David Elstein's concern is to explore the Thatcher legacy to broadcasting which, he argues, is characterised by a shift away from social values to market forces as the key engines driving broadcasting. The Peacock Committee initiated this ‘sea-change’ by introducing notions such as consumer sovereignty and competition into programming considerations. Significantly, the Peacock Committee exceeded its brief by largely ignoring the BBC, while proposing ‘the groundwork for a powerful attack on ITV’.

Elstein argues that the 1988 White Paper (Broadcasting in the 1990s: Competition, Choice and Quality) and the subsequent Broadcasting Act 1990, with their requirements for the allocation of ITV franchises by auction, the financial restructuring and sale of ITN, the separation of Channel 4 from ITV and the creation of Channel 5, will have damaging effects on the commercial sector of broadcasting and lead to the ‘demise of those high-cost, high-quality programmes like Poirot [and] Who Bombed Birmingham?’

Elstein concludes that only the BBC is ‘currently immune to these commercial pressures’ but he queries ‘will it remain so?’ He suggests the licence fee will continue to provide funding for the BBC although his preference is for subscription, which he argues provides ‘the safest, most socially equitable, most politically insulated form of funding the BBC’.