ABSTRACT
Television spread rapidly across the United Kingdom during the 1950s. This chapter explores the role of social fear in relation to television in the UK through the lens of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting, known as the Annan Committee, which sat between 1974 and 1977. 1 After considering the meaning of fear in this context and the ways in which the advent of television has been understood by historians, it surveys the evidence of the remarkable speed of television's spread. The reasons behind the formation of the committee and the broader social context within which it operated are explored, and the fears that television provoked in this first major period of expansion are examined in relation to issues raised in the evidence submitted to the committee, in particular the alleged power of the medium, its bias, its relationship to politics and the way it impinged on family life and values. The chapter concludes by arguing that television was an unprecedented form of national communication: bringing powerful images on a daily basis into the homes of millions. Nothing like this had ever been experienced in UK history, and for its first generation of viewers television could appear as the cause, not the mirror, of the major social transformations that occurred in postwar society.
