Assess The Impact Of Commercial Television In The 1950's

How do you assess the impact of commercial television upon the British Broadcasting System from the 1950’s until the present day?

To help answer this question, it would be beneficial to begin by summarising the history of Broadcasting from the 1920’s up to the 1950’s. This will help generate an understanding and make more clear, whether there was a change in the British Broadcasting System after the launch of the first commercial television channel in Britain. This history will contain, in short, the basics of the launch of radio, the development of the British Broadcasting Company and the British Broadcasting Corporation and a summary of the aims and values each of these mediums. There will also be references to the new technology and
This is where public service broadcasting and the British Broadcasting Corporation (the modern BBC) were provisionally born. They decided that the charter would help to enforce the values of the BBC and aim to ‘educate’, ‘inform’, and ‘entertain’ the viewer. This trinity was and still is (to a degree) the backbone of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The charter also brought about the idea of mixed programming that wasn’t considered in the early broadcasting days. This was probably because the BBC realised that they had an obligation to the British public, as a service provider, to uphold the trinity and to give the public a choice in their viewing and to ‘entertain’ them. After all, the British public are paying their licensing fees, surely they should get something more than a one-dimensional list of informative programs without entertainment
The ‘Peacock Report’ of 1986 suggested, in short, that commercialisation was key to the values of broadcasting. It was debated that in order to please the consumer you didn’t have to lower the standards of television. It was still possible to ‘educate, entertain and inform’ the viewer without sacrificing their ‘high standards’ or broadcasting. So it was a few years after the release of the Peacock report (which was later dismissed a high number of people due to the fact that the market didn’t develop as he predicted and that he didn’t frame the arguments about broadcasting in the correct way) that the BBC were forced to rethink PSB as the public were about to be given more choice as to what they watched than ever before. The Peacock Report didn’t convince the BBC to shift away from its public service broadcasting stance as such, but it helped. The factors were more to do with the competition brought from not being a complete monopoly any longer and the threats this brought to the BBC’s