Perspectives on Programmes

Abstract

Fraser’s remarks in his 1960 Manchester address about ‘people’s television’ came to be widely quoted in subsequent years. There were those who saw them as almost as great a condemnation of ITV as Gillett’s indiscretions or Roy Thomson’s naughty phrase. It was, they thought, a characteristically romantic euphemism for the commercially rewarding policy of ‘playing down to the lowest common denominator’. It was the sort of attitude which the Workers’ Educational Association was to condemn in its evidence to the Pilkington Committee as ignoring ‘the kaleidescopic character of each individual’. They were concerned, they said, about the ‘assumption that there are two kinds of people, a cultured élite, and the masses, both of whom must be catered for by different types of programme’.¹