Public Service Broadcasting and the Public Interest

Abstract

The first of January 1987 saw the 60th anniversary of the start of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Diamond Jubilees suggest continuity, the certainties of a fulfilled purpose and an agreeable retirement. For the BBC few of these can be applied, yet it is likely that it will at least continue. How far its presence in the future will be changed by events in the immediate short term; how far, indeed, it will be able to maintain its present position at the leading edge of British and world broadcasting, seems now to hang on the extent to which it can adjust to a different environment - political, economic, social and technological. From its own history we can work out how powerful is its ability to emerge from this kind of challenge intact, if altered.