Michael Darlow – Battles Over the Box: a Veteran Programme Maker’s Account

So What Next? Debate!

Ever since the Selsdon Committee was set up in 1934 to ‘investigate the feasibility of launching a public television service’, television, and broadcasting in general, must have been the subject of more government reports, committees of inquiry, royal commissions, campaigns by pressure groups and attempts to interfere with it by self-appointed guardians of public morality than almost any other British institution. But what about the programme makers in all this?

Michael Darlow, an award winning documentary, arts, music and drama director, not only experienced the effects of this endless scrutiny, he was deeply involved in the programme makers’ campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s which led to the creation of Channel 4 and the introduction of programmes made by independent producers. He will tell the inside story of those battles and, with television’s future again under the spotlight, ask you “What should happen next?”