ABSTRACT
Commercial television produces audiences, not programmes. Advertisers, in purchasing a few seconds of television time, are actually buying viewers by the thousand. The price they pay is determined by the number of people who can be expected to be watching when their advert is shown. Hence, advertisers regard programmes merely as the means by which audiences are delivered to them. The sequence of programmes in any evening, week or season reflects the quest of commercial customers to get the largest or most appropriate public they can. ‘The spot is the packaging’, wrote a market researcher in Advertising Quarterly, ‘the product inside the package is an audience’. These are the realities which help to determine what kinds of programmes are made, when they are shown and who sees them. Commercial television was introduced in the 1950s because it was claimed
that it would bring competition into broadcasting, and make the service more responsive to popular demands. The Independent Television channel was supposed to break the narrow élitism of the BBC’s cultural policy. Indeed, once it had been given a regional structure, it was also supposed to promote provincial culture and oppose the BBC’s metropolitan bias. Finally, commercial television, its advocates claimed, would be less vulnerable to political pressure. Unlike the BBC, its finances would be independent of official control. Few of these hopes were fully realized. The allocation of the franchise areas
in which commercial companies were given the right to broadcast was designed to produce a system in which four (later five) of the largest and wealthiest regions made most of the programmes for the national network. The smaller companies made most of their programmes for local consumption; only a few of their products were to be shown nationally. The first commitment of the commercial companies was to make a profit.
Hence they were concerned to minimize the financial risks involved in making programmes. The smaller regions, whose audiences were not so attractive to advertisers, could not afford to invest in expensive programmes unless they were guaranteed a national showing. Similarly, the large networking companies needed to be able to show their programmes in every region in
order to cover their costs. Consequently decisions about which programmes were to be networked became centralized. This centralization was formally established when the Independent Television
Companies Association (ITCA) was set up in 1971. This decided which programmes were to be shown on the national network, and how much the smaller companies had to pay towards the costs of the major programme producers. The smaller companies, however, complained that the ITCA was dominated by the five major programme networking companies.
