d merely producing quality programs, even producing quality programs at peak hours that will attract a large audience. Rather, it also involves providing a focus for those activities which are best regarded as a common experience. Whether it be a the Wedding of Charles and Diana, a World Cup Football match, or news of a fateful event, television has a unique ability to generate a sense of community, through the knowledge that the vast majority of the country is experiencing the same event at the same time. The sense of community so generated is a useful element in preserving coherence in society (Green, 19). Throughout its history, the BBC has always been successful in providing audiences with this sense of national cohesion through its programming and no matter how many new cable and satellite channels arrive on the scene, this is unlikely to change. As one journalist put it, when a wall collapses on football fans in Brussels, people are not going to tune to Sky Channel.Public service broadcasting, however, consists of a much larger public function to the audience than merely covering special events or issues of national importance and from its early years the BBC has been criticized for being unable to truly involve itself with the deeper and more diverse levels of British society. Newspapers of the 1930s were probably getting ahead of themselves when they declared the BBC as typical and representative a national institution as the Bank of England: reliable and responsible, the safe depository of the nations cultural capital (MacCabe, 48). No matter what people may have liked to believe, the BBC could not but help become aware of its general lack of engagement by the eve of the Second World War. Independent researchers were showing as early as 1936 that the BBC was failing to reach large sections of the people, or, at any rate, failing to make them feel that it had much to say to them (Green, 14). With its (mis)conception of ...
