Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed the World

This programme contains some strong language

Hello from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts

here in London, where, over the next two hours,

we're going to be looking at some of the best

of this country's television from the last 60 or so years,

and we'll try to make sense of the momentous impact

that television has had on the lives of just about every one of us.

We're joined by some of the people responsible for the programmes

which have moved us, made us laugh, made us angry and got us interested,

and we'll be finding out whether they agree on the scale and spread

of the influence of television

and whether they think that we're now at a pivotal moment of change.

We're taking Britain as our canvas, because we were in at the beginning

and we can still be up there with the best in the world.

Here's a taster of what has so enlarged our views of the world

because of that box in the corner, or that flat screen on the wall.

# Bring me sunshine... #

Television. I think that nothing has had so great an impact

on our daily lives since the Industrial Revolution.

-It brings extraordinary images...

-# All the while... #

..instant news and information.

This is it. We're walking into Kabul city.

Drama...

-We are emperors of Rome, Andrew.

-Entertainment...

And a range of knowledge that our ancestors wouldn't have credited.

And it's all happened in the past 75 years,

and already we can barely imagine what life was like before it.

But what a trip it's been.

# Bring me love... #

There was a time when the nearest you got to seeing

world events was in the photographs in newspapers, or magazines,

or you heard about them in radio -

the John the Baptist of the communications industry -

but television changed the game.

It's almost impossible for anyone under the age of about 40

to conceive of a world without live images of news

unfolding from across the planet.

-Come to West Berlin.

-CHEERING

The tidal wave arrived with ferocious speed and force.

While TV has continued to chronicle key events for ourselves and future

generations, it's also reminded us how we've become who we are.

This is the battlefield of Hastings,

and here, one kind of England was annihilated,

and another kind of England was set up in its place.

How we've learned about the world around us...

Galileo stepped up the magnification of the telescope to 30 -

and he turned it on the stars.

Chartered our cultural achievements...

All the great civilisations or civilising epochs

have had a weight of energy behind them.

..and ensured we can't forget our catastrophic mistakes.

And if we think the barriers of class and privilege

still exist in our society,

consider a world before television, when the establishment

was able to hide within the corridors of power,

unreachable and unaccountable.

Welcome to Senate House, at the University of Cambridge,

for 90 minutes of question, answer and live debate.

Television has allowed us to participate in democratic debate,

and to have a voice where we had no voice before, and in the process,

has even given politicians some of their best lines.

I know he's very keen on summing up policy in six words.

Well, how about this? You are the weakest link. Goodbye.

LAUGHTER AND CHEERING

And TV has been democratic in many other ways.

Activities and experiences, once the privilege of the entitled

ruling classes, have been made available to all of us.

THEY SING: Nessun Dorma

APPLAUSE

As technology has developed, the scale and ambition of TV

has enabled us to explore the fullness of the Earth.

It's opened our eyes to the natural world

in wholly unexpected and magical ways, charting the unseen,

uncovering the unknown and alerting our attention to the problems

we may face in the future.

Sea ice will refreeze this winter, but it's getting weaker and thinner,

which means that in summers to come it's more likely to break up

and melt, a pattern that scientists say is accelerating.

And of course, perhaps the greatest achievement of all,

TV has taken us beyond our own planet.

Eagle, we've got you now. It's looking good, over.

That's one small step for man.

One giant leap for mankind.

Back here on Earth, television has shown us our bodies

from birth to death...

She's the most complicated thing on Earth, and during her lifetime,

she'll achieve the most amazing things.

It has recorded the way we live our lives...

Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.

We have maps from the 1950s...

..and allowed us to explore our individual histories.

Charwoman.

SHOUTING AND CHEERING

And the winner of The Voice is...

-It's discovered talent in all fields.

-..Leanne!

CHEERING And inspired everyone to have a go.

Even if, sometimes, it ends in tears.

Ben, you're fired.

Thank you very much for a wonderful opportunity, sir.

OK. Off you go.

And of course, it's provided great entertainment

at the press of a button.

I think we're on a winner here, Trig, all right?

Play it nice and cool, son. Nice and cool, you know what I mean?

-Sorry we're closing for lunch.

-Never mind that, my lad,

I wish to complain about this parrot,

what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

Oh, yes, the Norwegian Blue. What's wrong with it?

I'll tell you what's wrong with it.

It's dead, that's what's wrong with it.

All this and more from the comfort of our own homes,

where staying in has become the new going out.

We've been united, sharing experiences, accumulating memories,

being comforted, being challenged, and with luck, being enlightened.

That is the man the world has been waiting to see.

No wonder it can be addictive.

Nothing like it has ever happened before.

And the scale of the television revolution

on the make-up of our daily lives is impossible to overestimate.

Who wants transparency when you can have magic?

Who wants prose when you can have poetry?

CHORAL SINGING

There is no question but that television pushed frontiers out.

When I think about my father,

he only had a chance to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony once.

You know?

And, er...

My grandfather had never moved outside of his own village.

He had no idea Everest existed, or the centre of Africa.

And the social people he mixed with were within that area.

I know, because people of my own name,

they're still living around there, and that was the world for them.

And there's no question

but that television burst all those frontiers.

Both geographically, and socially,

and scientifically, and every way you can think of.

Suddenly, and perhaps, it's bewildering.

Perhaps it goes too far.

But it's certainly changed beyond recognition,

the world as it was in the 19... Before the First World War.

Later we'll cast a more critical eye over some of the many ways in which

television has transformed our lives, but first of all,

can we agree on the scale of the revolution we're talking about?

I'm joined by Joan Bakewell,

one of Britain's most respected broadcasters,

who began on BBC2's Late Night Line-Up in the 1960s,

and by historian and broadcaster David Olusoga,

who recently won a Bafta for Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners.

David, did we exaggerate in that introduction

-the size, impact and place of television?

-I don't think we did.

I think we've taken a long time to allow this medium to settle in.

It was described as a craze in the 1950s, along with rock and roll

and dancing. The idea that it was a craze, that it was a phase,

it was something we'd grow out of - no-one talks in those terms now.

And I've said, rather fancifully,

it could bear comparison with the Industrial Revolution,

happening inside instead of outside,

but can you think of it on a global scale of changing

the way that the human species is leading its life and seeing itself

lead this life and being human,

-as big as that?

-I think there's communal events,

like the release of Nelson Mandela.

Those events were only possible, they're part of everybody's memory,

everyone remembers where they were when they happened, remembers

watching the television screen... That's never been possible before.

The example that historians tend to use is it took about a week

for the news of Abraham Lincoln's assassination

to reach everyone in America.

When something big happens now,

we all share in it, and we've got used to that idea,

-but it's revolutionary.

-And what effect does that have?

Knowing it so instantly and so globally?

I think we're still finding out.

I think the idea of instant news is something we've come to fear,

it's something we've got used to,

what its impact will be in more troubled political times,

we're still finding out.

75 years is a pretty young invention.

It's still in its infancy.

I don't think we know the scale of the television revolution,

cos we're still living in it.

Joan, you came into television

when it had really hit its stride in this country.

Did you feel you were going into something new,

never been in before, did you feel this was exciting?

I thought it was the poor relation of radio and it might prosper.

It was very popular,

because it was the coronation that made it popular.

But I... I spent my childhood in a world

in which there were very few images of any kind.

I mean, newspapers were very thin in the war,

there were no photographs, there was picture post - so imagery,

the actual pictures of the world,

were very, very rare in my childhood.

So the arrival of something that just threw at you so many images,

even though they were very often ordinary, was an enormous shock.

All we wanted to do was stare -

stare and stare at what was put in front of us. Not only that,

it became very collegiate in that the screens were very small -

erm, there was only one per house, if the house had one.

So the family congregated,

so you have the social impact of television,

in which everyone came into the same room in the evening,

watched from start to finish,

and discussed it next morning with their neighbours

and their work colleagues.

So, in social terms, it was very cohesive.

Having mentioned radio...

I was working in radio at the beginning of the '60s,

and radio was still very strong,

and thinking that television was draining some of the talent away,

but radio would prevail,

and then, about five or six years later, that radio would be dead.

Neither of those things have happened,

but television was in that balance for a while in the ideas that people

had, although not so much in the viewing figures.

I think the problems with the technology, when, as Joan describes,

the TV was right at the edge of what was possible when it was produced.

The cathode ray tube was a very difficult thing to produce,

many of them failed.

So... We think of TV as beautiful flat-screen TVs,

they were very difficult things to be involved in early on.

But this idea that this medium might not survive,

or this medium might kill the previous medium,

we're still living with that.

As long as I've been involved in television,

the next thing is going to kill it, the internet's going to kill television,

like television was supposed to have killed radio -

it hasn't happened. If you go onto a train now,

there's people with iPads watching television on the train.

But in the end, nothing kills anything.

Cinema didn't kill theatre,

television didn't kill cinema, and so on and so forth.

-We adapt...

-Did it influence you directly, television?

I think I'm entirely a product of the television age.

I became an historian

not because the history lessons at school were absolutely riveting -

it's cos I went home and I watched Timewatch, and I watched

Michael Woods, and I watched a generation of TV historians

bring the past to life in a way

that I'm afraid my teachers didn't and books didn't.

I chose my profession because of watching it on television

-and seeing what it could be.

-So, you saw it as an educator?

Absolutely. I was brought up in a council estate by the Tyne

and I learnt about history,

got my desire to become an historian and learnt about art

through watching television programmes.

1986, there was a series called Artists And Models,

about French art.

Three years later, I go interrailing and me and my friends,

we go to the Louvre. Our idea of where to go had been given to us

by television. Television gave me an appreciation of art

I wouldn't have had otherwise.

One of the other things that was interesting about the time

was that what we grew up on was cinema, films,

and we went, all the time, to the cinema,

you went out of your home for your entertainment.

Television brought imagery into the home.

And also exposed you to all sorts of things,

didn't matter what it was - we watched westerns,

we watched reality shows, and we watched variety,

the cameras in front of vaudeville stages.

It was very unsophisticated, there was no grammar of television,

it was all a matter of putting cameras in front of events

and letting it happen.

-It was very crude.

-But very communal, you watched it together.

Someone described television as the greatest of all inventions,

cos it allows people who are related to one another to sit in a room

without having a row. I think there's a lot to that.

Do you remember how snobbish people were, briefly, about television in the beginning?

-How...?

-Snobbish people, some people?

-"We never watch television", and so on...

-There was a slightly,

erm, yes, de haut en bas. It's for the populace,

it's for the masses, cos we rather...

We're listening to The Third Programme.

Thanks to Joan Bakewell and David Olusoga.

Thank you very much. Television wasn't a free-growing plant.

From the start, it was those in charge who decided

what was fit to be shown on this new medium of mass communication.

News, obviously, entertainment and drama.

Given that this medium was destined to be delivered to a massive

proportion of the nation at the same time, and much of it live,

then caution was perhaps inevitable.

Yet from the start, producers wanted to give the whole country

a sense of what someone called a smell of itself.

But did this mean it should be comforting or challenging?

Feisty or a nice cup of tea?

The first great audience-grabbing broadcast on British television

was the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II.

CHEERING

For the first time in history,

people from all corners of the nation crowded into small rooms

to watch and to feel a part of something

far beyond their usual horizons.

What's more, they all saw the same thing, at the same moment.

It was British TV's first great unifying event.

And the pageantry of the occasion - even in black and white -

reinforced a widespread deference towards our monarch,

which has remained for decades.

A preoccupation with the monarchy has sustained television producers

ever since, so that more than 60 years on,

interest in anything royal, from the Tudors...

Ha!

..and the Victorians...

God save the Queen!

..to the modern Royal Family, still guarantees big audiences.

A point that was argued at the time of the coronation,

when Prince Philip was among the first to understand what TV

could do for the royals.

How close are you proposing that these cameras get?

They will be kept at a very discreet distance.

No close-ups?

Zoom. Lenses.

Oh, no. It will all be done with the greatest sensitivity and respect.

Has this obsession with our royal heritage helped keep us together

as a nation?

Or is it evidence of British television's reluctance

to keep pace with a changing world?

For centuries, great British institutions, like this behind me -

Westminster Abbey, a place where kings were crowned -

were closed to all but the privileged.

A few Londoners could go in, but the vast majority of people

in this country didn't know what was going on inside that place.

Now they do, thanks to television.

While these programmes managed to prise open the closed doors

of some of the established structures of our country,

few, if any, managed to shine a really penetrating light

into dark corners.

And why should we expect it to have been otherwise?

Because, already, three quarters of a million foreign visitors

have chosen to come to this country this year for their holidays.

-Well, what exactly do you want?

-In its earliest days,

television, like BBC Radio, looked and sounded as though

what made it onto the screen

was all decided by boys from Eton and Harrow and Oxbridge.

These television pictures will be relayed across the Channel.

That's because it largely was.

The voices that carried the news and other serious stuff on radio

and television were posh, southern and sounded exclusive.

So now, let's get on with the show.

# Hark, when the night is falling... #

It wasn't until after 1955, when Independent Television launched,

that the nations and regions

had the chance to air more of their own identity,

albeit the first forays may have pandered to some stereotypes.

# High as the spirits of the old Highland men... #

You're a copper 24 hours a day....

An apparent reluctance to rock the boat

also characterised television's approach to serial drama.

WHISTLING

-Ah, good evening, all.

-Shows like Dixon Of Dock Green

reassured us that we were all safe in the hands of an incorruptible

and tolerant police force,

reinforcing our belief in fair play and the triumph of good.

I'll see you again next week.

Ta-ra.

The bad guys got their comeuppance, the good guys always won.

It's a comforting view of law and order

that's lasted into some crime dramas to this day.

So that even if the victims may be losing their heads,

you can be sure that Chief Inspector Barnaby

will track down the crucial clues leading to the culprit.

A shepherd's pie.

I confess, I buried it alive.

It's a world in which disbelief must be suspended.

It's opening time.

Quite how anyone is left alive in Oxford,

as the tortured Inspector Morse

blunders around in an alcoholic haze, eludes us.

But providing he's left vindicated and brooding over a pint of real ale

at the end, we can all sleep soundly in our beds.

That's not bad, this.

Early television producers also tuned into the audience's interest

in peeping behind the curtains of the newly established

and widely welcomed National Health Service.

OK, let's have a look at him.

With versions of life in our hospitals or surgeries

providing entertainment for millions.

Dr Finlay, could you come quickly?

It's Dougie. He's drank the carbolic!

-What did you put on it?

-Initially, there was very little of the blood

and vomit of the real-life NHS,

and very few shortages of staff and money.

Five in resus, 15 in majors and 32 moderate...

This was, and often remains, a reassuring view of the world

as we would like to think it is, rather than how it actually is.

So, what happened?

Everywhere, there are sympathetic doctors.

Right. Don't move him, let me have a look at you.

And nurses who get rather too personally

involved for anyone's good.

You'll get all the information you need there. OK?

Stories usually have a happy ending

that we can enjoy from the safety of our own homes -

and that says something

about how we like to think of ourselves as a nation.

The National Health Service gave her the gift of motherhood.

She called her child Grace Miracle.

And she was perfect.

One of the greatest blessings of television,

as far as I'm concerned, is that it brought such fine actors

and comedy writers to the screen.

And they provoked a national, classless conversation of delight.

Like crime and medical drama,

comedy quickly became a defining characteristic of our television,

showing confidence in who we were.

Allowing us to laugh at her own absurdity -

and sometimes helping to air social concerns.

-Oh, dear.

-Oh, my God!

Ladies and gentlemen, your new vicar.

Hello! Geraldine.

-Boo!

-SHE LAUGHS

Arguably, the British reputation across the world

for our national sense of humour derives more or less exclusively

from our television and films.

Your name will also go on the list.

-What is it?

-Don't tell him, Pike!

-Pike.

Continually on the lookout for aspects of life

which would unite us and translate into big audiences,

early TV producers spotted our national affection for our history.

Which resulted in an often sentimental

and nostalgic view of the past.

So, costume drama found a place early on in the schedules.

And has continued to do so with some of the biggest hits in recent years

being remakes of old favourites with a few added twists.

Silence in court.

Now we come, not for the first time, to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

We were told that the nation's female hearts

all missed a simultaneous beat when Colin Firth emerged

from the lake as Darcy in a wet shirt.

Mr Darcy!

And we're told they missed several beats when Aidan Turner

did actually take off his shirt in Poldark.

As he scythed, someone said, the nation sighed.

Much of our most popular costume drama has focused on class.

And again, often presenting a rosy view of the past.

-It's five minutes to 11, sir.

-Oh, thank you, Hudson...

An early favourite was Upstairs Downstairs,

in which the gentlefolk above ground

were largely benevolent -

and the servants below were largely hard-working and honest.

That's gone into the coal.

But most important of all, everyone knew their place.

-BELL RINGS

-That must be the morning room.

40 years later, the identical themes underpinned

one of the most popular dramas of the age.

Are there still forbidden subjects in 1920?

I can't believe this.

I agree with Mama.

Some subjects are not suitable for every ear.

Mm. Pas devant les domestiques?

Come on, my dear.

Carson and Alfred know more about life than we ever will.

With all the modern talk of a fast-changing,

ethnically mixed Britain,

a nostalgic look at the British class system

still has the power to produce huge audiences.

You know, the way to deal with the world today is not to ignore it.

If you do, you'll just get hurt.

Sometimes, I feel like a creature in the wilds whose natural habitat

is gradually being destroyed.

Later, we'll look at the various ways that television

has challenged what some thought was our self-confidence

and others our complacency.

But I wonder whether it was inevitable from those earliest days

that teams around which we could all unite would dominate the schedules.

Alongside Joan Bakewell, I'm joined by Michael Grade -

who's enjoyed a long and distinguished career in television,

with top jobs at the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 -

and Anthony Horowitz - creator of Foyle's War,

and writer of some of television's most popular drama,

including Midsomer Murders and Poirot.

Michael, why do you think that we dipped in a nostalgia so early

and have held onto it so tenaciously?

Great stories. It's storytelling, that's all it is.

It's what Anthony does so brilliantly,

and that's what our literary heritage

that we borrow from in modern series, but essentially,

it's just great stories, and TV can bring great stories,

and people never tire of great stories.

Anthony, you've tapped into the past in drama.

-What takes you there?

-Takes me back?

-Mm.

I think I like dramatizing history because it gives me

a sort of certainty. I know exactly what was going on there.

If I try and write about where we are now,

people will argue with me and say, no, it's not like that at all.

But I think we do have an idea of sort of Second World War,

for example, or the villages where Midsomer Murders is set,

but it's sort of very much in our national psyche and it's a certainty

-about it which I like.

-Is the certainty beguiling?

Do you think the certainty works because it works with you,

or the certainty's there because it really was like that?

No, it wasn't like that at all. Of course not.

-That's the joy of it.

-LAUGHTER

You're dealing with a sort of a myth here.

I mean, Midsomer never existed.

Old ladies on tricycles going around the place,

thatched cottages and the sun always shining.

I mean, that doesn't exist, but it is somehow in our minds -

just like the Second World War, of course, and the Home Front -

the stiff upper lip, that this is how it was.

It's how we've been sort of programmed ourselves.

And why do you think,

given that you say more or less this is a fiction based on a fact,

why do you think it plays so well?

Because it's comforting, or because we want to have been like that?

I would say it's because modern life is increasingly less comforting,

because we're now so uncertain of where we are.

Look at America with Trump,

look at Brexit, look at everything around us.

Look at the way 24-hour news now throws us from side to side.

We don't know where we are any more,

so we can turn on the television and find certainty.

Joan, Joan Bakewell, did television, in the early days,

feel like a club run by men for other men?

Yes, because it primarily was.

I mean, there were some outstanding women.

Grace Wyndham Goldie was very famous for leading a department,

but it was assumed that women wouldn't get the jobs

unless they made a special effort.

So, they weren't on the screen.

The stories, on the whole, reinforced the place of women.

The women were the nurses, the men were the doctors.

There were women's programmes, to which I contributed,

which were done in the afternoon,

because that's when women would be watching television,

cos they didn't have jobs.

I did a programme called Home At 4.30,

which was full of knitting and recipes...

LAUGHTER Did you do that?

Yes, and some of those programmes were actually presented by men,

but with adjacent women in inferior roles.

So, the whole role of women was very clearly demarcated,

both in the reality, in the fictional programmes,

and in the real programmes. Also, something else,

it comes out of the selection you've just had there,

it's the importance of the church.

The church was very important.

There was something called The God Slot, which obliged every television

channel to stop doing entertainment between 6.15 and 7.45

so that people would not be persuaded not to go to church.

We were a churchgoing country

and the idea that television would seduce

people away from that was seen as a social responsibility.

So you had to do serious, worthy programmes on Sunday evenings.

And now and then somebody would pop up which said, "Please mention God"?

Well... That happened in my programme, I'm afraid.

Because we didn't really want to do programmes about God,

we did social issues and their moral content,

and we tried to bring God in, and on one occasion forgot,

and someone rushed in with a notice board saying, "Mention God."

LAUGHTER

Michael, one of the things that happened

was the scooping up of people,

great entertainers from the seaside resorts -

we've seen Morecambe and Wise - bringing them in,

and it must have had a terrific impact on them, because they

were using in a night material that would've lasted them

-for a year or two.

-Well, that's absolutely true,

and a lot of them fell by the wayside.

They couldn't make the transition.

Very, very few great musical hall variety performers

made the transition.

Frankie Howard, Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise, Des O'Connor,

Harry Worth, a blessed memory.

Not many of them... Bruce Forsyth, of course,

but there are hundreds more who couldn't make the transition.

They had their five minutes that they could do at Hackney Empire -

and that was all they had, was those five minutes.

It took Eric and Ernie a long time to learn how to use the medium,

-how to use cameras.

-So then what happened?

Did comedians start to work for television through television?

Yes. There were shows like Sunday Night At The Palladium,

which was a ground-breaking show,

which moved variety on television

from very patrician - Cafe Continental,

which was a Saturday night BBC entertainment, pre-ITV -

which consisted of an audience in white tie and tails and the women in

long gowns and gloves, sitting, sipping pseudo cocktails

and very "refeened" variety acts would come on and do some

very "refeened" stuff.

Sunday Night At The Palladium

changed that overnight and made huge stars out of many, many people.

Anthony, you've written so much, and been so successful -

can I just go back to this idea of presenting a view of this

country that some people think is idealised?

Can you develop that a bit?

Well, I don't set out to do that.

I know you don't.

In a show like Foyle's War, for example,

a lot of what we wrote about in Foyle's War was really much the sort

of, the dark side of the Home Front in the Second World War.

Treason and anti-Semitism, and cowardice.

These were the sort of subjects that we tackled.

But first of all, because it was period, because it's old cars,

and it's old hats, and it's the throb of the Spitfire,

and it's all that stuff,

it comes with a sort of added warmth, which you can't really escape.

So people take away from the show this very warm,

benign view of the world you're presenting.

So it's in-built, rather than done by design.

Do you think that, finally,

do you think there was a sense that this is what the people who are

running television wanted to happen?

Well, who are the people running television?

I mean, I wrote Foyle the way I wanted to write it -

nobody told me what to do.

I'm very pleased to hear it, thank you very much.

Thanks to Joan Bakewell, Michael Grade, and Anthony Horowitz.

From the beginning, television has undoubtedly played its part in

reinforcing our own self-image of being fair-minded, patriotic,

and compassionate, with an appetite for nostalgia and a very particular

sense of humour. But our television is has also had an honourable tradition

of jolting us out of our comfort zone by showing a slice of what producers

would claim was more real British life.

The problem was to find a family prepared to tolerate the intrusion,

by a film crew, into their every private moment.

We carried out many interviews and, finally,

one family emerged that we hope can meet the demands of this documentary

serial. The Wilkins, of Reading.

In 1974, a young producer, Paul Watson,

transformed British TV documentary by holding a mirror to the realities

of everyday working-class life in The Family,

providing an intimate view of the Wilkins family from Reading,

warts and all.

I mean, you see all these kitchen sink dramas, beautiful

kitchens, nothing out of place.

No dirty pans and what have you.

All sparkling. Well, people's kitchens aren't like that.

These were not the sort of people who had been seen on television before.

And the harsh and crowded reality of their lives, and millions like them,

were a revelation to television viewers.

-Bullshit!

-I've already burnt the bloody sausages, haven't I?

INDISTINCT SINGING

-What?

-Stop making faces!

Oh, bloody Nora, Mother!

It's hard to credit today,

but 1970s audiences were shocked

by any use of bad language and swearing,

and the thwarting of social convention.

Television had opened a window onto everyday reality,

and the domestic and social problems of ordinary people.

"..due to the fact that sleeping accommodation is for us two,

"and the baby, is situated in the one room..."

And if our TV documentary was taking us from a consoling Pathe News view

of the world, to the more accurate reality of life

as it was lived by most people, our TV drama was already doing the same.

Launched in 1964,

BBC Television's The Wednesday Play gave a voice to the working class...

Dirty sod, I hope your guts drop out!

..and made people face up to difficult truths.

Can you leave it this week? Only I'm a bit short.

Come on, love, you've £8 owing.

You'd better let me have ten bob.

Yeah, but my old man didn't give me very much this week.

Branded by Mary Whitehouse as a platform for

dirt, doubt and disbelief,

it both reflected and challenged contemporary Britain.

You're not having my kids!

You're not having my kids!

Ken Loach brilliantly used documentary techniques within drama

to highlight homelessness in Cathy Come Home,

and backstreet abortions in Up The Junction.

We're all done, love.

The tradition continued with directors like Alan Clark,

who seized the chance to push the boundaries with films like Scum -

his depiction of life in a brutal borstal.

Right, you bastard!

I'm the daddy now. Next time, I'll fucking kill you.

While Alan Bleasdale's 1982 Boys From The Black Stuff

captured the public mood as rising unemployment gave way to despair.

Go on, give us a job. Go on, give us a go!

That's been waiting for you half an hour.

And it wasn't just one-off drama that broadened the horizons of

the television-viewing public.

-Well!

-I'm very sorry, love.

In 1960, Granada transformed the TV landscape with the launch of what

was to become Britain's longest-running TV soap, Coronation Street.

..place looking like a pigsty.

Confident, unselfconscious, and unashamedly working class,

it was embraced by the whole country.

It's coming to something when father and son fall out.

Oh, I was just talking about that to Mr Swindley -

he says it will be very dangerous,

that fallout from the big bombs the Russians keep letting off.

Mr Swindley says it will be quite drastic.

While the north had often been treated to life in the south,

it was, for many southerners, their first glimpse of life in the north.

What do you think of that? Are you listening to this? I want you as witnesses after this.

And they took to it, in unequalled millions.

-All right, Mum?

-You're up, are you?

-Hello, lad.

We'll never eat this amount of stuff every week, Sheila.

We don't, the kids do.

Especially Gareth over there.

A torrent of northern drama followed,

bringing a clear identity

for a part of the country that had previously

been little known or understood.

And with an increased appetite for dramas about real life,

soap operas became an arena in which important social issues could be explored.

I'll ring you lunchtime, OK?

This kiss between two gay characters in EastEnders was considered so

controversial that it provoked questions in Parliament in 1987.

And in 1994, Brookside showed the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss.

With their huge audiences, soaps have continued to be an important

platform for addressing contemporary issues.

Is this enough?

You'll get yourself killed!

I'm fine. I'm fine.

-Just wait.

-No, no, I can't.

I have to go. I have to go.

I'll miss my...

..bus.

But arguably, while British television has been commendable in many areas,

it's been sluggardly in others,

not least in the role it ascribed to women.

What's this, Mrs Sharples?

What do you think it is? A birthday card?

-It's your notice.

-While soap operas developed a tradition of presenting

strong female characters

like Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street...

You get off of me!

..and Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders...

-You bitch!

-You cow!

..women were often trapped in cliched roles

and portrayed as dolly birds or housewives, or both.

The fact remains that you were wearing a 36D cup in Junior School,

weren't you?

That's not my fault. That's nature.

All right, put 'em away. Put 'em away.

He was laughing and joking when he came in.

Said to be in the club tonight.

Perhaps that was why, in 1991,

Prime Suspect's DCI Jane Tennison had such an impact.

Look, I am the only officer of my rank who was continuously overstepped,

sidestepped, whatever.

Just give me the chance to prove that I can...

You don't have to prove yourself to me.

Here was a strong, self-reliant woman,

complete with the flaws that had marked her male TV counterparts.

Taking the lead in a man's world,

and paving the way for others like her.

I'm Catherine, by the way, I'm 47.

I'm divorced, I live with my sister who is a recovering heroin addict.

I've two grown-up children, one dead, one I don't speak to,

and a grandson, so...

Keep dancing!

However, it remains very much a man's world

in other areas of television

where older women are noticeably absent.

A 2013 report revealed that just one in 20 of the presenters

on our screen are women over 50.

These columns speak of authority.

And when an older woman with first-rate credentials and presenting skills

does appear, it's her age and looks that make the headlines.

If there's just one Roman that

everyone knows, it's Julius Caesar.

And from those famous last words -

"Et tu, Brute,"

which he definitely didn't say...

Anyway, I was wondering...

British television has been slow to represent disability.

TV's first regular disabled soap part only came about because the

able-bodied actor who played Sandy Richardson had an illness that rendered him immobile.

The producer wrote his disability into the story.

I'll have a word with Mr McPhee.

-Hello, Sandy.

-Hi. Thanks very much.

And then there's the changing racial and ethnic mix of the country -

an area in which TV has also been shockingly slow

to reflect real life.

In 1968, Barbara Blake Hannah became the first black news reporter on

British TV.

Are you willing to rewrite...

But her career was short-lived.

Her first contract was terminated after just nine months,

in response to daily complaints from viewers.

But while 1960s viewers found it difficult to cope

with a black presenter, they'd no problem with blacked-up faces,

in one of the most popular shows of the time -

The Black And White Minstrel Show.

# Chariots a-swinging... #

It was only finally taken off the air in 1978.

You said he was born in Manchester.

-Yeah.

-Well, he ain't a proper blackie, then, is he?

Early attempts to reflect an increasingly diverse population

were often through comedy, where sometimes

it was unclear whether the programmes were reinforcing

prejudice or mocking it.

I mean, the ones I'm talking about, they are your proper blacks,

ain't they? The ones that was born in the jungle.

I love English food.

Get off, you just fancy the waiters, innit, huh?

It was only in the 1990s,

when producers turned to black and Asian writers

that viewers were offered

a different perspective with shows like, Goodness, Gracious Me!...

It wouldn't be Friday night if we didn't go for an English.

..and The Kumars At Number 42,

brilliantly skewing British behaviour

by flipping it on its head.

So, boys...

Let's talk football.

-I...

-I hear about the wet look.

Alongside comedy,

the 1990s saw a handful of sitcoms featuring non-white casts.

But progress has been slow.

And today it's noticeable how many shows still resort

to crude stereotypes.

Walk away, disrespect me, Errol.

Just last year, the BBC's Undercover

was hailed by some as a milestone when Sophie Okenedo

and Adrian Lester were cast in a show where the colour of

their skin wasn't central to the plot.

Here was a middle-class black family whose identity was not just defined

by their race.

Now, nobody's saying Chatsworth estate is the Garden of Eden.

But it's been a good home to us. To me.

While British TV has been slow to reflect social change in many

areas, there've also been successful attempts to inject more realism into

the schedules.

The comfortable crime and medical dramas that had been a staple

since the earliest days of television

have been brought sharply up-to-date,

in shows like Jed Mercurio's Line Of Duty -

the antithesis of the cosy escapist cop show...

No!

..and Bodies, an unflinching view of a disintegrating NHS.

Something went wrong, didn't it?

In the operation?

-Sometimes things go wrong.

-But while programmes like these undoubtedly do

their best to challenge complacency and reflect a changing Britain,

we live in an age where there is a proliferation of channels,

many of which are dominated by fly-on-the-wall shows

and a different kind of reality.

These may attempt to show who we are...

James Turner Street was one of the best streets.

Unemployed, unemployed.

Now, one of the worst.

..but do they really?

Unemployed. Unemployed.

Or is reality, in fact, one big misnomer,

and is our TV, for the most part, failing to reflect, in any meaningful way, who we've become?

That's just a scan of 60 years of television's attempts to engage with

a changing Britain. But how successfully has it managed the balance the cosy

with the more radical agenda?

Joining me to discuss this, one of our foremost film-makers,

responsible for some of television's most ground-breaking drama,

Ken Loach, writer, broadcaster, and former politician Trevor Phillips,

and multi-award-winning screenwriter Abi Morgan,

whose television credits include Birdsong, The Hour, and most recently, River.

Ken, in the 1960s you made films showing a side of Britain which had

rarely been seen before.

When you made them, were you aware of the power that these films could

-have?

-We were aware of the power of television, I think.

And I think we knew we were on to something.

And we were at a point when drama was moving out of the studio,

onto the streets.

So all that came together to tell contemporary stories.

But I think it was a time when the ruling class was very confident,

so they felt able to let these stories be told.

When the ruling class is not confident, then the noose tightens.

You see that in wartime, you see it when there's industrial unrest.

And you see it very much now, when society is fractured,

and in conflict.

So when you did Cathy Come Home and Up The Junction and so on,

was there much opposition?

Did you and Tony Garnett say, we want to do this?

Well, Garnett was one heck of an operator,

but, even so, you got it through on your own terms?

Yes. The critical figure was Sydney Newman, who was head of drama,

and he gave us the go-ahead to do contemporary fiction after the news.

And we tried to make it

indistinguishable from the news, in a way.

In that people would use the same critical faculties they used on the news for the drama.

And we got into trouble because people said they couldn't

tell if it was fact or fiction.

And we said, precisely.

But, in fact, if Sydney said it was OK, it was OK.

I think the difficulty now is there are so many checks and balances

all the way up, and so much micromanagement,

that I don't think we could make those programmes now.

We now look back on these as great successes

but, at the time, was there a lot of resistance, outrage,

outcry about them?

Um...yes.

But from...

But it was fraudulent.

We did a series called Days Of Hope,

which was about the labour movement's

struggle from the First World War to the General Strike,

and somebody in one of the right-wing papers said,

"We can't believe a word in this film,

"because the soldiers are marching in fours not threes."

At the same time, there was a programme - or round about the same time -

there was a programme about Churchill called The Young Churchill which was hagiography -

it was flattering beyond words.

There was no mention that that was confusing fact and fiction.

That was fine.

And I think what is central to this discussion -

I don't know if you'd agree - is that broadcasting is an arm of the state.

It is controlled by politicians.

And, of course, it will conflict with governments.

But the central tenets of the state are not challenged -

hierarchy, monarchy, established religion,

freedom equals the freedom of the market.

And so you don't see... What you don't see - it's very interesting -

what you don't see there is the ruling class

being given a dose of social realism.

If we started on that, we're here all night.

That wouldn't be a bad idea, to be here all night, but we've got to ask about the women here.

You... Prime Suspect meant a lot to you, didn't it?

Yeah, I mean, you know, seeing a show,

and certainly a cop show at that time

led by a woman, and a woman like,

you know, Jane Tennison, was kind of extraordinary,

because she was flawed.

She was complex. She was addressing the issue in the room.

I think it was very exciting, also, to see a workplace drama where she

was driving the story and the narrative.

Do you feel, even now - do you still feel that women are

underrepresented in many different areas and ways in television?

I think, statistically, they are.

Yes, basically.

I think what really is interesting is about the female ensembles on TV.

We see male ensembles again and again,

but the reason why I'm interested in female ensembles -

so I would look at shows like Band Of Gold, you know,

and certainly Sally Wainwright's work, where you see someone like Scott & Bailey,

which is a group of women working together -

is that for me, it's exciting not only on a political level,

but on a professional level, because you're bringing up the next generation of female actors as well.

So that's what I like to see.

We've see movies again and again, you know, cop shows,

where there are five or six men in the room.

That's also about employment of actors for me, so, for me,

television is a political means to tell a very strong political story,

but it's also, actually, in the very act of its making, a political act.

So that's why I get excited about writing for women.

Do you think there's been much progress in the...

What did the statistics show - you must know -

about women representation on television?

Geena Davis is very interesting,

in terms of her research that she's done for her

media centre for equality in the media.

She talks about the magic 17%.

Certainly, in relation to US television

it's this magic 17% where they

looked at 17% of jobs across the board,

and specifically they started to look at background artists in shows.

And they found that 17% of background artists, on the whole, are women.

So that's a huge statistical difference, and so,

you start to realise that, subliminally, you're saying things all the time,

with how you present women on the screen.

And certainly, we know statistics for directors and writers,

which are still extraordinarily low.

Trevor, Trevor Phillips,

how has television kept pace with the diversity in our society?

I think the big change from some of the earlier stuff we saw is,

ironically, in television, about visibility.

When I was a kid,

if ever there was a black person on television,

somebody who was downstairs would shout upstairs, "Auntie, there's a black man on television!"

And somebody would run down the street and say, black man!

By the time everybody got to the television,

he'd gone because he was only there for 15 seconds,

but I think what is different now is that there isn't the same level

kind of invisibility.

And by the way, you know, the symbolic kiss that you referred to -

bear in mind the first one that really caused a storm was the interracial kiss

in Emergency Ward Ten,

which was one of the dominant soaps of the 1960s.

So I think what is different now is that kind of invisibility has

lessened in some way.

That doesn't necessarily mean that what we have now is in some way

a representation of the nation as it really is

because I think if you think about minority communities - I think it's also true about women -

the picture we see of those groups of people is a picture that is viewed,

frankly, largely from the eyes of a white, middle-class decision maker.

So the people are there,

but only in a way that is seen by people

who aren't men or minorities.

You said that you think that the most optimistic, heartening representation

of diversity on television is in Big Brother and The Apprentice.

Well, this point about visibility.

You used the phrase, actually, in the package,

of television being a window.

Most people in this country do not know a person of a different colour

well enough to have ever been in their house.

That's just statistically the case.

The way in which they will have seen what somebody like me behaves like

at home will be through Wife Swap or in Big Brother.

The first time and only time they'll have seen somebody or come close to

somebody who's transgender is in Big Brother.

So these are opportunities to provide a window into different people's lives.

Can I go round the table very quickly?

Do you think television is changing to becoming more radical now,

or less, Ken?

I think it's changing to be more compliant, much less radical.

Trevor?

No, I don't think so, but I do think that it is still rather blind.

We don't see working-class social conservatives on TV.

When we see Luther - nobody's more sexy than Idris Elba -

but he's got no black friends or family.

I mean, that's the view of somebody who's not like him.

So, although there are more different kinds of people on the box,

they aren't really like themselves still.

And Abi?

I'm kind of a believer in see it to be it, so actually,

I think it's a kind of balance between, I agree,

we still need to see more advances, but I think we're also at an age

where there is so much television being

made at the moment that I think it's being very conscious in the way we

make it and how we present it.

So, I think there's room to go.

Well, thank you all very much indeed.

Thanks to Ken Loach, Abi Morgan and Trevor Phillips.

From its earliest days,

television recognised and took seriously its role as a tribune of

the people, even if its style of doing so at first would be scarcely

recognisable today.

Good morning, Mr Attlee.

We hope you had a good journey.

-Yes, excellent.

-Can you - now you're back,

having cut short your lecture tour -

tell us something of how you view the election prospects?

It's going to be a good fight.

A very good chance of winning.

Anything else you'd care to say about the coming election?

No.

While early interviewers treated our politicians with great deference,

as television gained confidence,

it began to establish itself as something of a scourge.

Journalists like Bernard Levin

introduced some of the irreverence for which he'd become known in the press.

I'm talking about things that morality.

-All right.

-That's what you want to impose.

That's one thing that cannot be done by statute.

-I don't suppose you ever read things like this?

-Yes, indeed I do, Sir Cyril. Yes, indeed.

-Could you tell me what it is?

-It's the criminal statistics. The annual one.

-When was it published?

-It's published every year.

-When?

-Now, please stop this silliness.

If you want to make a silly point out of that, make it.

And a new generation of interviewers was unafraid to confront senior

-politicians.

-You say it's typical.

-Yes, I do.

-You see you keep using words like typical as though there's

millions of piles of excrement dropping through letterboxes

up and down our green and pleasant land, to use your own phrase,

and that's not happening. And it's not typical.

So Mr Pym and Mr Pryor and Mr Whitelaw and Mr Walker

-are not necessarily going to go?

-You are going further than I wish to go.

Well, naturally. That's part of my job, Prime Minister.

Television has helped massively to introduce democracy to our system.

Not least because we see the people, we can challenge them,

and they are challenged on television by good interviewers.

I have accounted for my decision to dismiss Derek Lewis...

Did you threaten to overrule him?

..in great detail before the House of Commons.

I'm going to be frightfully rude.

I'm sorry. It's a straight yes or no.

-You can put the question and I will give you an answer.

-It's a straight yes or no answer.

Did you threaten to overrule him?

And more than that, when we see them, we see their faces,

we can tell, I think, whether they're lying or not.

Television is a very good lie detector and, as we know,

most of the information we get about people is from this

and television fits this quite well.

If it now falls to me to start a fight,

to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country

with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of traditional British fair play, so be it.

Jonathan Aitken accused the media of lying but was subsequently found to

have lied himself.

He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for perjury.

And it's not just professional interviewers

who have been able to put our politicians through their paces.

TV has also offered members of the public the occasional chance to

confront those in power.

When the Belgrano was sunk, it was a danger to our ships.

Mrs Thatcher, I am saying that nobody with any imagination can put

it sailing other than away from the Falklands.

Mrs Gould, when the orders were given to sink it and when it was sunk,

it was in an area which was a danger to our ships.

Now, you accept that, do you?

-No, I don't.

-Well, I'm sorry.

I think it could only be in Britain that a Prime Minister was accused of

sinking an enemy ship that was a danger to our Navy.

And our TV has ruffled the feathers of those in authority outside the

studio too. Television drama has a long and honourable tradition of

giving those in power sleepless nights.

In 1965,

Peter Watkins' The War Game looked at what life would really be like in

the event of a nuclear attack.

When the carbon monoxide content of inhaled air exceeds 1.28%,

it will be followed by death within three minutes.

This is nuclear war.

It was a step too far for the Government of the day, when the threat seemed

very real, and the film didn't actually air until 20 years later.

Jesus, this place has been totally blown away.

Clever writers and directors have used TV drama to bring to life

the human stories behind the news headlines

by creating characters we get to know and empathise with.

Such was the impact of Peter Kosminsky's 1999 Warriors -

the fictional story of traumatised peacekeeping troops in Bosnia -

that fears were raised within the military that it might impact on Army recruitment drives.

Get on board now!

It was a great job you lads did out there.

We're all really proud of you.

You were heroes. All of you.

Yeah. I think, erm...

I think it was shite...

..what we did.

Leaving people to die.

Jimmy McGovern's Hillsborough was accused of being trial by television

when it told the story of the 1989 disaster

from the point of view of the bereaved families.

What's going on?

Fans forced the gate.

Fans forced their way in and that's the result.

My lads went to a game of football...

..and you brought them back home in a coffin.

It was only last year that an official inquiry confirmed the account that

McGovern's television play depicted 20 years earlier.

In the world of investigative journalism,

TV brought to attention crucial issues.

It effected change as a raft of current-affairs programmes were developed

that became a thorn in the Government's side.

Reaching 13 million UK viewers at its peak,

World In Action's campaigning style of journalism uncovered corruption

and challenged governments with its mission to comfort the afflicted and

afflict the comfortable.

World In Action challenged Member of Parliament Matthew Paris to prove

the Conservative claim that supplementary benefit is enough to live on.

Cabinet ministers were questioned and so was the British judiciary.

Bombs destroyed two crowded pubs in the heart of Birmingham.

21 people died.

162 were hurt.

Its most celebrated investigation eventually proved the innocence and

secured the release of the Birmingham Six,

wrongly convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described the people who made

the series as "just a lot of Trotskyists".

In 1988, an edition of Thames Television's This Week,

Death On The Rock, became the subject of an independent inquiry.

The killing by the SAS of three IRA terrorists in Gibraltar has provoked

intense debate throughout the world.

The programme presented evidence

that the IRA members were shot without

warning or while attempting to surrender.

We have interviewed four key witnesses to the shootings.

Their accounts raise serious questions about what really happened that afternoon.

Much to the fury of the Government, and despite attempts to discredit it,

Death On The Rock was vindicated in the inquiry.

But investigative journalism, documentaries and one-to-one

interviews aren't the only way that we have

jolted authority and pricked pomposity in television.

Another has been straightforward abuse.

Satire, comedy and comments from its perpetrators which would have sent

them to jail or got them shot in other countries.

Would you like to order, sir?

Yes. I will have a steak.

-How do you like it?

-Oh, raw, please.

And what about the vegetables?

Oh, they'll have the same as me.

# That was the week that was

# Politicians on the rack... #

In 1962,

That Was The Week That Was pushed the boundaries in a way never seen

before.

The programme survived for just 13 months,

before being pulled off the nation's screens in December 1963 for fear it

could comprise the BBC's impartiality with the impending election.

And so there is the choice between the electorate and for the electorate.

On the one hand, Lord Hume, and on the other hand, Mr Harold Wilson.

Dull Alec versus Smart Alec.

Goodnight.

Yes Minister held the workings of government up to ridicule,

including a particularly revealing early insight into our relationship

with the European Union.

We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside.

We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work.

Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing.

Set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians,

the Italians against the Dutch.

The Foreign Office is terribly pleased.

It's just like old times.

Spitting Image showed how making authority figures into grotesque

celebrities could better hold them to account.

So, tell me, Mr Pillock.

-Er, Kinnock.

-Kinnock, yes, what is it you do exactly?

I'm the leader of the Labour Party in Britain.

In my country we don't have a political opposition.

No, nor do we.

And with New Labour came new satire.

Preparing for tomorrow's enquiry,

I thought I'd have a look at some of the old speeches I did.

I mean, this is a great one.

Listen to this. "Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the

"possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war,

"or sending our children to war."

Crikey. What was I thinking of?

Ed. Get Tom Rudd in, now. We're offering him Northern Ireland,

-the lucky sod.

-Armando Iannucci's The Thick Of It

also found New Labour fertile territory.

Remtard Remington.

I mean, the guy is an epic fuck-up.

He is so dense that light bends around him.

His savage parody of a spin doctor based on Alastair Campbell resulted

in a brand-new word making its way into the Oxford dictionary.

Jesus Christ, see you, you are the fucking omnishambles,

that's what you are.

Today's media-trained politicians are adept at handling television,

even embracing satire in the hope of appearing less pompous.

David Cameron was very rude about your people, wasn't he, Nigel?

-Oh, he always is.

-Yes, he said...

-He can't help himself.

-He can't help himself.

-Fruitcakes.

-Fruitcakes and loonies.

-And loonies, and worse. He said worse than that.

-He did.

I think it's time for a game of Fruitcake or Loony?

Has this meant it's become harder to challenge authority?

Or are the political landscape and those who inhabit it

so extraordinary that they are beyond a joke?

So, how successful or otherwise has television been

in holding our leaders to account?

With me to discuss this are the man credited with changing

the face of TV comedy with shows like Spitting Image

and Not The Nine O'Clock News, John Lloyd.

A former Shadow Chancellor turned dancing sensation, Ed Balls.

And presenter of Radio Four's The World At One and former political editor

of BBC Two's Newsnight Martha Kearney.

Ed, why do you think politicians fear to be interviewed

and are given such a hard time?

I think if you go into an interview, you are expecting these days

to have a very well-prepared interviewer,

who has the most difficult questions,

and they're not going to let you get away with not answering the question,

because the public now are very, I think, educated about evasion and

they can smell it a mile off,

and sometimes as a politician it's hard to give a straight answer,

and the worst place you want to be is evading and twisting and knowing

that you're not being straight with the interviewer,

because that's disrespectful and the public at home see that and don't

like it, and so you always have to be on your mettle and ready for that tough question.

Do you look back with envy at the time when Clement Attlee

could just say "no", and the interviewer would shut up?

It's a funny thing, though, because as a politician you become skilled

at answering the difficult questions and preparing.

In some ways, the moments that I found hardest -

which didn't happen that often -

would be when you were on the Today programme or on The World At One and

the first question would be, "So, what have you got to say?"

And you would think...

I'm ready for the hard question,

but you just want me to summarise my point in 20 seconds?

And I think what happened over time was that the interviewers knew that

simply doing the tough questions can get a bit boring and sterile and

sometimes the hardest interviews are the ones where...

In some ways, David Frost was a past master at this, but in more recent

times, the interviewer who beguiles you into making a mistake or a slip,

not by being tough and interrogating,

but giving you the space to trip yourself up.

Martha, it seems to me, I know a lot of good journalists and so do you,

and good politicians.

Why do they seem to be at each other's throats so often and giving

both sides such a bad name?

I think it's the way that society has changed.

I loved seeing that Clem Attlee interview,

and I'm sure you'd love it if I said,

"Is there anything more you'd like to say about the coming election?"

-My worst nightmare.

-We'll try that out one day.

But I think you saw through those clips the way that society itself

has become more challenging towards figures in authority and I think voters now expect us to do that.

And it's quite interesting, when I'm doing interviews I will often have

a Twitter feed now, and there will be people saying, they are not answering you,

and they are egging you on to challenge politicians.

Clearly, there's a balance because we wouldn't want to encourage too

much cynicism but, on the other hand,

it is part of our democracy to be able to challenge figures in authority.

Yeah, but to come back to the question, why do you think...

Am I not answering your question?

I apologise. That would be hypocrisy.

Why do you think in polls journalists and politicians...

We have known a lot of good ones...

Why are they so low down the list?

Why does the general public think they don't want to have much to do with that lot? And the other lot?

I think that's because of the way people's attitudes towards authority

have changed and journalists and broadcasters are seen as being part of the establishment

in the same way that politicians are,

and I think that's why it's so interesting the world we're

living in at the moment, with the growth of social media, which means that people -

both politicians and members of the public -

can bypass broadcasters and talk directly to each other,

which presents a real challenge for broadcasters.

In that last clump of film I used the words "television is a lie detector",

which is a phrase of Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, saying...

Do you think that's true?