What Listeners Want

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 388, 29 November 1946, Page 5

What Listeners Want

E don’t know how many of \y our readers saw a recent London message summarising the results of a long period of listener research conducted by the BBC. Those who did see it, and think about it, may have come to the conclusion that what the BBC had discovered was what it must already have known, namely, that easy listening is more popular than hard listening and that art has no. chance at all against variety, It never had; and if the two were necessarily in conflict the case would be hopeless. But broadcasting is not reduced to a foolish issue like that. It never has to decide which section of the community will get all its attention or even which section shall get earnest and which perfunctory attention, Its task is to serve all sections earnestly, all with the same degree but never the same kind of forethought and knowledge. This task no service pretends to understand fully after only one generation of trial and error. The most the BBC ever claims, all anyone has ever claimed in New Zealand, is that there is never a day when the reasonable demands of the public are forgotten or deliberately ignored; that no section is played off against any other section; that if the balance tips sometimes on the side of what people. want and sometimes’ on the side of what someone thinks they should get the fixed policy always is to find the safe social balance between these extremes; and that far more hard, and honest, and enlightened thinking is going on than critics commonly imagine. To say that anyone knows what the public want would be dangerous nonsense; but it is not nonsense to say that those who are pondering on a problem day and night are more likely to understand it than those who give it no thought at all until something happens to annoy them. A man who cries out when he is hurt may do so with reason and to good purpose, as the history of most reforms amply proves; but he may also do so to bad purpose, and it would never do to surrender the control of broadcasting to mere noise and selfishness.