‘Dear Sir,
I have never before been so incensed by a T.V. programme that I have tried to telephone from my home in the country to protest. I am sorry your number was engaged, but not surprised, as no doubt hundreds of other decent citizens were also telephoning at the same time …’
For anyone who regularly feels tempted to put pen to paper, I’m Sure I Speak For Many Others is an alternative history of the BBC, from its triumphant broadcast of the coronation in 1953, to that Tynan moment, the controversial That Was The Week That Was, and the groundbreaking Grange Hill.
Stretching across over forty years of programming, these never before seen letters represent the joy, the fury and the wit of the nation.
Colin Shindler is a bestselling author, film screenwriter, TV producer and well respected lecturer in the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. His previous books include Sunday Times bestseller National Service, Four Lions, and Manchester United Ruined My Life which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.
For nearly a hundred years there has been a broadcasting organisation called the BBC. And for nearly a hundred years the people who watch and listen to its programmes have been writing letters to complain about them and to praise them. These letters are a barometer of our changing social attitudes.
In a corner of the grounds of Caversham Park, a few miles outside Reading, sits a small and undistinguished white 1930s bungalow. If it weren’t for the BBC sign outside you would pass down the suburban street it faces without a second glance. As you enter the building you are transported back in time, to a GP’s practice in a county town, or your grandmother’s hall. But this is all an illusion. For once the door is closed, this modest bungalow seemingly goes on forever. Behind the unassuming frontage and entrance hall lie numerous extensions and new buildings; each room is filled to the brim with the production notes, requests and forms that are a fundamental part of programme making. If, for example, you want to know how many extras were asked for by Ian Macnaughton, the producer of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for the filming of the Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch you will be able to find the answer. Much more interesting, however, are the files of letters dating back to the start of the BBC in 1922. These are the true glory of the BBC Written Archive.
The files labelled ‘Reports on Programme Correspondence’ contain monthly reports. The file for May 1958, for example, reveals that during that month the BBC received 12,944 letters. The Telephone Correspondence file for the same month shows they also received a further 181 phone calls. Perhaps not surprisingly, the BBC has not kept all 12,944 letters. Instead it was the job of Kathleen Haacke for over twenty years, from the late 1940s right through to the 1960s, and later that decade the delightfully named Betty Kitcat, to summarise the correspondence received and to extract sections of particular interest. The selections that Kathleen, Betty and their successors made are the first step in our journey into the minds of the British public throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
To an extent the letters have been pre-selected. Not every file from every production was sent to Caversham. The decision to destroy the files instead of sending them to Caversham might have been made by an overworked production secretary or a producer who did not think his or her programme would be the subject of historical study decades later. Not every production file which was eventually sent to Caversham has been retained by the Archive, mostly, I am assured, for reasons of space but since none of the programmes I produced for the BBC over a period of twenty years are there I am inclined to attribute the decision to pure caprice (or malice).
There is an overwhelming preponderance of letters from the 1960s, the decade in which Hugh Carleton Greene was the Director General and the decade in which the BBC lost its stuffy 1950s ‘Auntie’ image and opened itself up to stories and ideas which reflected the social turmoil of the time. Greene had been a journalist in Berlin during the inter-war years and had been much influenced by the cabaret culture of Weimar Germany. He had also seen at first hand the impact of the dead hand of government on cultural expression during the Nazi years before the war. It was Greene who made it possible for men like Sydney Newman, the innovative Head of Drama who brought working class drama to the screen, and Huw Wheldon, who edited the pioneering arts strand Monitor, to hire the people who created the BBC’s reputation for artistic excellence.
Nobody disputed the distinction of series like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, Alistair Cooke’s America, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth or Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. However, many of the groundbreaking productions of the BBC in the 1960s were not received with unanimous acclaim despite their current iconic status. The comedy series Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part were thought to be vulgar and blasphemous. Z Cars was a police series whose gritty portrayals of life on the streets of Kirkby, a suburb of Liverpool (or Newtown as it was called in the programme), shocked audiences that had been happy to believe that P.C. George Dixon could keep the London borough of Dock Green free of crime with a clip round the ear of a teenage delinquent. The Wednesday Play (or Play for Today as it became) included major works by Dennis Potter, Ken Loach and Tony Garnett. Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction are the most famous examples of this strand and their depictions of homelessness and illegal back street abortion in Clapham horrified and outraged many.
As Greene threw open the windows and tried to let in the outside air, many thousands of licence fee payers believed that he had merely let in the stinking and polluted air rising from the sewers, and the result of their protests was the start of the Clean Up TV Campaign, led by Mary Whitehouse, who regarded Hugh Greene as Public Enemy Number One. As we can see from the chapter on Radio Swearing, certain sections of the British public had long made its objections known to what it regarded as blasphemous and obscene, but it was in the 1960s that the letters poured into the BBC in a veritable torrent because these new programmes were part of a deliberate effort on the part of the Corporation under Greene’s directorship to tackle controversial subjects like sex, religion, the monarchy and Parliament, which the BBC had traditionally eschewed. It was believed by the outraged correspondents that in transmitting plays with a title like The Year of the Sex Olympics, or letting David Frost and Ned Sherrin satirise the Queen, Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, or possibly worst of all, letting Kenneth Tynan say the word ‘fuck’ on a late-night television discussion about censorship, the BBC was betraying its traditional role in British life.
There was a reason why the BBC was the nation’s favourite ‘Auntie’. The BBC had had ‘a good war’. The voices of Alvar Lidell and John Snagge reading the news or Richard Dimbleby and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas reporting from the front line had been extremely reassuring to people who had been facing the real possibility of invasion, defeat and occupation by a barbaric foe. Just as the women who had succeeded triumphantly in the workplace during the war were escorted back to domestic routine when the men came home, so the BBC in the 1950s seemed to retreat with a sigh of relief to the safety of Workers’ Playtime, Music While You Work, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and What’s My Line?
When Greene, Wheldon and Newman abandoned this safety net and deliberately sought new, difficult and challenging areas of programme-making, many people were confronted by a stream of images and ideas which they found unpleasant if not frightening. Much was made in the post-war years of the atmosphere in which young children could grow up and prosper, free from the Depression, war and austerity that had blighted the early years of their parents in the 1930s and 1940s. The BBC had a part to play in this idea, it was believed, but by promoting Alf Garnett, Albert Steptoe and David Frost, Hugh Greene’s BBC had seemingly abandoned the ethos of middle-class values and deference to traditional authority which had been the hallmark of its behaviour since 1922. It had not opened the door to a new cultural freedom: instead, it had stimulated and encouraged a collapse of moral values.
This was the kind of thinking that persuaded the letter writers of the 1960s to implore BBC executives to cancel shows like That Was the Week That Was and Till Death Us Do Part. In writing such letters, they believed that it was within the power of the BBC to restore Britain to the place it had held as a great power before 1945.
There are many letters in this collection that will make readers of today smile if not laugh out loud, though beneath the smile is a more serious intention.
They are fascinating historical documents, and the letters are reproduced exactly as written including the spelling mistakes. Some of the longer letters have been trimmed of their repetitions but all the words are those of the original authors. Annotated comments in square brackets or in italics are mine.
The traditional BBC response to a letter addressed to the Director General was usually a printed postcard thanking the author for the views expressed, of which note would be duly (not) taken. It didn’t do much for the frustrated author who was confronted with the stark realisation of the waste of a threepenny stamp. On the other hand, some letters addressed to specific individuals by name did produce a personal response. In the files there are to be found many well written and carefully worded responses that did more than simply acknowledge the original letter.
There are copies of a number of letters written by Huw Wheldon which elicit nothing but the greatest admiration. He does understand why viewers are getting so worked up by bad taste, swearing and, as they now say, ‘scenes of a sexual nature’, which in 2017 are as nothing in a television climate that includes a naked dating series at 10 p.m. on Channel 4. Wheldon tries sincerely and with passion to explain why artists need to venture down avenues of human behaviour which make some audiences uncomfortable. He begs their forgiveness and appreciates the anger they feel but he believes that writers and programme-makers must be allowed to explore their own originality and creativity, which might also mean the inclusion of words and ideas that some people will find offensive. It is a thoroughly admirable and eloquent defence of artistic freedom but it has not been included herein because the book was always intended to showcase only the views of the general viewing public.
An attempt has been made to preserve the anonymity of the writers except in certain circumstances when the author is a public figure: for example, Clement Attlee, shortly to become the Prime Minister, Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury and, inevitably, Mrs Mary Whitehouse. Her rather gentle chiding of the BBC in 1961 in neat handwriting on a small piece of lavender-coloured stationery, stands in marked contrast to her much more strident communications and demands later in the decade. It is of course appreciated that these letters were not written with the intention of ultimate publication so the addresses from which they originated have been shortened to make identification impossible. After considerable research it might be possible to identify who the Honorary Secretary of the Skegness Hoteliers Association was when the gentleman who held that distinguished office wrote in to protest about the BBC’s outrageous implication that the air in Skegness was not as bracing as the inhabitants of that Lincolnshire coastal town had always maintained. It would, however, be a rather pointless exercise since he was only doing the job he had been appointed to carry out.
I Am Sure I Speak for Many Others … is the story of the people’s BBC, because from these letters we can learn a great deal about Britain and the British people in the years since the end of World War II. Who are the people who write these letters? Why are they so unbelievably upset about things that appear to us now to be astonishingly trivial? Why can’t a lot of them, who appear to have enjoyed the benefit of a good education, nevertheless reveal themselves as unable to spell properly? (Maybe texting, internet trolling and comprehensive school education aren’t the only reasons for the current blight of appalling spelling.) More importantly, what do those letters and the programmes that inspired them tell us about how life used to be in Great Britain? The answer is that, taken as a whole, the letters contained in this book tell us exactly how we have become the nation we now are.
In the days before radio phone-ins, emails, blogs and internet trolls, the general public had two principal ways of making the BBC aware of their observations on its programmes. One way, of course, was to write a letter or preferably, as the BBC would always politely remind its viewers and listeners, ‘a postcard’. This was intended to keep the complaints brief but, as the following pages indicate, nothing really replaced a good loud moan on the Basildon Bond.
The other way was to telephone BBC Television Centre in London on 743 8000, which got you through to the main switchboard. Out of hours, i.e. during the course of the evening when the programmes were actually broadcast, the telephone was invariably answered by an elderly commissionaire in uniform with a peaked cap, armed with a pencil and a pad of lined paper. Painstakingly, he wrote down the litany of complaints from the licence fee payers who were invariably irritated that they could not speak directly to the person responsible for their irritation.
The Duty Officers’ logs were then typed up and circulated to the relevant department the following day. There was the occasional paean of praise but, like the letters, they were far outweighed by the complaints. However, it was recognised by the BBC that these protests were a useful way of keeping track of exactly what the licence payers felt strongly about and, again like the letters, they provide a helpful guide to contemporary reaction.
If we take a typical evening, say Saturday 18 January 1975, we get a fairly typical cross-section of telephone calls. Bear in mind this was the BBC at its strongest. The lineup of programmes included such ratings stalwarts as Doctor Who, Jim’ll Fix It, All Creatures Great and Small, Kojak, The Generation Game, The Two Ronnies, then Match of the Day and Parkinson. It might have terrified ITV, who could never find the smallest dent in that lineup, but it didn’t impress some of the viewers. The BBC commissionaire licked his pencil stub and began to transcribe the phone calls …
LULU
A lady: What have you done to Lulu? She has no tone, and she looks terrible.
WEATHER
Tell Barbara Edwards she’s talking a load of rubbish. It’s bucketing down in Epsom and has been all day, and she said all rain had finished and moved her little black dots off the map.
DOCTOR WHO
Anon. man: Thought that the new series of this programme was absolutely pathetic, even for children of 43. There were holes in the plot and it was like watching a leaky sieve.
NEWS
Anon. man: Screamed down the telephone that he wished to speak to someone in the News department because, he claimed, during the course of the bulletin the word ‘project’ had been pronounced two different ways, i.e. ‘project’ and ‘prowject’ and he wished to complain. He was told that his complaint would be noted by the D[uty] O[fficer] and passed to News but he refused to leave his name, went on shouting very loudly, said I had obviously never been to school, was extremely unintelligent, and could go and drown myself – at which point I hung up.
All this, the DO must have been thinking, for £38.53 a week less tax deducted at source. And now for something completely similar … I Am Sure I Speak for Many Others: Unpublished Letters to the BBC.
This is possibly the most brilliant suggestion for a new and original BBC radio series ever submitted by a listener …
New Malden, Surrey
15 January 1946
To: Messrs. The British Broadcasting Corporation, London
Dear Sirs,
That you do your utmost to please all ‘listeners’ is, I am sure, to be appreciated.
There is, however, one section of the public for whom, to the best of my knowledge, you have never catered.
A great opportunity will shortly present itself.
Why not give us an hour of Chess? – a game between Dr. Tartakowa, this year’s Hastings Champion and the winner of the International Tournament now in progress in London.
Thousands of Chess enthusiasts would be ready with boards and record pads.
Something new – Something Great!
Yours truly
N. R.
No record of a reply to this innovative idea is to be found in the BBC Archive ….
You would have to have been born before 1945 to have grown up in a Britain when children’s programmes meant those broadcast on the radio. Baby boomers might have had an early exposure to the comforting voice of that supreme storyteller Daphne Oxenford on Listen with Mother saying, ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin,’ but, for most of us, children’s programmes meant what was on television.
In the 1950s, after graduating from Muffin the Mule, children found that their programmes quickly assumed a familiar schedule. Freda Lingstrom, who had devised Listen with Mother, became Head of Children’s Television and predictably converted her radio ratings smash into Watch with Mother, the umbrella title under which very British middle-class programmes prospered. It was The Woodentops on Mondays, Andy Pandy on Tuesdays, The Flower Pot Men on Wednesdays, Rag, Tag and Bobtail on Thursdays and whatever it was on Fridays was so unmemorable I’ve forgotten it. I think it might have been something called Picture Book. These programmes only lasted ten or fifteen minutes and they contained a lot of puppets with visible strings. Nevertheless, so far, so comforting and undoubtedly so uncontroversial.
Andy Pandy, The Flower Pot Men and The Woodentops were created by Lingstrom herself, aided by the writer-narrator Maria Bird, with whom she shared a home for four decades. In fact, the output was dominated by women: of the seven producers originally allocated to the department, four were female. Perhaps understandably, then, there was a significant maternal comfort to these BBC programmes, in marked contrast to the American ‘rubbish’ which dominated the ITV children’s schedule and with which Lingstrom refused to sully the BBC’s reputation.
Unfortunately, children preferred American cartoons like Huckleberry Hound and Popeye, to say nothing of Davy Crockett and the homemade Robin Hood. As BBC audiences switched wholesale to the newly formed ITV, the Corporation was forced to compete and soon the American series of westerns, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and Bronco came to dominate the schedules of BBC children’s television, much to the disgust of the now departed Lingstrom. There were still plenty of extremely good adaptations of classic books on the BBC – The Silver Sword, The Children of the New Forest and so on but there was a realisation by the Children’s department that they needed to innovate.
Like much else in this book it becomes apparent that as children’s programming began to expand its horizons in the 1960s, it attracted instant opprobrium. Doctor Who, which started in 1963, was an immediate hit with children but an object of terror for parents. Teenagers would happily spend many hours of a school day chanting ‘Exterminate, exterminate!’ with an arm stretched out in front to imitate a Dalek, but for pre-teen children whose parents thought they were getting a harmless science fiction adventure it quickly became an argumentative battleground. What had been regarded as the staple children’s programmes on the BBC – Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School, Captain Pugwash, Pinky and Perky, The Sooty Show and perhaps an adaptation of Ballet Shoes – were no longer enough. They were safe, they were entertaining, certainly, but they weren’t edgy. Doctor Who, for all its 99p special effects, captured children’s imaginations – which, the BBC could justifiably point out in its defence, was what its children’s programmes were supposed to do.
Alongside its drama there began in 1958 a programme that was still going strong sixty years later. It was a shame that a British pacifist organisation seemed to get hold of the wrong end of the stick ….
Peace Pledge Union, Endsleigh St., London WC1
22 July 1960
To: The Director General, British Broadcasting Corporation, Broadcasting House W1
Dear Director General,
We have seen with much concern that the BBC are putting on a series of six programmes on television under the title ‘Blue Peter’. It would seem that the programme is a recruiting effort primarily designed to persuade young lads to enter the RAF. Like other recruiting methods it will doubtless appeal to youngsters and their love of adventure by showing all the attractive side of life in the RAF. May I ask whether it will also show the other side and make them aware of what the consequences might be of manning a fighter aircraft and still more a V-bomber carrying the H-bomb?
However much the programme may disguise the essential facts, it remains true that the end product of training in the RAF is violence. To accustom them to the worst form of warfare and even to make the H-bomb a symbol of adventurous service, is to do the gravest disservice to our young people.
Will the BBC give facilities for the pacifist appeal to be put to our young people and present a similar series which would appeal to their sense of adventure in ways which are beyond doubt beneficial to humanity and of positive service to the community?
Yours sincerely,
M.S.
Band of Hope Union, London SW1
3 November 1964
To: Sir Hugh Greene, K.C.M.G. O.B.E., Director General, B.B.C., Broadcasting House London W1
Dear Sir,
I am instructed by my chairman, Sir Cyril Black, M.P. to make urgent representations to you in the following matter.
On Thursday evening last in the ‘Blue Peter’ programme a recipe for Ginger Beer was given, and the children were invited to write for a copy of it. We understand 9,000 children applied for this recipe by first post Monday morning.
We have sought expert opinion on this particular recipe, and are satisfied that it is a brewing process which produces alcohol. The giving of this recipe to children of unspecified ages is, we respectfully submit, not only against the public interests but has a distinct element of danger.
We understand that this recipe is to be distributed in printed form by the end of the week and we make an urgent request to you to prevent this ill-considered action. The children and their parents would be quite mistaken in thinking that the resultant beverage produced by this recipe would be similar to that purchased legally and harmlessly in the shops.
We should be most grateful for an early reply as we would wish to delay further action until we hear from you.
I am, dear Sir,
Your obedient servant,
T.R.
Twickenham, Middlesex
20 December 1966
To: Mrs Doreen Stephens, [Head of Family Programmes] Television Centre, Wood Lane, W12
Dear Mrs. Stephens,
Last Saturday evening our two children, a boy aged 6 and a girl aged 4, watched the Dr. Who programme. This contained a sequence in which some of the main characters were threatened with hanging. I thought at the time that this part of the play lasted for a longer time than might be considered appropriate for a children’s programme.
The following morning I was shaken to find that the children had hanged one of their dollies. Neither child is handicapped or emotionally unstable.
Children will people their own phantasies [sic] with a good deal of what they see on television and this includes violence. They are unable to detect the discord of implausibility and are much more ready than adults to accept things at their face value. Most of the violence portrayed is two dimensional – there is little depth to the emotion generated in the audience. Criminology between paper covers may be amusing; in real life it is sordid and depressing.
In my view, for violence to be acceptable on television for family viewing, it must be shorn of those qualities of horror, gruesomeness and sinister connotations which characterise real life. Our children are not old enough to understand the meaning of death, far less the ritual of hanging. I would be surprised if it had any more significance for them than a game of cowboys and Indians. But it is a game my wife and I would rather they did not play – the hanging of dolls I mean.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. T.N.
London SW1
23 February 1968
To: Thelma Cazalet-Keir [BBC Governor 1957–1962]
Dear Thelma,
Forgive me bothering you, but I know you used to be connected with the BBC, and I do not know who else to contact. I am very concerned at the hour 5.30 till 6 that a programme called Dr. Who is put on the screen. Last week I turned on this programme and a few minutes before it ended with a view to seeing the News my daughter aged 3 was in the room and watched. At the end of the programme a vast – by adult standards – terrifying monster appeared on the screen. The child became quite rigid with terror and ever since that evening we have to take her all round the house, search behind curtains etc before she goes to bed. She believes this monster is in the house – often screams ‘Mama, mama don’t go out there that man will get you.’
At her age it is just as easy for a monster to appear mysteriously in the house as on the screen. What I feel is that as little children must often look at television before 6 o’clock this frightening programme should not be put on till a little bit later.
See you before too long I hope –
Yours ever
[Lady] T.A.
Wakefield, Yorkshire
9 December 1963
To: The Director General, British Broadcasting Corporation, Broadcasting House, London W1
Dear Sir,
I am a parent of two boys aged 8 and 5. Last Saturday, I had the misfortune to view with my two boys what had in its first part promised to be a good adventure; Dr. Who. In its third broadcast it degenerated into a distasteful and horrific twenty-five minutes. A particularly horrible part was that where a man was mauled by an unseen but heard wild animal. It’s [sic] effect on my five-year-old may be of interest. He is not an unusually sensitive or emotional child, but the night following the programme was a very unhappy one for him. During the programme he was particularly disturbed, as I imagine would any child of five seeing a badly clawed person moaning in agony.
I really cannot understand why the Producer thought it necessary to include such a sadistic scene. Surely it is possible to find gripping adventure stories which do not contain this sort of American Horror Comic type of thing. James Hilton’s ‘Lost Horizon’ is an example.
What I am really curious about is the administrative machinery for deciding what is suitable for broadcasting when children of all ages are viewing. Judging by what was broadcast last Saturday between 5.15 and 5.40 this machinery needs badly overhauling.
Yours faithfully,
E. J. W.
Taunton, Somerset
29 September 1965
To: The Controller, Children’s Television, B.B.C. Television Centre, London W12
Dear Sir,
It was with a sinking feeling, superseded by something akin to disgust that I read of the return of the ‘Daleks’ in the serial ‘Dr.Who’. Once again, the B.B.C.’s policy of ‘If a programme appeals in it’s [sic] first showing, repeat it until it’s done to death’ is evident. It is my opinion that ‘Dr. Who’ in general and the Daleks in particular represent the very dregs of Children’s Television, and the fact that the programme does appeal to so many children is no excuse at all for repeatedly putting out such rubbish.
My husband wrote to you recently complaining of the low standard of Children’s Television, but received a vague reply which did nothing to explain this low standard. I speak as the mother of two young children, and I can remember the very excellent ‘Children’s Hour’ in ‘Uncle Mac’s’ heyday. I think that television could produce programmes on the lines of [BBC radio’s] ‘Nature Parliament’ and ‘Regional Round’. Then there are well-known and well-loved series such as ‘Toytown’. ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ and ‘Said the Cat to the Dog’. You have all the recordings lying idle (and most grievously so).
Perhaps you could devote two half-hours a week to programmes for boys (railways, aeroplanes etc.) and girls, (ballet, nursing etc.). I realise the difficulties of catering for a wide and differing audience, but too often Children’s Television is put out to appeal to the masses, which means American cartoons and series, lots of pop music, and a generally poor standard. A bolder, better policy might attract far more viewers in the long run.
Yours faithfully,
P.M.P. (Mrs.)
Northfield, Birmingham
5 September 1967
To: The Head of Children’s Television, B.B.C. Television Centre, London W12
Dear Madam,
Some time ago I wrote to you to make several points of complaint about the Children’s programmes that the B.B.C. were putting out. Subsequently, there was some improvement, with fewer American importations and the introduction of ‘Jackanory’. Although it may have been accidental, my wife and I like to think we did have a hand in these changes. Since then the programmes have ranged from the good to the tolerable, but recently they have gone to rock-bottom.
On Sunday there was a repeat of ‘Pinky and Perky’ which my own daughters (aged 5 and 3) plainly recognised as a repeat and despised accordingly. On Monday there started a week’s ‘Jackanory’ about the Second World War. When this programme first began it was declared as being intended for the under-sevens: it seems to me either a sophisticated or a nasty way of telling them stories to describe ‘bombs falling and crushing them’. Gone are the naively innocent tales of Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne and Rupert [the Bear]. Today, (Tuesday) your week hit rock-bottom. At a time when all six-year-olds might be expected to be watching, we were subjected to a new American cartoon; personally I consider this to be Trash. It is noisy and crudely done and it encourages all the worst excesses of American speech, linguist style and vulgar programming.
When my 6 year-old wrote to [conjuror and presenter] David Nixon in her best handwriting to say how much she likes his programmes and to ask for a photograph of Basil Brush, she did not receive so much as an acknowledgement. She has just recovered from the disappointment.
Yours faithfully,
M. P.
Northfield, Birmingham
23 March 1968
To: The Head of Children’s Television, B.B.C. Television Centre, London W12
Dear Madam,
Having just viewed this afternoon’s episode of ‘Dr. Who’ I feel I must write to you again on this subject. Both my husband and I have written to you before questioning the suitability of this serial for children’s viewing but I feel that this new story has entered a new area of unpleasantness. I am not against ‘monsters’ but the ‘humanised’ monsters such as the two men in to-night’s episode strike me as belonging to a different category – horror for its own sake; and this is deplorable as well as being very frightening. In our case the solution is simple – one turns off the set, but I am worried about the number of children who are subjected to this sort of horror.
I think it is fair comment to say that the lingering camera shots of a menacing man with a fixed stare and bared teeth, of a gaping maniacal laugh, come all too close to the psychological horror of Orwell, Huxley or the Marat/Sade.
I am aware of the arguments for retaining this serial; apparently some children do like it although on the evidence of my own and various friends’ children they can be terrified.
On a separate issue, may I again enquire if there is any hope of hearing the ‘Children’s Hour’ recordings of Winnie-the-Pooh? These gave me very great pleasure as a child and I feel sure that children today would derive equal enjoyment.
Yours faithfully,
P.M.P. (Mrs.)
Wootton, Northampton
28 October 1962
To: The Postmaster General, House of Commons, London SW1
Dear Sir,
I am gravely concerned about the choice of B.B.C. television children’s programmes at the weekend. After maintaining a reasonable standard through the week they are often poor on Saturday and worse on Sunday.
After taking my family to Church on Sunday morning and to Sunday School in the afternoon, I am very happy for the children to see ten minutes of ‘Sooty’ type entertainment. But on the last two Sunday afternoons, failure to switch off promptly afterwards has confronted them with the spectacle of
a) a grinning corpse with a knife handle protruding from its chest, and
b) a close-up of a man receiving a sickening blow on the head; these were the opening scenes of instalments of a serial entitled ‘The River Flows East’.
It may be that there is a place for this type of programme, but not at this time of day and not on a Sunday.
In my home the only result is the frustration of children deprived of expected entertainment. In other homes, irreparable damage may be caused to the minds of a rising generation. Children are being conditioned to accept violence as commonplace.
Is there any chance you can influence the Corporation in its choice of children’s programme?
Yours faithfully,
G.D.S.
Cardiff
18 October 1959
To: The Director General, British Broadcasting Corporation, Broadcasting House, London W1
Dear Sir,
I have until now resisted the inclination to write to you concerning the increasing amount of American material shown on B.B.C. Television.