Greg Dyke's second MacTaggart Lecture states his vision for a new BBC, which involves melding the public-service tradition with the realities of the digital television market in order to forestall the emergence of a ‘digital underclass’.

Dyke's vision embraces a number of concrete programming proposals, including shifting the BBC's nine o'clock news bulletin to the 10 p.m. slot and the creation of two new children's channels. BBC1 will remain the ‘gold standard of mainstream television’ but will become more focused on entertainment, drama and factual programmes. Some programmes currently at the margins of BBC1's schedule will be given a higher profile slot on BBC2,which will broadcast more specialised ‘highbrow’ programmes. BBC3 will target a youth audience and while BBC4 will be ‘unashamedly intellectual’ and offer a televised amalgam of Radio 3 and Radio 4 with an emphasis on culture, music and arts. BBC News 24 will comprise the seventh BBC television channel. Dyke acknowledges that his vision will require the agreement of the BBC Governors and the Culture Secretary before it can be implemented.

Michael Grade's MacTaggart Lecture, widely interpreted as an application for the job of Director General of the BBC, analyses the finances, management and programming of the BBC following a period of robust clashes with the Thatcher government and in the run-up to the Charter renewal in 1994. Grade argues for the significance of programmme quality and standards at the BBC for the wider broadcasting industry. ‘It is the BBC,’ Grade famously remarks, ‘which keeps us all honest.’

Grade identifies a number of key problems confronting the BBC. First, the BBC has adopted a policy of ‘political appeasement’ in its relations with government which can only result in ‘terminal decline’. By contrast, in-house management at the BBC has adopted a ‘sort of pseudo Leninist style’ which relies on ‘central control’ and promises the spectre of ‘editorial dictatorship’. Grade concludes that the Governors cannot be both managers and regulators, and consequently advocates a single new regulatory body – ‘Let us call it the British Television Commission’ – for all television services.

Verity Lambert addresses the question ‘What can we do to preserve quality?’ in the context of a broadcasting system experiencing deregulation, reflecting both government policy and the emergence of multichannel broadcasting. Lambert begins with definitions but acknowledges that the notion of ‘quality’ is contested. She suggests that money is central since it allows high production values, well-researched programmes, a good programme mix and funds innovation, risks and the occasional mistake. Lambert claims ‘you may not know it [quality] when you see it, [but] you certainly know it when you don't’.

The inclusion of a ‘quality threshold’ in the Broadcasting Act 1990 is a significant amendment, but, additionally, the ITC must hold ITV companies to their programming commitments, especially the production and airing of documentaries and current affairs in prime time and the BBC and Channel 4 must ‘not lose their nerve’ when confronted by falling ratings.

Lambert concludes by considering the role of programme-makers (inhouse and independents) in sustaining quality: her focus is on independent production. Establishing an association for independents would help eliminate the fragmentation and competition between them which can reduce programme quality. Independents also require ownership of the rights in their programmes, an independent mechanism for evaluating a fair price for programmes and guaranteed access to the network. If deregulation and a freer market are to co-exist with quality programming it will require programme-makers to refuse ‘to compromise or lower standards’ but also to ‘seize the opportunities that are there’.

Norman Lear's lecture recalls the progress of television programmes, especially situation comedies, in addressing previously taboo subjects such as homosexuality, abortions and black family life. He regrets the current backlash which seeks to reinstate these old taboos: they grow back ‘like weeds in an unattended hothouse’. The pretext of those who censor is the need to protect viewers from offensive material, but the real concern is to ‘block content which might be too informative and provocative’.

These taboos were overturned following confrontations between writers and producers like Lear and the Program Practices Department – which ‘is the euphemism for censor’: cuts in portrayals of sex and violence were typically the focus of their concerns. Lear always responded by saying that if the edit was made ‘they could not expect to find us at work the next morning’. He suggests this stance was not heroic since he knew the ‘network would eventually buckle’, but reminds that the power of the three networks over creative workers’ products is considerable: ‘Remember that the American television writer has only three doors on which to knock’.

The key theme in David Liddiment's MacTaggart Lecture is that the soul of British television is in danger as a result of a battle for ratings in which ‘we're losing sight of the innate value of programmes’. But television is about more than ‘just putting bums on seats’ and broadcasters must seek to make television interesting, ambitious and diverse as well as popular. Liddiment argues that broadcasters ‘have to take risks’.

The BBC is the most powerful and dominant force in British broadcasting: £2.4 billion a year of public money and 43 per cent of all viewing and listening in UK homes. Its role in providing creative leadership is crucial: ‘this beast is the keeper of the soul of British television. No one else can do this job.’ But Liddiment is concerned that the BBC is losing sight of its cultural responsibilities in its ‘rush to beat the commercial competition at its own game’. This failure in turn reflects a failure in corporate governance. The ‘committee of part-timers’ known as the Governors must decide whether they are regulators or management: ‘they cannot be both’. There is a need for ‘a new way of governing the BBC that puts creative leadership back at the centre of its public purposes’.

Jeremy Isaacs’ MacTaggart Lecture articulates his vision for the new fourth channel. He envisages broadcasting in the eighties as being characterised by a confrontation between ‘a BBC on two channels and an ITV on two channels’; the former ‘poorly off and getting poorer’, the latter ‘rich’ and getting ‘richer’.

While Pilkington's (1962) assessment of ITV was critical, Annan (1977) found much to praise. The change reflected the impact of Pilkington's remarks in shifting the Independent Television Authority (ITA) from being a ‘friend’ of the companies in the direction of more rigorous regulation. Isaacs argues that ITV enters the 1980s with a secure financial base and consequently the second ITV channel must be resourced to deliver quality programming without any diminution of programming on ITV 1. By contrast, BBC has witnessed a decline although it remains the ‘best television service in the world’. The BBC has been underfunded since the establishment of BBC2 in 1962 and this is evident in programming: shortages of drama; an increase in American imports; and too many repeats. This decline is crucial since the BBC serves as a sheet anchor for all television programming and Isaacs’ hope for the 1980s is that ‘BBC television will be guaranteed the funding it will need’.

Rupert Murdoch offers a highly contentious and critical assessment of public service broadcasting, denouncing it as an ideology deployed by ‘propagandists’ to protect the interests of a narrow broadcasting elite, but with debilitating consequences for British broadcasting. Most significantly, public service broadcasting and its ‘guardians’ militate against the prospects for viewer freedom and choice. Such restrictions ‘are not compatible with a mature democracy’.

This ideology of public service broadcasting is a form of ‘special pleading’ which misrepresents an economically inefficient, paternalistic and unaccountable broadcasting system, as the only organisational structure capable of delivering quality programmes and encouraging creative risk-taking in programme-making. Murdoch's argument rests on a ‘simple principle’. Namely, ‘in every area of economic activity in which competition is attainable, it is much to be prefered to monopoly’.

By contrast public service broadcasting is nowhere clearly defined, although Murdoch redresses this problem by suggesting that ‘anybody who, within the law of the land, provides a service which the public wants at a price it can afford is providing a public service’ (subsequent MacTaggart lecturers have contested this definition). Consequently ‘if in the years ahead we can make a success of Sky Television, that will be as much a public service as ITV’. Murdoch offers a number of examples to illustrate his argument that the market-led American system has been substantially more successful in creating greater quality and diversity of programming than British television informed by the principles of public service broadcasting.

Richard Eyre's 1999 MacTaggart Lecture announced the imminent demise of public-service television: ‘It's a gonner’ – and for three reasons. First, public-service broadcasting relies on regulators who are increasingly overwhelmed by the expansive sources of broadcast information: this will result in inequities. Second, it relies on an active broadcaster and a passive viewer, but ‘at the end of a tiring day viewers don't always choose what's good for them’. Third, public-service broadcasting lacks any agreed definition. Modifying Oscar Wilde's judgement of fox hunting, Eyre declares public-service broadcasting to be ‘The unsustainable in pursuit of the undefinable.’ Public-service broadcasting must give way to public-interest broadcasting, which will provide salvation for the BBC because it will oblige the Corporation to engage with viewers ‘more wholeheartedly’. The key difference is that while ‘service is what you do for people … interest is what they give you and what you elicit from them’. It implies a contract and consensus between broadcasters and audience.

This shift does not imply the end of quality television. Broadcasters cannot merely pursue the lowest common denominators, because it is not in their interest to do so. ITV must be a public-interest broadcaster if it is ‘to draw large audiences. So must the BBC, S4C and Channel 4. And Channel 5.’ The difference between public-interest broadcasting at the BBC and ITV is that the former must try to achieve maximum weekly reach while commercial common sense will sustain an ITV that is unequivocally in the public interest by generating diverse and high-quality programming: to do otherwise risks forfeiting market position.

John Schlesinger's lecture is based around a ‘few observations about my time in this business’ working in television and film. Schlesinger readily conceeds that he could never ‘understand the difference’ between ‘making television’ and ‘making a film for television’. The one difference is the distinctive audience reaction to the two media: the cinema creates a ‘special experience’.

Schlesinger began in television working on Tonight (‘I got the sack’) and with Huw Weldon on Monitor; the year with Monitor was ‘among the happiest I've ever spent in this profession’. Schlesinger went to America to make Midnight Cowboy. On arrival, he recalls his mix of embarrassment and delight. Embarrassment which prompted him to hide with Julie Christie during the premiere of Far From the Madding Crowd, which flopped badly in the States; delight and irrepressible excitement at meeting celebrities – ‘it is very exciting when you're at a traffic light and Hitchcock's in the next car’. Other films followed: Gorky Park, Marathon Man, The Englishman Abroad and Yanks. Schlesinger confesses to not enjoying shooting a film, but he loved ‘dreaming it all up with the writer’, the editing and ‘the fantasy into reality when you're talking about design’.

Christine Ockrent's lecture explores and analyses the ethical consequences of rapid change in the French broadcasting system. She details the shift at TF1 Network from a public-sector organisation run by ‘miserly, incompetent civil servants’ to a private-sector broadcaster, owned by a civil engineering company which believes there is ‘no reason why a TV station should be run differently from a pipes factory’ and whose ethical ‘code of behaviour’ includes ‘simple mottos’ such as ‘Kill the enemy, the competition, the weak’. Ockrent believes that this subject will interest a British audience because ‘in many ways the French situation epitomises the fears which many of you nourish about deregulation’.

Ockrent makes three key claims. First, while deregulation may be a prerequisite for the expansion of broadcasting, it is ‘inevitably damaging to standards’. Ratings have become the key consideration with game shows, sitcoms, American series and films dominating French television schedules resulting in ‘conformity and uniformity’. The paradox which emerges is that ‘we have more channels … but we seem to have less consumer choice…. Standards of news programmes have also declined as …some presenters … imitate entertainment shows… and …what is interesting has long since overrun what is important…. Ockrent…s second argument is that whatever its dangers, expansion is essential if the broadcasting system is to survive and compete internationally. This will require large capital investment of the kind Murdoch has made in the UK to develop satellite and cable channels in France.

The origins and development of the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture and the Edinburgh International Television Festival (EITF) are typically, and in some ways appropriately, regarded as inextricably connected, but the MacTaggart Lecture can claim rights of prima geniture. The first lecture, delivered in Edinburgh by radical playwright and director John McGrath on 25 August 1976, formed part of a retrospective celebrating the work of the recently deceased, Scottish television producer and director, James MacTaggart. The retrospective had been organised by the BBC in association with Granada Television and the highly successful and prestigious Edinburgh International Film Festival, which had begun some thirty years earlier. It was in the following year, that an Advisory Committee, chaired by Gus Macdonald with William Brown (then Managing Director of Scottish Television) and Alastair Hetherington (Controller, BBC Scotland) as joint Presidents, organised the first Edinburgh International Television Festival at which distinguished documentary maker Marcel Ophuls discussed ‘Naturalism and Television’ as his theme for the second MacTaggart Lecture. But the mutual success and continued close association of these two events has blurred recognition of their staggered birth.

Across the subsequent three decades, MacTaggart lecturers have been drawn from the ranks of the most celebrated and distinguished programme-makers (Verity Lambert and Norman Lear), producers (Janet Street-Porter, Christine Ockrent, Marks and Gran), playwrights (John McGrath, Troy Kennedy Martin, Dennis Potter), journalists (John Humphrys, Peter Jay) and authors (John Mortimer), as well as senior media executives from both the public (Michael Grade, Greg Dyke and Mark Thompson) and private/independent (David Liddiment, Richard Eyre, Jeremy Isaacs, Denis Forman and David Elstein) sectors of broadcasting, alongside significant owners of media corporations such as Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner.

Marcel Ophuls, the maker of television documentaries such as The Sorrow and the Pity, Sense of Loss and Memory of Justice, opens his lecture on a biographical note, expressing his admiration for his father, Max Ophuls, and describing how he himself became what he deprecatingly describes as ‘a self indulgent specialist of four-and-a-half talking-head marathons’: i.e. documentaries. Ophuls declares himself the spiritual as well as the biological offspring of his father, sharing fully ‘his assessments of the shallow, anti-creative, anti-humanist and authoritarian theories which seemed to us … the systematic foundations of the naturalist tendency’. His critique of naturalism explores, but strongly contests, themes addressed by John McGrath a year earlier at the initial festival in 1976: ‘John McGrath and I do not agree at all,’ he acknowledges, ‘on the nature, on the causes or the definition of the naturalist tradition.’

Ophuls begins his lecture with a recollection of a damp, November evening in London when, as a freelance seeking a job, he went to a meeting in Golden Square. As the discussion moved to the ‘techniques of naturalism – its social functions and its social mission and its social purpose’ Ophuls recalls the ‘irresistible urge’ to say that he ‘much preferred the realism of Noel Coward's This Happy Breed … to the elaborately bleak naturalism of Cathy Come Home’.

The theme of Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran's lecture is the relative powerlessness of the creative workers (writers, producers and directors) – ‘the talent’ – in television and the other creative industries. Establishing an independent production company provides writers with creative control over their work but even independent producers can end up being treated as little more than ‘a glorified freelance at the mercy of the market’ without ownership and distribution rights over programmes. It is still preferable, however, to working directly for a broadcaster such as the BBC or ITV which often involves being ‘under-respected, under-consulted, [and] under-rewarded’.

In 1989 Marks and Gran established their production company Alomo: their programme credits include Birds of a Feather, Love Hurts and Goodnight Sweetheart. The BBC remains the most important customer for talent, but its attitude towards independent producers remains ‘essentially patronising’ preferring to ‘concentrate their cash, care and chauffeur-driven cars on the front-of-camera talent, soap stars and celebrity chefs’: both the BBC and ITV ‘betray the behind-the-camera talent’. Channel 4 is little better. A creatively liberating partner, Channel 4 drives ‘some of the hardest and cruellest bargains financially’.

At the BBC the problem reflects the fact that creative leaders and their ability to commission work have been undermined by ‘legions of lawyers … and policy unit apparatchiks’. These new ‘gatekeepers’ have little enthusiasm or interest in programming and apply to television ‘the same discipline they would apply to the production of biscuits … Like the Hitler Youth they know no other system.’

Ted Turner, James MacTaggart Lecture 1982

Ted Turner, founder and president of Cable News Network (CNN), delivered the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in 1982. It set a precedent by being the first ‘ad-libbed’ lecture: no lecturer has subsequently followed Turner's lead. Turner's approach was broadly anecdotal; his modest ambition, to ‘tell you a little about my experiences in this business’.

Turner's first business involvement was with what Americans call the (outdoor) advertising industry. In the UK, this is known as hoardings and billboards which impose a ‘blight on the scenery’, but they constitute ‘a good profitable business’ which funded the purchase of Turner's television station. He bought the station because he liked old films and because it was cheap: ‘I couldn't afford a real television station so I bought this Mickey Mouse station’ in 1970. Turner knew very little about television and had no love for the medium. He was not part of a network and described himself as a ‘fringe, fringe player’. But he argued that success in television rests on skills in programming and promotion alongside an ability to anticipate future trends in communications. Two technological developments were crucial.

Mortimer begins with an anecdote to introduce his argument that ‘there is no clear or necessary distinction between fact and fiction, between drama and documentary, between creating and reporting’. Indeed ‘one gives life to the other’ and both are equally important in the search for truth. Consequently, censoring drama is as ‘damaging and dishonest’ as censoring the news.

Mortimer's working life illustrates this synergy between fact and fiction. His simultaneous engagement with law and the theatre prompted the discovery that while the playwright ‘has to face up to the fearful truth of existence’ the lawyer can exist ‘in a world of pure fantasy and make-believe’: the plays of ‘Strindberg … were forced to tell the truth … about married life’ while ‘the divorce laws of England were a web of romantic fairy-tales’. Mortimer argues that truth is essential to drama and must be rooted in the reality experienced by the writer: the ‘best of dramatists … have all dealt in worlds which are quite their own’ and require them, as Proust acknowledged, to ‘read the book of unknown signs within him’.

But television drama has two ‘enemies’: censorship and ratings. Mortimer rejects both. Censors reject material which tends to ‘deprave and corrupt’. Mortimer argues that drama should shock audiences – as Dickens’ accounts of the workhouse did; moreover, any ‘healthy person’ should expect to be ‘shocked and offended at least three times a day’. Ratings also threaten drama and lead to mediocrity.

John Birt, then Director General of the BBC, used his 1996 MacTaggart Lecture to outline his vision for the BBC in the digital age. He began by listing the BBC's major achievements and concluded with a plea for an increase in the licence fee.

Reformulating Reith's original injunction that the BBC should ‘educate, inform and entertain’, Birt claimed in recent times the BBC's role has been to ‘delight, educate and inform’ and, by so doing, to act as ‘the touchstone of quality in UK broadcasting’. Birt summarises the BBC's considerable achievements: ‘we have become a major cultural patron … we have opened up intellectual vistas; and, at the same time … we have won the hearts of our viewers and listeners’.

While the digital age of broadcasting offers considerable advantages, there are a number of dangers confronting the BBC which must be overcome by government and regulators. First, the digital age will be dominated by the key players who own and control the vital gateway into the home (the ‘set-top box’) which carries not only television signals but potentially unlimited economic and financial exchanges. The struggle to control this gateway will constitute ‘one of the great business battles shaping the next [i.e. the twenty-first] century, to rival the nineteenth-century battle for the railroad’. Second, the ready access to a global system of programming will encourage a decline in programme standards and an Americanised world culture.

Phillip Whitehead opens his lecture with the suggestion that the British broadcasting industry is suffering the most severe and sustained attack he can recall in the last twenty-five years. The assailants include politicians, government policy, new technology, free-market economics and even broadcasting regulators. The ‘buzzword’ informing policy change has been ‘choice’ measured by the number of available services. But diversity, Whitehead suggests, ‘has to be fostered’.

Whitehead argues that Annan articulated the principle of a genuine ‘regulated diversity’ promoted via different authorities protected by separate sources of finance: a smaller BBC; local radio cut ‘adrift’ from the BBC and IBA; ITV as a truly regional service and regionally based network; and a new publishing channel commissioning independent production. Ten years on, the BBC has become closer to the model Annan espoused, but the fifteen regional companies of ITV are ‘now bought and sold with little regard to their region’; the diversity of programming produced in the regions is being lost. By contrast, the independent producers have brought ‘a quite new pluralism to British television’, although this may be compromised by a ‘Peacock afterthought’ which threatens to change advertising arangements at Channel 4 and may result in a loss of ‘innovatory zest’. Similarly, ITV may be ‘dragged down’ by its investment in satellite and cable if these innovatory services fail in the late 1990s.

Troy Kennedy Martin picks up the cudgels first wielded by John McGrath a decade earlier in his ‘swingeing attack on naturalism’. He defines naturalism in television as ‘actors talking in contemporary dress against a contemporaneous background’ intended to offer ‘a replication of real life. In dramatic terms it is the mediation of story through dialogue’; he concludes that naturalism is ‘basically phoney’.

Kennedy Martin proposes to open up a ‘fourth front’ alongside plays, series and serials, which would deal with ‘micro drama’ composed of ‘dozens of fragments of drama, shards of experience made and put out very quickly’. Micro drama should embrace three key elements of advertising commercials which contrast sharply with television drama. First, ad copywriters condense information while playwrights tend to expand it. Second, in television drama the budget contracts with the length of the piece but in adverts there is no necessary connection between cost and duration. Finally, adverts reinforce their message through repetition whereas in television drama a repeat is a failure to provide something new. Kennedy Martin envisages a number of advantages to these micro dramas: repetition reinforces impact but also defrays costs. But the micro dramas should also employ similar styles ‘in which time itself is altered and naturalism goes out of the window’.