‘This outlet for criticism could ginger up

the whole climate in which television is

watched’: (Re)viewing Points of View –
Audience, Access and Participation

Su Holmes

The concept of interactivity has been invoked as central to the contemporary

digital media age. In conjunction with the increased importance of the ‘diffused
audience’, one which is dispersed and fragmented, characterised by an ‘always
on’ interaction with a proliferation of media forms,1 this context has posed new
challenges and questions for audience studies. Although the active audience para-
digm, as well as academic work on fandom, had long since blurred the conceptual
lines between production and consumption, the contemporary media context has
prompted more explicit calls for a reassessment of the relations between viewer
(or user) and text, as well as production and consumption, agency and authorship.
As Henry Jenkins explains, now that consumers ‘have become key participants in
media culture; the debate now centres on ‘the terms of their participation’, not
whether audiences are active or passive’.2 Although largely associated with the
move away from transmissional (one-way) models of communication, a great
deal of ambiguity has surrounded the meanings of the term interactive – especially
with regard to its relationship with text/audience negotiations from ‘the past’. Yet
in broad terms, the idea of an intervention in a text, as well as some form of recip-
rocal communication or feedback – ‘the ability for message receivers to respond
to message senders’ – has nevertheless emerged as a key point of discussion in
debates about interactivity.3
But there remains a question about the role of the historical here. In 1999,
John Corner aptly observed how television studies had frequently worked with a
‘frantically contemporary agenda’.4 Although television historiography has since
become a vital and visible part of television scholarship, the dialogue between tele-
vision studies and television history remains limited. Helen Wheatley has recently
referred to ‘the short-sightedness of [television studies] . . . that often claims so
much for the new without rigorous investigation of the apparently “old”’.5 With
respect to interactivity, and in tracing a trajectory from periodicals in the 1880s,
confessional magazines in the 1920s, the rise of talkback radio, real life magazines
in the 1980s, to the millennial event of Big Brother, Bridget Griffen-Foley has
 (Re)viewing Points of View 5

justifiably emphasised how ‘audiences have for more than a century been con-
tributing to successful media outlets’.6 While the notion of modifying content on
reception is hailed as a key difference of the interactive age, she explores how all
these media examples ‘have addressed their consumers as textual actors . . . [and]
. . . have allowed their consumers to feel involved in determining the nature of the
text’.7
With respect to the contemporary television context, and Griffen-Foley’s refer-
ence to Reality TV, what is perhaps most interesting where the construction of
the audience is concerned is less the scope for actual audience intervention, than
the ways in which such programme formats (from Big Brother to X-Factor), self-
consciously dramatise a set of relations between text and viewer as central to their
textual form. In Reality TV, ‘the audience’ seems to be everywhere, more visible,
in fact, than ever. We are hailed directly to have ‘our say’ by voting, imaged as an
excitable and boisterous crowd on screen, constantly discussed by participants
when they speculate about how they are being represented and received, solic-
ited to call/text/email our opinions on the shows, and beckoned to step into the
television space – to traverse the boundary between living room and screen.8
With this dialectic in mind, I want to look at one neglected arena in which televi-
sion viewers have been conceptualised as ‘textual actors’: the long-standing BBC
viewer comment programme, Points of View (1961-present). Launched by the
BBC in 1961, and still running today, the viewer comment programme represents
a unique institutional and textual space when it comes to exploring a historical
trajectory of television participation and interaction. Prior to the advent of the
Internet, the viewer comment programme was one of the most visible spaces (in
conjunction with print media forms) in which we could see comments about
television from ‘real’ viewers – something which, given the dispersed and priva-
tised nature of television viewing, is central to its appeal. As such, Points of View
represents a symbolic, and here historical, journey into what Ien Ang conceptual-
ises as the usually ‘invisible’, obscure and ‘mysterious’ territory of the audience.9
Drawing on written sources from the BBC Written Archive Centre (WAC) (and
to some extent audio-visual material), it is this journey that I want to explore in
relation to the formative discourse surrounding Points of View. Given that the
articulation of discourse, as well as any attempt to construct ‘the audience’,10 is
always inextricably enmeshed with questions of power,11 my primary focus here
is on the micro-structures of the memos as a means of accessing the institutional,
ideological and historical circulation of the programme in its early years –
principally, 1961–69.

Knowing the Public in Public Service Television

Although there has been some work in the field of journalism on the mediated
public debate arising from ‘letters to the editor’,12 the TV viewer comment pro-
gramme has been neglected by both broadcasters and academics. Perhaps it is
seen as aesthetically uninteresting (simply a ‘TV version’ of a letter’s page), or
6 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

perhaps it is often not perceived as a ‘real’ programme form at all. (Points of View
has ranged from between five-15 minutes in length.) But in terms of the television
industry, this neglect might well illustrate John Ellis’ point about the hierarchical
conception of ‘audiences’ and ‘viewers’. Prefiguring Ang’s discussion of the audi-
ence as a ‘taxonomic collective’ that is actively produced by media institutions for
their own purposes,13 Ellis explains how:
Broadcasting institutions are not concerned with ‘viewers’, but they are with ‘audi-
ence’. ‘Viewers’ are individuals, people who use TV within their domestic and social
contexts. Viewers are the few people who ring in to the duty officer, or write to broad-
casters or to newspapers, expressing their opinions.14

But this immediately begs questions about the specificity of the public service
broadcaster. The concept of the ‘audience’ invoked by Ellis is defined in terms of
ratings discourse, a ‘bulk agglomeration created by statistical research’.15 Yet the
public service institution has traditionally been premised on the concept of the
audience-as-public. As such, its relationship with the audience is characterised by
a sense of cultural responsibility that, with respect to the BBC, was seen as anti-
thetical to the idea of giving the ‘audience what it wants’. When the BBC set up
its Listener Research Department in 1936, Lord John Reith was famously opposed
to the idea of sustained audience research, fearing that it would erode the BBC’s
cultural mission and enable listener taste to dictate broadcast output.16 In fact, the
cultural mission of uplift was precisely premised on a theoretical conception of
a unified audience which would be ‘disciplined’ under the cultural leadership of
the BBC – an idea that could only exist without empirical knowledge of the ‘real’
world of listeners’ tastes and desires.17 The increasing production of empirical
knowledge about the audience did impact upon the BBC’s programming policies,
and its institutional and cultural attitude toward its audience from the late 1930s,18
although once television emerged, bringing with it ITV in 1955, any shifts in the
BBC’s conception of its audience were also inseparable from the new pressures of
competition and commercialisation. After 1955 both channels had to exist within
an economy shaped by ratings discourse, although it would be fair to suggest that
the BBC’s cultural aims were modified, rather than eroded. The Corporation’s
own efforts to ‘know’ the audience still remained heavily invested in a qualitative,
rather than simply quantitative, discourse, reflecting the extent to which different
institutional objectives require different paradigms of audience knowledge. After
all, the desire to serve the audience necessitates a more multidimensional index of
public response than ratings discourse, which only measures the commercial aim
of capturing large numbers of viewers.
But whatever the motivation behind the research, the use of any knowledge
paradigm is always an attempt to conquer the audience, and as Ang reminds us:

How the television audience is known within television institutions, then, articulates
the way in which they attempt to weave actual audiences into the mechanisms of their
own reproduction. Various forms of institutional knowledge about the audience are
 (Re)viewing Points of View 7

by definition interested knowledge, inextricably linked with various forms of insti-

tutional power.19

This self-serving functionality is openly confirmed by Robert Silvey, the first Head
of the BBC’s Audience Research Department, when he explains how, although the
purpose of the research would be to ‘seek truth’, it ‘would not be seeking truth for
truth’s sake, but for the BBC’s sake’.20
I return to the significance of this communicative circuit below, but Ang’s
work foregrounds how any attempt to conceptualise or investigate ‘the audience’
necessarily involves construction and representation. In this regard, Points of
View can be conceived as occupying a heightened relationship with this represen-
tational process. As part of television’s flow, Points of View offers a highly visible
textual and institutional performance of the audience on a number of different
levels (and we might note that, unlike Points of View, the BBC’s ‘real’ audience
research was not open to the public gaze).21 Given the extent to which this article
began with a discussion of more recent debates surrounding interactivity, it
is significant that Nick Couldry described interactivity as a form of ‘showing,
in performance, the otherwise merely assumed connection between medium
and representative social group’22[my emphasis] – a dialectic which could well
describe Points of View.
The idea of visibility takes on particular significance here when we consider
the fact that, precisely because of the difficulty of measuring the effectivity of the
public service mission, public service broadcasters ‘have more problems than
their commercial counterparts in coming to a satisfying knowledge about their
relationship to their audience’.23 In this regard it is notable that, in the United
Kingdom at least, it is primarily public service channels (the BBC and Channel
4) which have produced viewer comment programmes, although that is not to
suggest that they simply (or even primarily) represent a selfless bid to know, and
thus presumably serve, the audience better. Although the suggestion that Points of
View can be conceived as ‘a performance of the audience’ need not imply purely
insincerity or manipulation where the programme’s institutional and cultural
function is concerned, it remains important to recognise its role in contributing
to the construction of the BBC’s public image – especially as this encompassed its
relationship with the audience.

Promoting Points of View: Everyone’s Important!

While Points of View frames itself within a participative discourse (‘your show’),
this participation necessarily also constitutes a form of ‘feedback’, and feedback
is itself a form of control.24 Not only does it seek to construct a loyal and close
relationship between channel/programme and audience, but – and as has been
discussed in relation to magazines, the Internet and interactive TV – it also pro-
vides information about the audience which can be sold to advertisers.25 While this
second function does not pertain to the publicly-funded institution of the BBC,
8 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

the Corporation did initially describe the viewer feedback programme as a ‘sincere
and genuine attempt to communicate [with the audience] which will be respected
and help foster trust’.26 Interestingly, however, there was also the concern before
Points of View began that this apparent bid to centralise viewer correspondence
(listeners and viewers had, of course, always written to the BBC) would have the
opposite effect – disrupting, rather than cementing, the BBC’s relationship with its
audience. As The Head of Women’s Programmes, Doreen Stephens, pointed out to
the Head of Television Presentation in 1961, Points of View could actually ‘remove
a very important point of contact between output departments and the viewer’.27
Letters not read out on the programme ‘would be ditched’, and letters that once
went to ‘producers will be lost’. As such, producers would ‘now be ignorant of a
considerable volume of viewer reaction effecting programmes. . . . Nor [will they
be] . . . given the chance to respond to these letters should they consider it neces-
sary’.28 There is also the suggestion here, as developed later in the article, that the
process of turning viewer correspondence into a ‘programme’ engenders a more
superficial (because entertainment-led) interaction with viewer discourse, and
Stephens’ concern adds further weight to the conception of Points of View as a con-
densed performance of the audience which serves the BBC’s public image well.
Indeed, when the BBC mooted the idea of a Junior Points of View in 1962 (it
began the following year), it was explicitly noted at the Programme Planning
Committee how ‘publishing the views of children about our programmes would
enable advantages to accrue to the Corporation [in] . . . dealing with various pres-
sure groups’.29 The idea here was that it would show children delivering intelligent
and critical views on television, in opposition to the increasingly vociferous claims
of ‘effects’ research into children’s relationship with television by the early 1960s.
In addition, it is clear that in its early years, Points of View often received a posi-
tive press reception, which, in turn, shaped perceptions of the BBC’s public image.
It could be seen, for example, as showing ‘the greatness of the BBC in not being
afraid to invite criticism and laugh at itself’,30 or as another critic insisted, Points of
View is ‘one of the BBC’s best [ideas . . .] It acknowledges the right of the audience
to hit back: and . . . short, sharp presentation is an excellent way to do it’.31
The title, Points of View, signalled the intention to convey a plurality of view-
points, while it also anchored the programme’s relationship with the visual realm of
television. It was decided that Points of View would be produced by the Presentation
Department, which was also responsible for programme announcing and the
weather. This location reflected the internal concern that if the programme emerged
from an existing programme department (Light Entertainment or Talks, for
example), it may fall prey to bias and ‘indirect promotion’ in such a way that would
compromise its autonomy to comment on BBC television output.32 Points of View
was initially scheduled on a weekly basis, going out for five minutes at 6: 45pm on a
Monday. By 1962, it aired twice a week: Mondays and Thursdays at 6: 45pm. It was
screened after the news and weather, but before the primary evening schedule.
While there were programme spaces on radio in which listeners could air
their opinions on BBC radio output, the idea of a formalised audience comment
 (Re)viewing Points of View 9

programme really emerges with television. Despite television’s emergence as a

mass medium in the 1950s, Points of View does not begin until 1961. In terms of a
generic or media precursor here, the most obvious reference point is the TV letters
page – long since included in the press, as well as television magazines including
TV Mirror, Radio Times and TV Times. However, the BBC was keen to distinguish
the institutional remit of Points of View from its print precursors in this regard. As
the Head of Television Presentation, Rex Moorfoot, explained in 1964:

Points of View is not voicing the editorial of the BBC. It is merely publishing views
of the public. As is frequently stated in the programme, it is well known that more
people criticise than praise. We do not think that the selection of letters must always
be balanced for or against; to do this would soon reduce the programme to the sort of
soggy correspondence column run by uninspired magazines. . . . [Points of View] is
activated by the mood of letters [rather] . . . than by numbers.33

In the quote above, Moorfoot gestures toward the apparent ‘balancing’ of reader
discourse in print media. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen’s study of newsroom culture
and letters to the editor complicates this assertion: as the memo above also hints,
contributor letters received are often ‘heavily dominated by extreme positions’
in ways which frequently raise debates about their representative nature.34 Either
way, Moorfoot’s conception seeks to shore up the suggestion of viewer agency
and autonomy (the BBC merely ‘publishes’ what the viewers ‘activate’); but at the
same time reflects upon the specificity of public service paradigms of knowledge
for ‘knowing’ the audience. Investing in the significance of qualitative informa-
tion, this discourse does claim to be interested in the ‘messy and confusing world
of actual audiences’.35 As the initial draft memo on Points of View explained, in
channelling viewers’ comments ‘about what they see on . . . BBC television, any-
thing they write about is therefore valid within the context of the programme’.36
(Their concerns and observations could range, for example, from comments about
outside broadcast presenters often wearing sheepskin coats, to the foreground-
ing of an incorrect historical fact in a documentary on the printing press.)37 The
institutional discourse surrounding the programme was also at pains to reject the
significance of quantitative measurement. This is despite the fact that, by the early
1960s, and under the Director Generalship of Sir Hugh Greene, the importance
of robust competition with ITV was widely recognised.38 Light Entertainment,
for example, was, by 1960, explicitly conceptualised as an ‘audience getter’ and
‘audience holder’.39 But it was precisely against this institutional and economic
backdrop that Points of View was to perform the continued investment in the
qualitative paradigm of knowledge. As the BBC’s Publicity Officer George
Campey wrote in the early years of Points of View:

I am under a strong directive from [the Director General] . . . not to comment on

telephone complaints by using phrases such as ‘only seven people telephoned’, or
‘eight telephone calls of complaint are not a significant number’ . . .The BBC must
take the view that anybody who complains has a right to do so and his [sic] complaint
10 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

is considered. We . . . are careful not to be influenced by the ratio pro and con in
telephone calls.40

The memo also raises the question of complaints as an issue with ‘which we are
most concerned about at the moment’, and given that it was written in 1964,
it may be pertinent to note the emergence of pressure groups, such as Mary
Whitehouse’s ‘Clean Up TV’ campaign, which frequently painted the BBC as a
haven of social permissiveness.
Arguably, it is precisely Points of View’s bid to render the usually privatised
contours of individual viewer responses visible that has historically been key to
its viewing appeal. BBC viewers in the early 1960s were apparently ‘enthusiastic’,
saying that while they wished it could be longer, ‘it was always interesting to
hear other people’s opinions about television programmes – whether one agreed
with them or not’.41 Others enjoyed the revelation of ‘the oddity . . . of some peo-
ple’s ideas’42 (which also suggests how the reception of Points of View implicitly
involved the formulation of ‘normative’ conceptions of viewership – even if these
remained necessarily vague and abstract). But the fact that the programme repre-
sented a space in which to perform the Corporation’s investment in a qualitative
conception of its audience is illuminated if we consider the difference between
‘public’ and ‘private’ discourse here. While those involved directly in its pro-
duction were clearly committed to its cause, Points of View could be described
elsewhere in the BBC as producing ‘unusually trivial letters’ (apparently rather
more so than Junior Points of View), or as articulating ‘stupid criticism’ and ‘a lot
of viewers’ nonsense’.43 With judgements such as these emerging from the senior
management within the BBC, it is little wonder that Points of View had to struggle
to be recognised as a ‘programme’ at all (a struggle which, as discussed below, was
played out by its constant difficulty in securing production resources).
This scathing internal dismissal of the public service value of Points of View
again resonates with Wahl-Jorgensen’s work on the institutional construction of
the letters page in the press. In examining the letters page as a form of mediated
public debate, and a public forum for political participation,44 Wahl-Jorgensen
outlines the often dismissive journalistic discourse surrounding such contribu-
tions. Her empirical research found that the dominant cultural construction of
the letter-writing public was often through an ‘idiom of insanity’.45 Furthermore,
a ‘description of a letter writer as a rational person [was] . . . rare and exceptional,
whereas the label “crazy” [was] . . . generously and frequently applied’.46 As Wahl-
Jorgensen goes on to argue, this is far from simply a humorous stereotype (‘crack-
pot’, ‘eccentric’): such a discourse effectively works to de-legitimise the content
of the letters section, thus functioning as an anti-democratic and conservative
strategy in the expression of public debate.47
If this can also be applied to the internal discourse on Points of View, then it
notably contrasts with the more positive aspirations for the programme articu-
lated by the press critics (with Points of View ‘acknowledge[ing] the right of the
audience to hit back’); although these, in turn, contrast with longer range, popular
 (Re)viewing Points of View 11

conceptions of the programme which have foregrounded the self-serving institu-

tional function of the show. As Not the Nine O’ Clock News (1979–82), parodying
Points of View, later joked: ‘I think the [television license] fee is far too low. I would
willingly sell my house and all its contents to help the BBC.’ But the programme’s
status as an institutionally constrained space for viewer comment or participation
was obviously there from the start; and in this regard, Points of View can no doubt
be positioned as a microcosmic enactment of Jürgen Habermas’ refrain that media
institutions create only an ‘illusion of participation’.48 With respect to broadcast-
ing, the relationship between public service and public interest has, of course,
long been a topic of debate, particularly the BBC’s difficulty in maintaining politi-
cal independence from the Government, which has jurisdiction over the BBC’s
license fee. But when it comes to Points of View, the debate is somewhat different.
The content is about (BBC) television itself, and the struggle surrounds the bid to
develop a level of textual and discursive autonomy within the BBC. The Head of
Television Presentation observed in 1962 how, ‘We are dealing with a new area
of editorial responsibility. Points of View is not a “current affairs” programme; it
deals only with BBC business, and not with public affairs, so existing rules and
practices hardly apply.’49 The narrow definition of ‘public affairs’ – is television not
part of ‘public affairs’? – is rather revealing, particularly as it seems to imply that
this renders the programme somehow ‘apolitical’. But the institutional debates
and tensions surrounding it make clear how it is anything but.

‘In the Interests of the Corporation’: Perspectives in Points of View

We have seen how the BBC could conceptualise Points of View as a publisher
and sometimes mirror of viewers’ thoughts; and there is, of course, a long stand-
ing debate within television and cultural studies that interrogates the ideological
implications of the reflectionist thesis.50 The question of power is played out quite
explicitly across the network of memos underpinning the institutional scaffolding
of Points of View. In early draft guidelines for the programme, the following four
statements/questions appear within the same list:

Points of View reflects viewers’ comments about what they see on . . . BBC television.
Anything they write is therefore valid within the context of the programme. . . .
[Robert] Robinson, who is the viewers’ host, as it were, also expresses his views on the
programme. If he were not to do so he would be a mere puppet and the programme
would lose much of its attraction. . . .
In the production of this programme we must be scrupulously fair. The content must
not be used in evidence in discussion with artists . . . nor should the Management ask
it to deal with special programmes. [Points of View must] . . . use the letters in the
interests of the viewers and the Corporation which is, after all, its sponsor.
‘In the interests of the Corporation’: Does Television Management wish to refrain
the programme ever from dealing with particular points? If so, at what level are these
decisions to be exercised?51
12 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

When it comes to the BBC’s own conception of how Points of View negotiates
its perception of its institutional responsibilities to both the Corporation and its
viewers, these statements are not only contradictory, but diametrically opposed.
As the third and fourth statements suggest, the ‘interests’ of the viewer can
hardly be conceived as necessarily or neatly congruent with those of the BBC.
Furthermore, in terms of inserting the viewer comments into the programme’s
framework (which, of course, involves selection and editorial decisions when
editors ‘parcel out entitlement for expression’52), Points of View dramatises what
has often been conceived as the limitations of television’s capacity to shift from
a transmissional to a conversational model of communication.53 As the Assistant
Head of Television Presentation, Rowan Ayers, asserted:

The Producers [of Points of View] will let me have, by 2:00pm every day, a note of
the subjects selected from the morning mail, together with suggestions of how they
will be treated. This can be in the very shortest note form, e.g. ‘A number of letters
on political bias in Panorama. [I am] . . . hoping to get a clip to illustrate a) this is not
so b) that it is’.54

Although this comment suggests the possibility of self-criticism – that ‘bias’

might be present in Panorama (1953-present) – it also foregrounds the extent to
which feedback operates here across a tripartite structure: the BBC transmits a
programme, the viewer responds and the BBC responds to the feedback. In this
sense, and to borrow a term used in relation to television news, the programme
necessarily offers a discursive ‘end of mind’55 on the issues raised by viewers.
This evidently speaks to the wider issue of audience agency, and more specifi-
cally, how the discourse of viewers as textual actors56 is mediated. Griffen-Foley
uses the concept of the ‘textual actor’ to refer to any reader/viewer articula-
tion that feeds back into the text, and especially with respect to Points of View,
the term should not be confused with the idea of an on-screen performance.
Although the BBC’s outline of how comments for the programme are channelled
by ‘the quoting of letters on the screen’, the ‘quoting of telephone calls to Duty
Office’, and viewers ‘appearing to explain their standpoint’, it is difficult to find
substantial evidence of the latter in the programme’s early years.57 Actors who
sat behind a screen and read out the letters represented viewers’ voices. There is,
of course, also a need to account for the shaping discourse of the host. Indeed,
far from what John Ellis originally described as ‘agreeable voids’,58 television
personalities – especially hosts – have since been conceptualised as complex sites
of semiotic and ideological meaning which mediate between institution, genre
and audience.59
Erving Goffman60 uses the term ‘footing’ to refer to the alignment of speak-
ers within a framework of spoken communication. Speakers can function as
authors of their own words, animators of the words of others, or they can adopt
the principal footing, speaking on behalf of an organisation or authority.61 The
viewers themselves cannot really be aligned with any of these roles (their words
 (Re)viewing Points of View 13

are ‘animated’). But the role of the host emerges as more ambiguous in mediat-
ing between and across these positions. Although, changing with the decades,
Points of View has had many hosts (including Barry Took, Tony Robinson, Anne
Robinson, Terry Wogan and Jeremy Vine), the programme was identified in its
early stages with Robert Robinson. Acerbic, sarcastic and blunt, Robinson had a
wide journalistic background by 1961. He had been a TV columnist for the Sunday
Chronicle, a film and theatre columnist for the Sunday Graphic, a radio critic for
the Sunday Times and later, a film critic for the Sunday Telegraph. He had also
been an interviewer and presenter on BBC arts programme Monitor (1958), as
well as on the BBC’s popular cinema programme, Picture Parade, from 1962.
Indeed, when Robinson took over from Picture Parade’s previous – and highly
genial – presenters, Peter Haigh and Derek Bond, viewers were rather abruptly
introduced to a more cynical, sarcastic and critical discussion of film culture.62
Robinson later presided over Ask the Family (1967–84), in which (middle-class)
families, comprising of four members, competed in a relatively high-brow quiz
show, involving general knowledge and themed question rounds. Although often
praised for being ‘clever’, ‘shrewd’, ‘brisk’, and for his ‘astringent wit’, it is clear
some viewers found Robinson somewhat smug and condescending.63 In respect
to Points of View, while many may have enjoyed his ‘dry wit and honesty’,64 others
objected to his seemingly patronising attitude toward viewer criticism and his
apparent ‘trivialisation’ of their comments.
Whatever the point of view, it is not difficult to see that the qualities – or
rather privileges – attributed to Robinson are both classed and gendered. At no
point, in the early days, was the prospect of a female presenter entertained: this
reflected the BBC’s prevailing conception that women often lacked the ability to
project the required gravitas beyond women’s and children’s programming.65 But
whilst questions of gender were taken for granted – and thus unspoken – class
was perhaps less so, as Robinson occupied a space in mediating between the
BBC as institution and an apparently class-inclusive address to the viewer (‘your
show’).
It would, in fact, be an understatement to suggest that Robinson’s role was
a constant site of debate and struggle in the negotiations between the show’s
production staff and BBC management. In the early draft conception of the pro-
gramme Robinson was positioned as expressing ‘his own views’ (lest he come
across as a ‘mere puppet’ of the BBC), and it is clear that he wrote his own com-
ments and links. When the BBC revised its remit of the programme in 1962, it
stated that ‘Robinson’s role is that of a person independent from the Corporation,
who represents the viewers’.66 In seeking to deflect editorial agency away from the
BBC, the elision of difference between Robinson and viewer is striking – both in
terms of Robinson’s class address, and the difference between the roles of viewing
and presenting. This is especially so if we consider how the viewers’ discourse is
framed (‘answered’) in the programme itself. After all, a typical edition in 1962
(which notably contrasts with the enthusiastic appraisal of license fee in the Not
the 9’O Clock News sketch) opens thus:
14 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

Robinson: Mrs Carter of Birmingham thinks that the £4.00 she has to pay . . . for her
television license is too much
[Voice of reader]: Don’t you think there’s a lot of tripe on BBC television these days?
And at £4.00 a year this seems rather expensive for this commodity’
Robinson: Let’s have a look at the figures. The BBC turns out 3000 hours of television
a year, and that costs Mrs Carter a third of a penny an hour. . . . The current price of
tripe is 2/4d per pound.67

But what became particularly apparent was the difficulty faced by the Presentation
Department in negotiating Robinson’s discursive autonomy within the pro-
gramme. Whether on radio or television (and despite the fact that the BBC had
used professional critics for film, theatre or book reviews), the Corporation had
long since been concerned about giving existing critics a regular platform to air
their views, and there was the suggestion that it was important for the ‘BBC to
build its own critics’.68 Yet this was, of course, not an option for Points of View.
The BBC wanted (needed) their presenter to appear as independent from the
Corporation so that Points of View could establish an identity as a semi-autono-
mous, critical space. But this autonomy clearly brought its own communicative
risks for the BBC, and while the Programme Board continually sought to oust
Robinson as host, a recurrent criticism was that he was ‘giving too much of his
own views’.69 The BBC was also concerned that his witty but cynical approach to
the world might engender a more ‘cynical’ approach to BBC television itself (thus
causing viewers to switch off). But on a more general level, anxiety appeared to
circle around the programme’s potential impact on the perceived cultural value of
BBC programmes, as well as its circulation of knowledge about BBC affairs. This
again returns us to the primary conception of the programme as a public relations
window for the BBC, rather than a forum for mediated public debate.
For example, the panel members of the popular What’s My Line? (1951–63,
1973; 1984–90) were angered by Robinson’s introduction to one 1963 edition
of Points of View, and panellist Barbara Kelly entered into heated correspond-
ence with the BBC about allowing one of ‘its shows to criticise another’.70 Before
introducing the critical letters from viewers, Robinson had mused: ‘I suppose the
attraction of What’s My Line? is its absolute lack of variety. Nothing is more com-
forting than a ritual that guarantees that nobody will be surprised. . . .’
But apparently even more sensitive than programme criticism was the role
played by Points of View in extending or intervening in the circulation of extra-
textual knowledge about BBC personnel. In a situation that notably prefigures
more recent debates about the BBC’s use of public money pay their stars large
salaries,71 it was reported in 1962 that Eamonn Andrews had been persuaded to
stay with the BBC – rather than defecting to ITV – by the offer of £30,000 per year.
When Robinson responded by affirming the press claims (even though none of the
viewer letters actually referred to the story), the BBC were most embarrassed that
Andrews had been painted as a ‘money grabber’. The Assistant Head of Television
 (Re)viewing Points of View 15

Presentation declared it to be ‘unfair’ and observed how Robinson’s statement

‘involves us all in a delicate situation’.72 This unpredictability was further com-
plicated for the BBC as the programme went out live (at least for the first year);
and there were numerous occasions when Points of View was reprimanded for
questionable lapses in ‘taste’ due to ‘off the cuff’ remarks.
At other times, existing memos express constant anxiety that Points of View,
with its contentious host and access platform for viewers, could literally be an
anarchic space for the unlicensed use of the BBC airwaves. In 1962, for example, a
Mrs E.J. Glover wrote to Robinson at Points of View to ask:

The son of a friend of mine is again out of a regular job. Would it be possible for you
to use your influence on his behalf in getting him a sound, well paid job with the BBC?
He is not too bright and has no special qualifications, but has a very sociable nature. . . .
Or has influence nothing to do with finding employment with the Corporation and
merit alone taken as the criterion?73

Perhaps rather surprisingly, given its lack of relevance to Points of View, Robinson
did read out the letter, only to receive sharp internal criticism after the programme
had aired. The BBC’s concern that it amounted to the unabashed promotion of an
individual appears to ignore the fact that it is hardly a resounding endorsement of
its subject. But disapproval seemed to circle around the extent to which the com-
ments made by the letter writer, and articulated by Robinson on-air, alludes to the
fact that the BBC operates as a form of institutional ‘old boy’s network’, with class
and upbringing being more of a necessary qualification than merit and hard work
– something which rather undercut the avowedly inclusive aims of the programme,
and the address of public service as a whole. Although this was an exceptional and
unusual occurrence in Points of View, it can nevertheless be positioned on a contin-
uum of concern when it comes to the Corporation’s anxiety about the institutional
autonomy of the programme. Indeed, while the memos clearly speak of the range
of institutional limitations which were placed on this ‘autonomy’, Points of View
simultaneously emerges as a rather contingent, unstable meeting of power between
institution, mediator and public (and its producers were notably exhorted on more
than one occasion to exert some ‘self-imposed discipline’ on the programme’).74

‘Five Minute Filler’ or ‘Important Piece of BBC Television’?

The perception that Points of View frequently exceeded its allotted institutional
space was certainly not shared by those directly involved in its production, as it
struggled to be taken seriously by others in the BBC as a proper ‘programme’ at all.
This explicitly emerges in discussions around programme length and scheduling,
but it is also dramatised more implicitly in terms of genre and aesthetics.
It is by no means unusual for a programme to struggle for adequate resources
within the publicly-funded institution of the BBC, but it is clear that those
involved in the production of Points of View felt this struggle to be particularly
16 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

acute. The following exchange is typical of what the production team saw as the
programme’s institutional marginalisation:

I was alarmed . . . to find that Points of View has been squeezed out of Monday 7th by
an extended Panorama . . . This again seems to point to a lack of understanding both
of the programme’s nature and value. It relies tremendously on a reasonable continu-
ity which this whimsical scheduling destroys. If it is an occasional 5 minute filler, let
this be declared and it will obviously affect our approach to building the programme.
If it is, on the other hand, as I believe, a by-now important piece of BBC Television
output, let us resist this casual approach from on top.75

Ayers’ memo reveals a concern about the limited institutional value placed on
the idea of a viewer comment programme, intended to ‘foster [audience] trust’76,
and presumably maintain a form of channel loyalty, and how it suffered from
sporadic and irregular scheduling. Furthermore, the producer foregrounds how
it requires ‘weekly regular placing [because] . . . it would have to be related to the
week’s output . . . otherwise it becomes too remote, unreal and its letters too gen-
eralised’.77 Invoking the importance of Points of View’s relationship with certain
technological and textual characteristics of the television medium – its live-ness
and with its weekly rhythms – the producer clearly positions the series as a televi-
sion text – a programme in its own right. Press critics for the most part appeared
to agree. Eagerly praising it as a ‘clever essay in popular TV criticism’, or describ-
ing how it had ‘triumphed over its apologetic beginnings to become one of the
titbits of TV’.78 At the same time, BBC viewers sometimes mentioned what they
saw as the aesthetic impoverishment of the programme – Robinson sitting behind
a modest desk, with a plain studio backdrop – as there was ‘a little feeling that the
programme had no visual interest’.79
Points of View was produced by the Presentation Department, a Department
which also produced ‘extratextual’ material such as programme announcements
and weather reports. In this regard, there was a constant struggle between depart-
ment and management about how Points of View should be conceptualised. This
debate can be positioned in relation to what Matt Hills has more recently termed a
programme’s ‘text-function’.80 Hills discusses a technological and cultural context
in which the DVD (box set) has become part of the mainstream consumption of
television, functioning to elevate particular types of programme/genre. As Hills
observes, not all titles are seen as ‘equally bounded and positioned as discrete
“texts”’ (which would make them suitable for DVD consumption).81 Whilst ‘firm
textual borders’ are seen as a mark of ‘quality’, thus working to activate and sustain
discourses of aesthetic value, ‘ordinary’ television ‘tends to spill beyond textual
boundaries’.82
Although the conceptualisation of any programme form as ‘ordinary’ within
its formative (least familiar) years is complex, Points of View clearly struggled to
establish a secure ‘text-function’: was it a ‘programme’, an item or linking material
– simply adding a ‘dash of spice to the evening pattern’?83 The textual instability
 (Re)viewing Points of View 17

and disagreement surrounding this question is clearly suggested by the 1962 BBC
management’s idea, strongly resisted by the programme’s producers, that Points
of View be incorporated into the popular evening news/magazine show Tonight
(1957–65).84
Similarly, while producers are told after requesting further production sources
that ‘there is little more than one minute of “original” material to find for each
programme’, and that this did not justify ‘a . . . production assistant, a research
assistant and a . . . production secretary’,85 the Head of Television Presentation
confides in his assistant. ‘You and I agree that the programme must never be a
catalogue of viewers’ letters, and its success depends on the degree of imagination,
or what has been called “creativity”, injected into it by the writers and produc-
ers.’86 Of interest here is how this returns us to the BBC’s institutional conception
of Points of View. After all, the notion of ‘creativity’ and ‘imagination’ conflicts
with the BBC’s preferred conception of Points of View as simply a publisher of
audience views – a channel or a reflective ‘mirror’. For example, when in 1963 the
BBC screened a programme which dealt with the life of the music hall, radio and
television comedy star, Ted Ray, certain viewers complained to Points of View
that it also ‘took the mickey out of old age pensioners’. (It is difficult to be more
specific than this based on the lack of existing evidence.) But what irked the BBC
management rather more was how the item was presented on Points of View. The
producer found himself defending the point that ‘the readers involved did not act.
The inclusion of music behind the reading of the letter was intended to increase
its atmosphere – it referred to the good old days of the music hall’.87 He received
the abrupt reply:

This is not an ‘entertainment’ programme, even while it may be [received as] enter-
taining. It has the responsibility of ensuring that the ordinary viewer has a chance to
air their views. [It is] . . . nothing more, and nothing less. This responsibility does not
sit well with (and furthermore does not need) ‘drama’.88

Perhaps suspicious of what Peter Dahlgren termed television’s ‘entertainment

bias’,89 we see here the idea that the values of public service are somehow factual
and transparent, while dramatisation (and perhaps ‘popularisation’) meddles with
the material in order to make it entertaining. This anxiety takes its place in relation
to what is now a long tradition of debate over the importance of maintaining a
‘proper’ distinction between television fact and fiction,90 and we might note that,
as with Reality TV, it is the values of the factual which are automatically aligned
with an earnestness of endeavour.

Performing Points of View

It is notable that the BBC is concerned with questions of agency and mediation
when it comes to assessing how ‘ordinary’ people’s views are represented on tele-
vision – a debate now familiar in the context of Reality TV. But given that viewers’
18 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

words are animated91 rather than directly articulated, the debate about agency, or
indeed authenticity and performativity, is played out across an additional repre-
sentational framework: Points of View effectively offers representations of a repre-
sentation (‘the audience’). In 1962, for example (and again reflecting on questions
of ‘performance’), there was concern that the accents used by the readers to articu-
late the letters were falling prey to the apparently meddling discourse of entertain-
ment and popularisation. But the producer protests how there has been a:

‘[R]ule of thumb’ from when the programme began . . . The reader should retain a
neutral accent while reading the letter in a manner as close (as we can safely assume) to
the manner in which it was written. In many cases this ‘mood’ is only too obvious and
it would be impossible to read the letter in any other way. I have not been conscious
that the neutrality of the accent used has been violated in the last six editions.92

By the early 1960s, the BBC had managed to shake off some of the accusations of
class élitism structuring perceptions of its institutional identity and relations with
the audience – perceptions which had, of course, been accentuated by the 1955
emergence of the ‘people’s channel’, ITV. Nevertheless, aspects of such associa-
tions remained, and in the memo above, it is clear that a prevailing middle-class
identity still colonised the BBC’s definition of the neutral and the normal. Even if
we account for the extent to which the more overt class indicators of speech have
been softened somewhat since the 1950s and 1960s, the reader voices used on
Points of View were steeped in middle-class tones. Significantly, the programme
has historically retained these associations, with comments from ‘Disgusted in
Tunbridge Wells’ or ‘Outraged from Orpington’ (‘why oh why oh why . . .’) con-
noting a stereotype of an articulate, but pedantic, middle-class writer (whose
comments are more than likely couched within a right-wing sensibility). Notably,
before Points of View emerged, and well before the BBC began its own systematic
audience research in the 1930s, the letters of (listener) comments that arrived at
the BBC were overwhelmingly ‘from middle-class writers’,93 and it is not clear that
Points of View sought to challenge that bias.
The BBC had long since guarded ‘ordinary’ people’s access to the airwaves with
a careful eye – from worrying about including an ‘ordinary’ housewife as a speaker
on radio film reviews for women in the 1940s,94 to its bid to weed out potential
‘exhibitionists’ from people wishing to seek help from its 1950s television problem
show.95 Although we have seen how this access is doubly mediated on Points of
View, it is notable that one memo describes the motivations of viewer-correspond-
ents as ‘suspect’ (versus the apparently genuine intentions of the younger corre-
spondents who wrote to Junior Points of View).96 The selection criteria for the use
of letters and comments on the programme apparently rested in ‘interest value’,
‘relevance’ and ‘provocation’ potential.97 Many inside the BBC doubted that such
criteria, which they saw as being yoked to the demands of television entertainment
rather than the apparently factual aims of public service, fostered the representa-
tion of ‘ordinary’ viewers’ sentiments at all. By 1966 the selection criteria of Points
 (Re)viewing Points of View 19

of View was seen as so biased toward the apparent demands of ‘good television’
that the Controller of Television Programmes asserted that ‘as a critical organ of
the BBC it is quite useless since the opinions of its correspondents can in no way
be taken as symptoms of a general trend . . .’98 Firstly, the programme was certainly
not set up to function as a ‘critical organ of the BBC’. Secondly, we have seen how
the BBC had never really seen the correspondence as representative,99 and that this
did not trouble the BBC as they claimed that quantitative audience measurement
had little place in the context of the public service ideal. Indeed, we might ask
what has happened to the emphasis on the value of the qualitative discourse in its
own right, and the extent to which, as a public service broadcaster, the BBC had
claimed that it did not need nor desire statistical indicators of audience response.
While this might reflect the increased competition between the BBC and ITV
(after all, it is not until the late 1960s and into the early-1970s that they are seen as
occupying a ‘cosy duopoly’ in the British television landscape, so competition was
still unstable and fierce100), it is also clear that this tension in how the BBC sought
to ‘know’ its audience was there from the start of Points of View.
If this adds further weight to the idea of the programme as a ‘performance’ of
the audience (and the BBC’s relationship with the audience), such a phrase takes
on more literal – and politically charged – connotations if we turn our attention
to the final example from the series that I discuss here. We have seen how the
BBC, or at least those in senior management positions, were keen to play down
the performative qualities of Points of View, in part because they interfered with
the conception of the programme as a factual and faithful reflection of viewer-
correspondent discourse. It is surely interesting, then, that the BBC was directly
involved in ‘performing’ the audience in Points of View in 1964: enter the ‘fake’
letters debate.

‘This is an Irritating One . . .’: Fake Letters on Points of View?

In 1964, the BBC’s editor of the ‘Travel and Exploration’ unit wrote to the pro-
ducer of Points of View, complaining that he had ‘reason to believe that two fake
letters (possibly three) were used . . . to criticise Traveller’s Tales ‘Land of Ice and
Fire’.101 This was a documentary on volcanoes transmitted two days earlier – and
produced by his own unit. The letters read out on Points of View had said that
footage used in ‘Land of Ice and Fire’, depicting certain Italian volcanoes, was in
fact taken from Haroun Terzieff’s award-winning factual film Les Rendez-vous
du diable (The Devil’s Blast, 1958) (and, furthermore, the footage depicted volca-
noes not in Italy but Iceland). The complaining editor suggested that the names
attached to the letters belonged to relatives (parents) of people directly involved
in the production of Points of View: ‘Mrs C. Morley’ from Hove was the mother of
one of the programme’s readers, actor/presenter Christopher Trace, while ‘John
Robinson from Liverpool’ was suspected to be Robinson’s father: (‘I believe that
Robert Robinson himself has a father living in Liverpool, who is called John’).102
In the edition of Points of View, and when dealing with the complaining letters,
20 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

Robinson had commented on the lapse of ‘professional ethics’ involved in the use
of the apparently second-hand volcano footage. Given the Travel and Explorations
editor’s belief that the letters were not spontaneous articulations from the general
public only inflamed his anger; and he justifiably complained to the producer of
Points of View that there was a ‘danger of bringing considerable disrepute upon
the BBC if such a practice is discovered and gets into the newspapers’.103
Although we always (necessarily) analyse the past from the perspective of the
present, it is difficult when reading these memos not to be reminded of the phone-
in/competition scandals that dominated debate about the regulation of British
television and radio in 2006–8. These scandals were principally focused on the
regulation of premium rate phone-lines on UK television, with a range of popular
magazine, quiz and entertainment shows all investigated for various shades of
malpractice. These investigations focused on over-charging callers, using fake
winners on air (radio as well as television), and advertising competitions after
a winner had already been selected. In spanning different channels and genres,
including the BBC, this effectively provided an occasion for the much wider
expression of concern about the extent to which transactional TV has become
a dominant means of funding programmes in an increasingly commercialised
television landscape, the concern that phone or ‘Text to vote’ has become ‘a way
of life now’.104
While Ofcom investigations raise the spectre of slack regulatory practices
within an increasingly competitive broadcasting landscape, not all the incidents
are revealed to be motivated by commercial concerns or economic gain. While
certain ‘Quiz TV Call’ programmes were accused of using fake callers and winners
to avoid paying out the prize money, other incidents were claimed to be the result
of a ‘technical glitch’ preventing a genuine winner being selected from the pool of
callers. This was the reason given for the use of a ‘fake’ child winner (she was visit-
ing the BBC studios with a parent) on the BBC’s flagship children’s programme,
Blue Peter (1958-present), in November 2007 – despite the fact that 40,000 children
had called the phone-line in a bid to win a toy. In finding the BBC guilty of ‘decep-
tion’, and ‘making a child complicit in that deception’, Ofcom for the first time
imposed a financial penalty against the BBC (to the sum of £50,000).105 But espe-
cially given that the programme emerged from the UK’s public service broadcaster,
this example fed into critical, cultural and regulatory concern about the apparently
rampant dominance of transactional television, and the extent to which it may
compromise the ethical relationship between the medium and its audience.
The incident on Points of View clearly had nothing to do with commerciality or
competition: indeed it spoke more directly to the concept of television as a public
sphere, based on discourses of democracy, access and debate. But it nevertheless
reflects upon the institutional and ethical context in which television makes sense
of viewer participation (and ‘interaction’). Although the Travel and Explorations
editor justifiably foregrounds the ‘considerable disrepute’ which could befall the
BBC if word of the incident got out, the Assistant Producer seemed unperturbed
by events. In beginning a memo to the Head of Presentation, he blithely explains
 (Re)viewing Points of View 21

how ‘this is an irritating one’, going on to detail how Christopher Trace had been
‘genuinely incensed’ at the Volcano item and ‘asked if he could write a letter’ to
Points of View:

He was told he could but as he was being used [as a reader] in the Wednesday pro-
gramme they decided it would be better to split the letter into two parts and put other
names against them (one of them was in fact his mother, C. Morley, and the other was
Robert Robinson’s father). The other letter was written by our Assistant film editor
who also expressed indignation and wanted to write to the programme. It is impor-
tant to make clear that these letters were not ‘fake’ in the sense that they were devised
by the Points of View office, but stemmed from genuine criticisms . . .106

But there is surely an elision between devised and written here: although the letters
did stem from ‘genuine criticisms’, they nevertheless originated from the Points
of View office. Furthermore, in so far as they did not reflect the actual identity
of the authors, the names attached to the letters were essentially ‘fake’, and the
BBC’s decision to use them surely attests to the internal perception that there were
questionable ethics involved. Given that the archival trail, which traces the exist-
ence of the fake letters scandal, seems to go cold at this point, it is not possible to
suggest whether this was an isolated incident where Points of View was concerned
(although Ayers’ lack of concern about the matter would seem to suggest that
it did not prompt any institutional action or intervention with regard to how
viewer comment on the show was regulated). But whether an isolated incident
or not, it nevertheless functions as the most explicit example of how, to return to
Ang’s quote, ‘forms of institutional knowledge about the audience are by defini-
tion interested knowledge, inextricably linked with various forms of institutional
power’.107 Rather than simply ‘interested knowledge’, this example gives new –
because somewhat literal – meaning to Ang’s famous conception of how institu-
tions, including those operating under an ethos of public service, produce ‘fictive
pictures’ of the audience for their own purposes.

Conclusion
In approaching any aspect of television historiography, it is important to be aware
of what John Corner refers to as the ‘double dangers’ of both an ‘over-distanced
approach (the past very much as “another country”) and an undue proximity (the
past as . . . “today with oddities”)’.108 In fully accepting the risks of positing an
‘undue proximity’ between past and present, this article began by suggesting that
Points of View can be seen as an especially fertile and dynamic case study in the
context of the contemporary interactive media environment. The historical con-
nection is less generic (the viewer comment programme is textually distinct from
– for example, Reality TV) than conceptual, enabling the historian to explore how
the audience, and forms of viewer access and participation, are produced within
relations and discourses of power. Indeed, it is possible that being overly nervous
about making connections across television history can also be disabling: we can
22 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

miss opportunities to explore historical links which can be both productive and
revealing; and as Corner also concludes, an ‘enriched sense of “then” produces,
in its differences and commonalities combined, a stronger and more imaginative
sense of “now”’.109
If this exploration of Points of View, as well as Griffen-Foley’s discussion of ‘a
century of audience participation’,110 suggest the need for more historical research
into the role of the audience as ‘textual actors’ in creating media and cultural
production, then there is certainly much terrain to be explored – especially with
respect to television. This also raises the question of the relationship between
what Jason Jacobs describes as the ‘macro-overview of broadcasting history’, and
the more local analyses of specific genres or texts111 (the extent to which the case
study feeds into, or is used to explore, broader institutional, textual and cultural
narratives about television). In focusing primarily on the discourses in the Points
of View memos, my scope has been deliberately modest. But the case study nev-
ertheless speaks to wider debates about the role of television in fostering public
participation (especially as related to discourses of public service), while it also
foregrounds how the televisual representation of the audience plays a key role in
this regard.
Press critic Peter Black was perhaps rather optimistic when he asserted in 1961
that ‘the conversation between television and its audience is not very alive. Points
of View could make it much more vital and less obedient and safe. This outlet for
criticism could ginger up the whole climate in which television is watched’.112 But
it is nevertheless the case that any attempt to represent, perform or conquer the
audience is always articulated within ultimately unstable discourses of power.
After all, as Ang elaborates, any bid to exert institutional power over ‘the audience’
is ‘perpetually in danger of being eroded, constantly contested, or . . . evaded’.113
While Points of View explicitly dramatises the constraints exerted by this ‘insti-
tutional power’, it also offers glimpses of an intriguing anxiety about letting ‘the
audience’ in.

Notes
1 Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences, Sage, 1998.
2 Henry Jenkins, ‘The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,’ International Journal of
Cultural Studies, 7, 1, 2004, 36.
3 Spiro Kiousis, ‘Interactivity: A Concept Explication,’ New Media and Society, 4, 3,
2002, 350–61.
4 John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 126.
5 Helen Wheatley, ‘Introduction: Re-Viewing Television Histories,’ in Wheatley, ed,
Re-viewing Television History, I.B. Tauris, 2007, p. 4.
6 Bridget Griffen-Foley, ‘From Tit-Bits to Big Brother: A Century of Audience
Participation,’ Media, Culture and Society, 26, 4, 2004, 533.
7 Ibid., 544.
8 Su Holmes, Entertaining Television: The BBC and Popular Television Culture in the
1950s, Manchester University Press, 2008.
 (Re)viewing Points of View 23

9 Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, Routledge, 1991.

10 Ibid.
11 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Tavistock,
1970.
12 Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Journalists and the Public: Newsroom Culture, Letters to the
Editor and Democracy, Hampton Press, 2007.
13 Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, 1991.
14 John Ellis, ‘Channel 4 Working Notes,’ Screen, 24, 6, 1983, 49.
15 Ibid.
16 Robert Silvey, Who’s Listening? The Story of BBC Audience Research, Allen and Unwin,
1974, p. 12.
17 Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, p. 119.
18 See, Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, 1991; and Paddy Scannell and David
Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Basil Blackwell, 1991.
19 Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, p. 3.
20 Silvey, Who’s Listening? p. 34.
21 See, ibid.
22 Nick Couldry, Media Rituals, Routledge, 2003, p. 109.
23 Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, p. 30.
24 Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, 1991.
25 Olaf Hoerschelmann, Rules of the Game: Quiz Shows and American Culture, State
University of New York Press, 2006, p. 52.
26 Undated memo, ‘Replacement for Points of View’ (circa 1966). File T2/254 (BBC
Written Archive Centre).
27 Doreen Stephens to Rex Moorfoot, 12 October 1961. T32/1800.
28 Ibid.
29 Rex Moorfoot to Controller of Television Programmes, 14 December 1962. T32/1800.
30 Bernard Hollowood, Punch, 18 April 1962. T32/1800.
31 Peter Black, ‘Teleview’, The Daily Express, 12 October 1962. T32/1800.
32 Rex Moorfoot to C.P. Tel, undated memo. T32/1800.
33 Rex Moorfoot to Barbara Kelly, 3 June 1964. T32/1800.
34 Wahl-Jorgensen, Journalists and the Public, p. 98.
35 Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, p. 7.
36 ‘Draft: ‘Points of View’, undated, unsigned memo. T32/1800.
37 Ibid
38 See, Holmes, Entertaining Television, 2008.
39 ‘Notes on the Future of Light Entertainment’, 1960. T16/91/2.
40 George Campey to Rex Moorfoot, 16 January, 1964. T32/1800.
41 Audience Research Report, ‘Points of View’, 4 April 1964.
42 Audience Research Report, ‘Points of View’, 26 October 1965.
43 ‘Draft: ‘Points of View’, undated, unsigned memo. T32/1800.
44 cf, Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopaedia Article (1964),’ New
German Critique, 3, 1984, 49–55.
45 Wahl-Jorgensen, Journalists and the Public, p. 136.
46 Ibid., p.137.
47 Ibid., p. 150.
48 Peter Lunt and Paul Stenner, ‘The Jerry Springer Show as an Emotional Public Sphere,’
Media, Culture and Society, 27, 1, 2005, 60.
24 Critical Studies in Television 4/1

49 Rex Moorfoot to Controller of Television Programmes, 5 July 1962. T31/400.

50 John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television, Methuen, 1978.
51 ‘Draft: ‘Points of View’, undated, unsigned memo. T32/1800.
52 Wahl-Jorgensen, Journalists and the Public, p. 101.
53 Jens. F Jensen and Cathy Toscan, TV of the Future of the Future of TV? Aaolborg,
1999.
54 Rowan Ayers to Rex Moorfoot, 8 September 1962. T31/400.
55 John Hartley, Understanding News, Routledge, 1982, p. 45.
56 Griffen-Foley, ‘From Tit-Bits to Big Brother,’ 554.
57 Although letters, emails and telephone calls still constitute the primary channels of
viewer access used by Points of View in 2008, it now includes home video comments
from viewers.
58 John Ellis, Visible Fictions, Routledge, 1982.
59 James Bennett, ‘The Television Personality System: Televisual Stardom Revisited After
Film Theory,’ Screen, 49, 1, 2008, 32–50.
60 Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, Blackwell, 1981.
61 See also, Raina Brunvatne and Andrew Tolson, ‘“It Makes it Okay to Cry”: Two Types
of “Therapy Talk” in TV Talk Shows,’ in Andrew Tolson, ed, Television Talk Shows:
Discourse, Performance, Spectacle, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001, pp. 139–54.
62 Su Holmes, British TV and Film Culture in the 1950s: Coming to a TV Near You!
Intellect, 2005, p. 254.
63 Audience Research Report, ‘Points of View’, 4 April 1964.
64 Ibid.
65 See, Holmes, British TV and Film Culture in the 1950s, 2005.
66 Draft memo, ‘Points of View’, 16 April 1962. T32/1800.
67 Script excerpt quoted in memo from Rex Moorfoot to Controller of Television, 15
February 1962. T31/400.
68 Holmes, British TV and Film Culture in the 1950s, p. 59.
69 Rex Moorfoot to Rowan Ayers, 23 May 1963. T31/400.
70 Rex Moorfoot to Barbara Kelly, 3 June 1964. T32/1800.
71 Although this debate has been raised periodically over the past few years where the
BBC is concerned, it was made particularly visible in November 2008 when Jonathan
Ross and Russell Brand were accused of making ‘obscene’ phone calls on the BBC’s
radio airwaves to the elderly actor, Andrew Sachs. Whilst Brand resigned, Ross – who
represents the BBC’s highest paid star with an £18 million 3 year contract – was sus-
pended from work for 12 weeks without pay. BBC Director General, Mark Thompson,
announced how ‘overpaid stars could have their BBC salaries slashed in the wake of
the scandal’ (see http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/69167/BBC-star-salaries-set-
to-be-slashed, accessed 6 February 2009).
72 Rowan Ayers to Rex Moorfoot, 24 May 1962. T31/400.
73 Mrs E.J. Glover to Robert Robinson, 1 November 1962. T32/1800.
74 Rowan Ayers to Rex Moorfoot, 24 May 1962. T31/400.
75 Rowan Ayers to Rex Moorfoot, 28 December 1962. T31/400.
76 Undated memo, ‘Replacement for Points of View’ (circa 1966). T2/254.
77 Rex Moorfoot to C.P.Tel, 14 December 1962. T31/400.
78 Bernard Hollowood, Punch, 18 April 1962. T32/1800.
79 Audience Research Report, ‘Points of View’, 4 April 1964.
80 Matt Hills, ‘From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf’: TVIII and the
 (Re)viewing Points of View 25

Cultural/Textual Valorisations of DVD,’ New Review of Film and Television Studies,

5, 1, 2007, 41–60.
81 Ibid., 46.
82 Ibid.
83 Rowan Ayers to Rex Moorfoot, 26 July 1962. T31/400.
84 Undated/ unsigned memo. T31/400.
85 Donald Baverstock to Rex Moorfoot, 24 July 1962. T31/400.
86 Rex Moorfoot to Rowan Ayers, 27 July 1962. T31/400.
87 Rex Moorfoot to C.P.Tel, 19 November 1963. T31/400.
88 C.P.Tel to Rex Moorfoot, 21 November 1963. T31/400.
89 Peter Dahlgren, Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the
Media, Sage, 1995, p. 23.
90 See, Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, eds, Understanding Reality Television,
Routledge, 2004.
91 Goffman, Forms of Talk, 1981.
92 Rex Moorfoot to Rowan Ayers, 27 July 1962. T31/400.
93 Silvey, Who’s Listening? p. 28.
94 Holmes, British TV and Film Culture in the 1950s, 2005.
95 Holmes, Entertaining Television, 2008.
96 Undated memo, ‘Replacement for Points of View’ (circa 1966). T2/254.
97 ‘Points of View’, brief, April 1962. T32/1800.
98 Ibid.
99 Also see, Wahl-Jorgensen, Journalists and the Public, 2007.
100 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting: The History of a Concept’, in Andrew
Goodwin and Garry Whannel, eds, Understanding Television, Routledge, 1990, pp.
11–29.
101 Editor of ‘Travel and Exploration’ to Rowan Ayers, 6 July 1964. T32/1800.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
104 Owen Gibson, ‘Roll up, Roll Up for Multi-Channel Television’s Latest Money-
Spinner,’ The Guardian, 28 November 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/
nov/28/broadcasting.digitaltv, retrieved 21 November 2008.
105 ‘BBC Fined over Blue Peter Scandal,’ The Independent, 9 July 2007, http://www.inde-
pendent.co.uk/news/media/bbc-fined-over-blue-peter-phonein-scandal-456562.
html, retrieved 23 June 2008.
106 Rowan Ayers to Rex Moorfoot, 7 July, 1964. T32/1800.
107 Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, p. 3.
108 John Corner, ‘Finding Data, Reading Patterns, Telling Stories: Issues in the
Historiography of Television,’ Media, Culture and Society, 25, 2003, 277.
109 Ibid. 275.
110 Griffen-Foley, ‘From Tit-Bits to Big Brother,’ 2004.
111 Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama, Clarendon, 2000, p.
9.
112 Peter Black, ‘Teleview’, The Daily Express, 11 November 1961. T32/1800.
113 Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience, p. 33.