Dennis Potter begins his eloquent lecture by warning his audience that he does not wish to be kind or gentle: his ambition is to ‘land a few blows on some of the nastiest people besmirching our once-fair land’: especially on that ‘pair of croak-voiced Daleks’ (John Birt and Marmaduke Hussey) who head the BBC. Potter argues that the BBC is currently under attack and ‘driven on to the back foot’ by an ideologically motivated and malicious government, aided and abetted by supine managers at the BBC who have responded by taking ‘several more steps backward’. The creative culture of the BBC is being replaced by ‘management culture’, articulated via a ‘dogma-driven rhetoric’.

Television which used to offer a ‘window on the world’ has been ‘ripped apart’ and reassembled by politicians and cost accountants who now decide ‘what we can and cannot see on our screens’. Potter argues that we must build defences to protect broadcasting and democracy from the occupying powers of business, bureaucratic management and politicians. There must be regulation to control the growing concentration of ownership and the expansion of cross-media ownership. This simple act of ‘public hygiene’ might temper abuse, widen choice and maybe even return ‘broadcasting to its makers’.