After a decade of the BBC's prim and proper programming, produced by well-intentioned middle-class persons for middle-class viewers, ITV took the public by storm. In 1956 there were 500,000 ITV television homes in Britain. By 1962 there were 12 million. Then the blow fell. The Pilkington Report, commissioned by the Macmillan government, condemned ITV root and branch: the independent companies had flouted the primary purposes of broadcasting, which were to educate and inform. It was Reith all over again, but this time the doctrine was expounded not in terms of blunt conviction but in a lengthy sociological treatise. The Independent Television Authority, later the Independent Broadcasting Authority, was galvanised into action. New standards were set immediately. There would be a quota set on the number of quiz shows and American imports. A fixed number of serious programmes must be produced each week.

So began the move towards equilibrium between the BBC and ITV. The BBC, reeling from the shock of losing 70 per cent of their viewers to ITV, entered the real world of broadcasting under the stalwart leadership of Hugh Carlton Greene and began to fight back with more popular programmes. ITV under the stern direction of the ITA were compelled to make programmes of greater substance and quality. The system worked successfully for some three decades, with the BBC perhaps having the edge in sport and comedy, ITV in current affairs and serials, and the honours for drama about equal. The ITV system had been successful in coupling commerce with quality for one main reason — fear of termination. The contracts were lucrative and the danger of losing them impelled the companies to ensure they had good standing with the Authority, and if this meant including in their schedules a number of low-rating programmes to earn Brownie points, so be it. No other country has ever harnessed the commercial drive of broadcasting to public service so successfully. This indeed was British television's golden age.

Nothing to ensure quality

Between the mid-1950s and the early 1990s television evolved at a comfortable pace. The monopoly was broken in 1955, the duopoly in 1964 with the arrival of BBC2 (and colour in 1967) and Channel 4 brought a fresh stream of programming in 1982. However by the time Channel 5 launched in 1997 the floodgates of satellite broadcasting had opened. In a few years the loyalty of viewers to the old major channels began to melt away like snow.

So what are we to make of the television scene today? There has been an enormous improvement in the coverage of sport. New technology has transformed the coverage of cricket and, to a lesser extent, other sports, although the standard of commentary has not kept pace. There are few Peter Allisses, Richie Benaud has gone from this country and it is best to watch tennis without sound. With the 24-hour news channels, the volume and accessibility of news has increased enormously but, with just two exceptions, Channel 4 News and Newsnight, standards have dropped. The main bulletins still cover major stories well — bomb plots, floods, high diplomacy — but for the rest there is too much trivia, too many soft features and little wit. The whimsical little exchanges between presenters usually embarrass rather than amuse. Too much time is given to the reporting of routine crimes plus murders, rapes and kidnaps, complete with the stolid police report and the sobbing parents. Sections of news bulletins sometimes resemble a police gazette. Alongside coverage of the war zones and the Middle East, Africa is given a lot of time, China and Russia little or none. Presenters are efficient, but with the notable exception of Jon Snow and Jeremy Paxman, lack the charisma and the status of their predecessors. I read with incredulity the statement of the current Director-General of the BBC that his policy was to move away from presenters per se and introduce more journalists as front men. These are two different professions — one is a public figure and part actor and the other does much of his work behind the scenes. A few can do both (Sandy Gall was one), but most journalists reporting from the site of their story would be quite at sea in presenting a major bulletin. The converse is also true. It was distressing to see Huw Edwards linking the news from Portugal following the abduction of Madeleine McCann. Out of the studio he lost his authority.

Although the standards of British television have declined in the past 25 years, the picture is not all one of gloom. There are many excellent programmes on air, but the spaces between them are wider. Programmes such as Spooks, Dr Who, Top Gear, Life on Mars are as good of their kind as any made in the past. BBC4, operating on a shoestring, has made a modest but encouraging debut. ITV3 serves up good things from the past. But in the main, the menu is made up of serials, television's bread-and-butter, with the two stalwarts, Coronation Street and EastEnders, holding on to their primacy; programmes about cooking, buying property and selling household goods, and endless personality shows, many of them cast in the form of rather limp quizzes. On the main channels history is well represented, but classical music, except for the Proms, hardly at all. The South Bank Show has survived but has been pushed to the end of the evening.

There are nuggets on the minority channels, but to find them is like looking for needles in haystacks. Sky has been the most successful broadcaster of the last decade, with its near monopoly of major sport and films and its sparky 24-hour news. So successful indeed that Rupert Murdoch's influence over the whole field of the British media is now attracting the interest of the Competition Commission. The only real recent novelty on television has been Channel 4's so-called reality (but in truth highly artificial) Big Brother, a show that is an insult to human dignity and, in my judgment, drags television below the Plimsoll line of what is transmittable. It is a truism to say that if you appeal to the lowest common denominator it is easy to make popular programmes, and it is easy to make elegant programmes for the elite, but the challenge of television is to make programmes that are both good and popular.

Production values have disappeared

But the greatest casualty in the world of television has been the documentary. In the 1970s there were three regular documentaries a week, World in Action with an audience of between 12 and 18 million (and often in the network's top 10), This Week with perhaps two thirds of that, and Panorama with a quarter. Thus in any week in the year there was a viewership of some 30 million for the regular current affairs shows, and there were frequent one-offs sprinkled over the schedule. Today there is only Panorama, a shadow of its former self, playing weekly, and Channel 4's Dispatches on for 40 weeks a year. Together these two attract an audience of some four million. There are still occasional documentaries in the schedules of ITV and BBC, but they are usually transmitted at a time when the only viewers are insomniacs and shift workers. Even the BBC's Question Time, not quite a documentary but a current affairs flagship programme, goes out after peak at 10.30pm. The reason for the reduction of the documentary in peak time is not hard to explain. World in Action employed 12 to 15 experienced journalists to find and research stories, some of which would take a year or more to reach the screen, and many were spiked on the way. This required a huge overhead. The direct costs were 10 times as high as a quiz show. In the present-day world where the ratio of costs to ratings is paramount, such an equation is simply not on.

The decline in standards in ITV is easily explained by the 1990 Act and the proliferation of channels. But why should the BBC, financed and run as a public service, have dropped its standards too? In its high summer of the 60s and the 70s the BBC was a programme-oriented organisation. It had its own culture, something between a club and a cult. As an organisation it was lively, powerful and full of confidence. As time went on this spirit diminished. In the late 80s the BBC became carelessly extravagant, the management lax, and internal worries began to affect the morale of the programme staff, but it was still the old BBC. When John Birt became Director-General in 1992 he did in a few years for the BBC what Margaret Thatcher had done for ITV: he turned an organisation once dedicated to the making of programmes into one where the first priority was cost effectiveness, structural reform and managerial efficiency. In doing so he destroyed the BBC club spirit and by a policy of outsourcing diminished the BBC's capacity as a production house. He introduced a maze of complex structures for programme-making which confused and frustrated producers and, in short, made everyone miserable. Since Birt, the BBC has never recovered and its morale reached its nadir in that week of shame when, bullied and browbeaten by an official in the Prime Minister's office, the BBC failed to support their man Andrew Gilligan, whose story was substantially sound, and panicked. The then Chairman and Director-General threw in the towel. The BBC today is not a happy place. The recent scandal over quiz shows reveals a devastating drop in ethical standards among their programme makers. Yet today the BBC is corporate, it is huge; it is an emporium selling its wares across the world. It has minority channels, it is moving into internet broadcasting and it is keeping up with the Joneses in every field of broadcasting technology. But what of its core duty of broadcasting to the nation? When the licence fee was set at a figure lower than the BBC had hoped for, along with other economies, programme budgets were cut. The programme budget must surely have first call on income. Cut everything else — and the BBC has plenty of options — but not the money for programmes.

Can anything be done to raise the standard of our two main channels? The solution for the BBC lies in its own hands and it is a matter of people rather than planning. The new Trust must find a top management composed of broadcasters first and foremost. Top-class management skills are readily available; a great impresario is rare. Greg Dyke, had he stayed, might have done it. Had Michael Grade been given the job of Director-General, rather than that of Chairman, he might have done it. As Chairman the task was beyond him. Today the Trustees should search long and hard for a latter-day Carlton Greene.

Fortunes in terminal decline

This can be arrested only by changes in the structure of the commercial sector. Here lies the rub for, since Thatcher, successive governments have regarded ITV more as a business rather than as a public service. In my day, the Home Office was concerned with ITV's programme standards as well as its economic viability. Willie Whitelaw had a personal interest in the broadcasting scene and played a central role in devising the formula for Channel 4. Today, far removed from television politics, I cannot descry in our present Cabinet any minister with a similar interest in broadcasting. No doubt the top people in ITV are active on the political front, but I see no signs of popular activity such as the Campaign for Quality Television, which in 1989 did good work in ameliorating the terms of the 1990 Act. Control of ITV has drifted further and further away from the close involvement of the ITA and the IBA, first in 1991 to the Independent Television Commission, then in 2003 to Ofcom, which cannot, in its brief, be much concerned with the quality of ITV programmes. Gone are the days where representatives of the Home Office, the IBA and the ITV companies would meet regularly to discuss major issues of broadcasting.

The general proposition is simple. If the Government believes that the nation should have a commercial broadcasting channel providing programmes of substance and quality, it must legislate for it. But since legislation would almost certainly involve some element of subsidy, whether by relief of taxation, a share of the licence fee or support for individual programmes, this does not seem a likely scenario. When we veterans venture an opinion on contemporary television we are told that our experience of television of the past is not relevant to the television of today. Of course the change is great, but there are principles of broadcasting that endure, and one such principle, which is not always observed today, is this: the first priority of any broadcasting organisation is to give its programme people the best possible conditions for making programmes. Quick decisions, short lines of communication, proper funding, strong personal relationships, bold leadership. No committees, no bureaucracy, no focus groups and no interference from business management. It is the directors, writers and producers who are the most important people in television — and if you want good programmes, their interests must come first.