ABSTRACT

What is wrong with the official formula is obvious enough. It is the same old utilitarian proposition which was imposed on public libraries, in the distinction of seriousness between fiction and nonfiction. When I was not in a university, and had to borrow most of my books through the post, I felt the weight of this quite practically, since I had to pay the postage on a novel but had it paid on anything, serious or not, which had that "non-fiction" guarantee. I used to wonder about being subsidised on How to Build a Garden Pool and not on Anna Karenina, and I find myself wondering now about statistics going through to all sorts of committees, based on the proposition that, say, About Anglia is serious and The Roads to Freedom is not. So I can agree with Fox up to a point, in his inclusion of drama, though the form of his new definition is hopeless: a programme "whose primary intention is informational, educational or critical, whether it be in narrative or dramatic form". A utilitarian bias, supported by old academic inertia, produces that limiting version again and again, and people who want to justify a policy take it up in the same spirit as a phrase like "prestige production". There can surely be no priority, for example, in "critical" as against "creative". "Education" usually means what it says, but "information" is

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a very doubtful category, not only because it can be very important or very unimportant, but also because it normally includes angled presentations which are serious only in the sense that they need to be seriously watched. I am sure we have to get away from the paternalist idea that instruction, of one sort or another, backed by what is called informed discussion, is the only really serious broadcasting. But what we also have to get away from is the idea that we can judge the seriousness of a programme by its intention.