Religion

Abstract

Changes in society progressively eroded the status of religion as a ‘special class’ of broadcasting devoted to Christianity, aimed at latent believers and entitled to protected ‘God slots’ in every television schedule.¹ A memorandum from the companies to the Authority in September 1969 urged that the raison d’être for the ‘closed period’, which shielded churchgoers on Sunday evenings from the temptations of television entertainment, was ‘now irrelevant and out of date and in the long term is the wrong way to serve the aims of the Church’. Instead the companies proposed the mingling of religion with adult education, current affairs and cultural programming and, for the major religious denominations, the equivalent of a series of party political broadcasts.² The closed period survived this proposal; the idea of religious PPBs was mercifully still-born; but — like its sister ‘special class’, adult education — religion became more broadly defined and a less distinctive category.