ABSTRACT
The British government’s 1988 White Paper Broadcasting in the ‘90s: Competition, Choice and Quality (HMSO, Cmd. 517), published shortly before the ‘opening of the (British) skies’ to satellite television, has occasioned a rather unusual flurry of discussion about quality in television.1 This seems to me both welcome and necessary. If, as a range of commentators have argued, one of the distinctive features of the White Paper is the disparity between its rhetorical aims, ‘Competition, Choice and Quality’, and its policy proposals, then public intervention by those committed to values opposed by this government is essential, and may actively shape broadcasting in the 1990s.2 (In this connection it is worth recalling that the sustained campaign by the Independent Film-makers Association prior to the setting up of Channel 4 did have an effect on the eventual remit of the Channel, even though it may not have been quite what was desired.)3
The debate is currently joined mainly by ‘interested parties’—broadcasters, the ITV companies, investors in satellite technology, etc. With broadcasting, however, we are all interested parties. My hypothesis here will be that ‘progressive forces’, particularly those working in the media or cultural studies fields, are severely handicapped in this debate by their eschewal of any interrogation of what is, and could be, meant by ‘quality’ in a discussion of television.4 ‘Quality’, for some good reasons, has become a bad word. The consequence of this is that only the most conservative ideas about quality are circulating, and will therefore win the day.
