ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews certain aspects of the nature of educational television. It starts by analysing in detail a particular Open University TV programme. It focuses on the TV programme of the Social Sciences Faculty's Foundation Year Course, D101, 'Making sense of society'. The chapter discusses three major approaches: reduction to 'author' theory, reduction to 'spectator' theory, and the theory of television as 'text'. The effect of the way in which most case studies have been conducted within Open University educational broadcasting is to afford the 'real world' a privileged position in relationship to knowledge. The ideology associated with these kinds of programmes is to let real social actors speak for themselves and to intervene as little as is possible. The chapter suggests that the main weaknesses of the programme analysed here is that it does not interrogate or challenge any of the observations offered by the participants on the programme.
