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Book Review: Entertaining Television: The BBC and Popular Television Culture in the 1950s, by Su Holmes

Entertaining Television: The BBC and Popular Television Culture in the 1950s. Su Holmes. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013. 224 pp. $24.95 pbk.The values instituted by the British Broadcasting Company's (BBC) first director, Lord John Reith, were to "inform, educate, and entertain," but those three verbs have enjoyed nary a moment of peaceful coexistence in the nearly ninety years that they have comprised the organization's public service mission. Conventional thinking holds that nonmercenary, beneficial-to-the-citizenry programming, and crowd-pleasing fare are mutually exclusive and that which is desirable to viewers, garners a big audience, and earns revenue is deemed antithetical to the charge of public service.Although the public service versus entertainment dichotomy is as old as broadcast technology, Holmes trains her lens on a decade when it was in full glory. The "entertaining" in the title of her book purposefully conveys a double meaning, referring to the type of programming that aims to divert audiences as well as the consideration of the entire endeavor of television. The latter connotation gives her ample room to dissect a wide range of issues, but at the heart of her argument is the "popular" in the subtitle. Although she explores British television programs, the matter is equally relevant to U.S. television history. In fact, public service and popular sometimes take on the faces of the BBC and the American system, respectively, given their dissimilar economic and political structures, but Holmes proves that the conflict was alive within U.K. television culture itself, as evidenced by the contentious relationship with the commercial, independent ITV.The BBC was a monopoly until the 1955 launch of ITV. Early television broadcasting was a matter of politics in the United Kingdom, far more aggressively than it was in its infancy and adolescence in the United States. British TV was essentially a pawn of the state, quite often divorced from any regard to its content. Much of it was characterized by its resistance to American TV, as if the BBC were a fortress against Americanization. Holmes makes frequent mentions of the 1962 Pilkington Report, a text that seems loosely analogous to U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Newton Minow's 1961 "vast wasteland" speech or an ersatz set of public service commandments. Among its conclusions the eponymous committee that published the report depicted ITV programs, in contrast to the self-described fair and balanced BBC, as populist and "trivial," indicting the United States as a bad influence. Paradoxically, the battle has been reduced to public versus popular despite the fact that in other contexts those terms might be on the same team. Popular can be quantitative, indicating that which is liked and watched by many, or it can connote vulgarity and low rent taste, depending on whom you ask.Holmes traces the BBC's interpretation of popularity and how judgments were challenged by the advent of ITV. She divides her study into categories of the soap opera, quiz show, "problem" show, and celebrity. The Grove Family, British TV's first soap opera or family serial, premiering in 1954, presented a lower middle class family. Reactions to the show revealed perspectives on patterns of consumption and taste and reflected, for better or worse, the cultural values of the millions who watched. Quiz, or "give-away," shows allowed escape and fantasy whereas a problem show revealed real-life tribulations and ostensibly an opportunity for education. Holmes explores the lineage of the modern talk show with the British problem show (e.g., Is This Your Problem?) and the U.S. advice show. Both early progenitors were criticized for invasion of privacy, peeping Tom-ism, and, ultimately, the tabloidization of TV. With their airing of laundry, problem shows also punctured the postwar bubble of purported happiness. Whereas The Grove Family intentionally presented a comforting image of suburban family life (analogous to Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver in the United States), the problem shows presented just what their name advertised. …