Quality of Television Programming in the United

¶ … Quality of Television Programming in the United Kingdom

During its heyday during the 1970s through the 1990s, British television programming help model the way in comedy, news reporting, action features and drama that remain influential today. Indeed, programs such as "Upstairs, Downstairs," "Doctor Who," "Fawlty Towers," and for "something completely different," Monty Python and its zany band of performers were enormously popular at home and abroad, especially in the United States where fan clubs for these shows still exist. Alas, the golden era of television programming in the United Kingdom appears to have faded in recent years, with current offerings representing poor substitutes for their former hits. This paper provides a review of the relevant literature to support the contention that the quality of television programming has declined in recent years, followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

During the 1970s, the quality of British television programming attracted growing interest from American television audiences (Miller, 2000). Recent trends in television programming, though, reflect what Yates (2004) describes as "the societal, technological, and commercial changes that have affected the television structure in the United Kingdom" (p. 715). To its credit, current television programming efforts in the UK include discussions of minority issues and the provision of minority programming, as well as local and international news (Yates, 2004). Lawmakers in the UK have also taken steps to prevent advertisement of foods high in fat, sodium, and sugar in programming that is targeted at children under the age of 16 years (Darwin, 2009). There is a growing tendency to rely on sex and violence in UK television programming, though (Yates, 2004). In fact, despite the continuing popularity of British television programming at home and abroad at late as the 1990s, and as Blake, Lovegrove, Pride and Strauss (1999) point out, "Quality content alone doesn't win market share" (p. 18), and that trends in programming reflected a need to respond to competition from the international market, especially the United State, as well as the deregulation of the market by the UK government (Blake et al., 1999). Consequently, these observers believe British programming has experienced a slow but sure decline in the quality of its programming. In fact, some observers might well question whether "they are being served" by contemporary television programming in the United Kingdom, including the quality of its journalism (Balinska, 2010).

Conclusion