Quality in television

Q: Different ideas of ‘quality’ in television have played an important part in recent

debates over the future of broadcasting in Britain. Discuss what kinds of services and programmes in your view make for ‘quality’ television.

To understand ‘quality’ in television we need to know, firstly what quality actually is and secondly we have to understand why quality is needed in television, if indeed it is actually needed. The government decide what we can and can’t see. As much as we like to think we have a free press, the state still intervenes on some aspects of modern media. All media is regulated by laws set down by the government with regards to obscenity, defamation and incitement. And it was the government who installed the institutionalised idea of a national public service broadcasting company, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The first director general of the BBC was John Reith a man who’s vision it was to create an “ independent British...