If all the energy and ingenuity expended on criticizing television were diverted into creating for it, the face of the medium might well be transformed. At the highest level, television is a twentieth-century art form. At all levels, it is an artefact – but an artefact peculiarly subject to the limitations of time and money. Every producer and scriptwriter – cameraman and film editor too – knows the frustration of having to compromise because conditions (physical or economic) make it impossible to do otherwise. Three days of rain during filming and a whole plan must be re-thought. And they know, too, the second wave of frustration when critics, professional and lay, suggest the very things which would have been done if only television were the all-miraculous, ail-endowed medium which those who have little or no practical experience of it suppose it to be.

It is a mistake to say, as many do, that ‘television is primarily a form of entertainment’. Television is primarily a medium of communication. That is its alpha and its omega. But entertainment is the use to which it is generally put and it would be naive in the extreme to presume that people buy, or rent, their television sets for any other purpose.