ABSTRACT
The 1960s occupies a distinctive place in the short and tightly compressed history of British television. Sandwiched between the confident assurances of the postwar years, dominated still by the Reithian paternalism of the BBC, and the harsher, more pragmatic and largely economic imperatives of the 1970s, lies an era characterized by experiment, innovation and a particular sort of cultural iconoclasm. New technologies, new practices and institutional structures emerged to provide the basis of the broadcasting that was to prevail for the next quarter of a century-the beginning, as it were, of the modern television period. Key forms and genres established or, at the very least, radically overhauled during this moment-documentary drama, the police series, situation comedy, current affairs journalism-still form the backbone of the broadcaster’s schedule in the early 1990s. As the broadcasting industry teeters on the edge of what might be regarded as its post-modern era of deregulated saturation image-bombardment, it is worth attempting to examine more closely the impact of this critical moment.
