Phillip Whitehead opens his lecture with the suggestion that the British broadcasting industry is suffering the most severe and sustained attack he can recall in the last twenty-five years. The assailants include politicians, government policy, new technology, free-market economics and even broadcasting regulators. The ‘buzzword’ informing policy change has been ‘choice’ measured by the number of available services. But diversity, Whitehead suggests, ‘has to be fostered’.

Whitehead argues that Annan articulated the principle of a genuine ‘regulated diversity’ promoted via different authorities protected by separate sources of finance: a smaller BBC; local radio cut ‘adrift’ from the BBC and IBA; ITV as a truly regional service and regionally based network; and a new publishing channel commissioning independent production. Ten years on, the BBC has become closer to the model Annan espoused, but the fifteen regional companies of ITV are ‘now bought and sold with little regard to their region’; the diversity of programming produced in the regions is being lost. By contrast, the independent producers have brought ‘a quite new pluralism to British television’, although this may be compromised by a ‘Peacock afterthought’ which threatens to change advertising arangements at Channel 4 and may result in a loss of ‘innovatory zest’. Similarly, ITV may be ‘dragged down’ by its investment in satellite and cable if these innovatory services fail in the late 1990s.