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Television PolicyThe MacTaggart Lectures$
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Television Policy: The MacTaggart Lectures

Bob Franklin

Print publication date: 2005

Print ISBN-13: 9780748617173

Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: September 2012

DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748617173.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM EDINBURGH SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.edinburgh.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Edinburgh University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in ESO for personal use.date: 03 April 2020

Television versus the People

Television versus the People

The James MacTaggart Lecture 1998

Chapter:
(p.211) Television versus the People
Source:
Television Policy
Author(s):

Peter Bazalgette

Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748617173.003.0022

In this lecture, the author, founder of the independent production company Bazal (now Endemol UK) and recipient of the Royal Television Society's Judges award for his outstanding contribution to British television, suggests that television is confronting a revolution in which power is shifting away from the ‘sleek barons of British broadcasting’ in favour of the viewer. However, television is still plagued by regulators who apply ill-informed and outmoded criteria of ‘quality’ to programmes and content. They also fail to achieve healthy competition, which benefits the consumer: the key ambition for any regulatory regime. The author argues that ‘we need an end to the era of over-regulation’ and offers a wide-ranging agenda for change, such as abolishing the existing and ‘absurd’ regulators of television content; removing the public service remit from Channel 3 and Channel 5 and reviewing Channel 4's remit for diversity; phase out the ITV companies' payments for their licence to broadcast, along with their entire capacity for in-house production with the sole exception of local and regional news; privatising BBC Worldwide; and preserving and strengthening BBC's public-service role.

Keywords:   television, power, broadcasting, competition, quality, ITV, BBC, public service, over-regulation

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