ABSTRACT
This has not been a very fashionable question for television scholars in the UK.1 I want to think about some of the answers that have been given to this question, and to query its continuing banishment. In the process, I will make a series of observations about the progressive valuation of the television audience(s) over the television text (however conceptualised) since the mid-1970s. I am not arguing that the emphasis of television studies should be evaluative rather than analytic, but I am suggesting that there is something rather odd about the fascination with what ‘real’ (i.e., other, non-academic) people think about television when it is combined with a principled refusal to reveal what academics think about it.
