Whose finger on the button? british television and the politics of cultural control

Abstract

‘The study of television’, John Corner suggests, ‘has suffered from a lack of historical studies’. This was ‘a particular problem in Britain’, where studies of television were prone to ‘privileging questions of policy and organisation’ rather than obtaining a sense of the power of television as a medium, assessing its cultural content and reception by viewers or the status and meaning of the medium, the television set and activity of watching it. Corner's own work on television history has broached such matters, but exceptions like Tim O'Sullivan's exploration through audience research and oral testimony of cultures of televiewing (in everyday life and as civic ritual around national events) in a Corner-edited volume apart, has not induced many others to do so.1 Corner has hit upon a broader debate about the predilections of post-1945 British history that necessarily impacts upon writing about television more than radio, since television only became a mass activity in the mid-1950s. Critics charge that co...