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Su Holmes, Entertaining Television: The BBC and Popular Television Culture in the 1950s. Manchester University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7190-7791-3.
In the conclusion to this engaging and in many ways admirable study, Su Holmes reflects on the ways in which it emerged as the result of chance discoveries which revealed 'a history one had not anticipated'1 (p. 202). Prolonged submersion in the television archive (especially the BBC Written Archives Centre) resulted in a real - disconcerting and at the same time pleasurable - surprise, which ran against the grain of expectation and orthodoxy. In this instance, it was not a fabled, 'missing memo', or some previously undisclosed, singular connection, but a whole, domain-shifting transformation. The received wisdom concerning British television programming in the late 1950s has and perhaps continues to adopt an image of BBC provision as continuing a Reithian 'highbrow', educational and improving, tradition; whereas ITV output is more readily associated with its antithesis, 'lowbrow' entertainment and the commercially popular. By the early 1960s, researchers such as Robert Silvey and Brian Emmet2 had begun to demonstrate that such images of the channel seemed to have little impact on actual viewers' choice of viewing - when they owned 'multi-channel sets' - but for some critics in the early years of ITV the perceived contrast seemed stark, evident and clear. Holmes cites the Manchester Guardian critic of the time, Bernard Levin, who responded to his first six months of ITV viewing by categorising the programmes that he had seen as ranging from those 'which people of taste and intelligence might be able to watch for two hours a week without actually feeling ill', 'ordinary trash' and overwhelmingly, programmes that in his view, were 'not fit to be fed to the cat' (p. 203). Holmes suggests that her overriding aim in the book - somewhat unusually - is to try to convince the reader that Levin's arrogant dismissal of ITV programming might just as well have been applied to the BBC television schedules at the time. In short, she aims not only to 'rehabilitate the historical value of popular programming' so castigated by Levin and other critics, but furthermore, to demonstrate 'that BBC television in the 1950s was more derided, "trashy", controversial and populist than existing historical...