ABSTRACT
Most Doctors Recommend Would it make a series? It is understandable that broadcasting planners now ask this so regularly. A series is more than a convenience, filling what are now characteristically called slots. It is also a sort of late version of character training: encouraging regular habits in the viewers; directing them into the right channels at certain decisive moments in their evening lives. Practically all that is now left of any public broadcasting policy, outside certain traditionally reserved areas, is that kind of market thinking: commercial calculations, done quite openly in public, and backed up by the general-purpose showbusiness language which is now normal in Radio Times. I think I can remember, for example, when a new serial like The Doctors (BBe-l) would have been introduced by its subject, but now, apart from a few quick sentences, the publicity goes to the heart of the matter: "Geoffrey Nicholson asked the principal actors how they felt about their futures as household names .... Now, in colour, meet your new doctors." "Most doctors recommend," as they used to say in the old advertising.
