The angry buzz pot

[...]... was exploring new forms of visual journalism At the same time, the advent of the group of companies that made up the Independent Television network (ITV) was hastening the expansion of the medium as the primary source of relaxation and entertainment for the population at large The ‘mirror in the corner’ was gathering a huge audience from all sections of the population, with regular viewing figures of... 1987–) The history of This Week interacts with these other series, and, despite their different characters, many personnel moved back and forth between them Together they provided a high-profile outlet for television journalism in depth, a weekly monitoring of the social, political and global landscape with the occasional spectacular revelation – such as This Week’s ‘Death on the Rock’ (1988) on the shooting... licences to the new companies and monitor their output to ensure that their commercial instincts were tempered by public service principles Parliament voted to label the new channel as ‘independent’ rather than ‘commercial’ and the service was described as ‘additional’ rather than ‘competitive’ The scholarly Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery and chair of the Arts Council (‘probably the most... appointed to chair the Authority The ITA decided on a network with a regional structure so that the companies did not compete with each other for advertising The ITA might equally well have been the BBC governors,’ wrote Peter Black Even so, John – by then Lord – Reith, whose powerful advocacy of public service and citizenship had forged the BBC, denounced the new channel in the House of Lords, ‘They have... style The notion then that television programmes should be either serious or entertaining struck us as false and rather insulting to the audience’ said its editor, Donald Baverstock (Corner 1991:8) In a similar spirit, on This Week the serious and the entertaining sat side by side, and it 12 ��� ����� ���� was – at least at first – accepted that neither would detract from the other April 1956 The number... Cockerell’s words, ‘Edenvision won’ and the 14-Day Rule got the force of law There had been some doubt as to whether it would also apply to ITV, but the Postmaster General (the minister with responsibility for broadcasting at the time) decided that it should, with the caveat that he ‘hopes to be “hands off” ’(Cockerell 1988:40) In the last item of that 6 April edition, the potent issue of race was floated through... wide audience’ on the other, she clearly laid out the antithesis that current affairs programme makers – and not only on the commercial channels – needed to negotiate in different ways over the following half a century Doncaster, Gille� and the commercial element Let’s face it once and for all, the public likes girls, wrestling, bright musicals, quiz shows and real-life drama We give them the Halle Orchestra,... oversee the shape of the series, its finances and its public-relations profile In that first year of ITV it was doubly important for producers to be ‘geared to the commercial element’ The start-up costs for the new companies had been substantial; not enough television sets which could take ITV had been sold and the take-up of spot advertising was slow From the point of view of the advertisers the new... in depth’ Robert Fraser of the ITA declared that ‘documentaries and news features are the consciences of the programme companies’ If they were taken away from them and given to ITN, the companies would be only ‘entertainment-makers entirely given over to the show-biz mind’ (Briggs 1995:70) From the first, critics compared This Week to Panorama, whose tag line the window on the world’ it had borrowed... backed up the risks taken by the series, and created an atmosphere in which slow and painstaking investigations, not necessarily showing immediate results, were possible (see Chapters 3 and 4) But the pendulum swung in both directions By the end of the 1970s there was a sense that risky journalism must be restrained The series was taken off the air in 1978 because, in the words of Mike Townson, the editor .