Richard Hoggart and the Uses of Television

Abstract

The Hoggart Archive at Sheffield University contains both published and unpublished materials by Hoggart and his publishers, lawyers and critics. Working in the archive with this material has led to this article which takes the opportunity to reflect on Hoggart’s influence on 1960s TV and his contribution to debates about television. This article is based on published work but I have taken the opportunity to set Hoggart’s contribution to the Pilkington Report against some of his later reflections on television. My aim is to use these materials to show the subtlety and depth of Hoggart’s critiques of broadcasting in the 1960s and to emphasise the consistent principles which ran through his thinking. This helps to complicate received histories and understandings of the period and of Hoggart’s place within them. The Uses of Literacy (1957) has been discussed more than any of Hoggart’s other works, but its impact in relation to broadcasting has not been sufficiently considered and in the first part of the article I show how Hoggart’s insights influenced a generation of writers of TV drama. In terms of Hoggart’s more direct interventions on broadcasting, his influence on the Pilkington Committee is well known but, in the second part of the article, I shall show how qualified his success with Pilkington was in terms of those aspects of his critiques that were adopted by the UK government but how consistently he argued for the principles that the Pilkington Committee had sought to clarify and elaborate. In conclusion, I shall also show that Hoggart’s critique still carries strong resonances with contemporary debates on ‘quality’ and ‘value’ in British broadcasting.