Quote Collection

I have been running a `quote of the month' on the front page, which gets updated each month (well nearly). So they don't get lost they will be stored here, along with some from other parts of the site.

"Sometimes we are criticised for having so much of our drama on film, but this at the moment is unavoidable."
(Norman Marshall, Head of Drama, Associated Rediffusion)

"Please indicate whether the programmes are filmed or live. I have reached a point where I refrain from tuning in, in case it is more film."
(viewer's letter to TV Times)

"Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria couldn't have invented a crazier system"
Harry Turner, Chief Executive of TSW

"If I only have a TV set and no radio, and I decide to look in only to ITV programmes, it seems unfair that I have to pay Ł3 a year for the support of other programmes that do not concern me."
(Letter to the TV Times, 11 November 1955).

[Southern Television]A victim of the system.
Lady Plowden, Chairman of the IBA

"You should care more about Birmingham England, and less about Birmingham Alabama"
(Howard Thomas to Lew Grade).

"A licence to print money"
(Roy Thomson)

"If the territory of Granada is interfered with in any way we shall go to the United Nations
" Sydney Berstein, 17 December 1966

I believe in Independent Television in Britain because I believe in independence, because I believe in television and because I believe in Britain."
(Sir Robert Fraser, first ITA Director General)

"This is free television in a free country and people will get the television they want, as they get the press and government they want"
Sir Robert Fraser

"Advertising will be an asset worn as a bright feather in the cap of free television, not as a soiled choker around the throat"
Sir Robert Fraser

"British TV is small, dull, slow, poor, starved and amateurish."
Ronnie Waldman, Head of BBC Light Entertainment, 1953

"The longer I have studied this matter, the more convinced I am that the present complete monopoly should not continue."
Sir Winston Churchill 1952

"If we hadn't fired Collins there would be no commercial television now."
Lord Simon, Chairman of the BBC (Collins in fact had resigned)

"Most of the reading that is now done in England is concerned with romantic and illicit love, or criminal and violent death."
Norman Collins, 1951 (Didn't take long for television to catch up then)

"We are satisfied with the present arrangements for the control of violence in our programmes, and doubt whether a code would make them more effective"
ITA, evidence to the Post Office 1962

" A monopoly leaves an immense amount of talent wasted."
Norman Collins

ITV seemed to be saying to the cultivated minority, "We've won the mugs. Television is not for you. It is for them."
Peter Black, 1972