to provide programming which is baseđ not on what the public wants but on what is really ought to have : its model is the schoolroom , not the fair-ground. Over the уеагз this rather repellent model of elite domination came to be mođified by a number of significant pressures . Тће most obvious of these was the introduction of limited competition in programming , first from the original pirates like Radio Luxembourg and then , in TV in the 19 50's and Radio a decade and a half later , by regulated commercial stations operated as profit-making concerns centrally interested in maximizing audiences . A further , perhaps more muted but equally important force was the inert pressure of political democracy itself , which founđ its most acute expression during the Second World War in the sense that if one wished to speak to the mass of the population one needed to đo so, more or less , in terms anđ in accents that they
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